In Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, Kathryn Gin Lum offers a sweeping challenge to what she calls the “replacement narrative,” a scholarly position in which notions of biological racial difference are said to have subsumed religious categories as the dominant axis of distinction in the modern West. Gin Lum contends that race and religion have long been closely intertwined, and so cannot be isolated from one another. To make this argument, she traces how the concept of the “heathen” has been mobilized throughout American history to both legitimate and challenge systems of racial domination and inequality. While religious categories are often described as softer than supposedly immutable racial distinctions—since they allow for movement from one status to another—Gin Lum argues that this very space for conversion, from heathen to Christian, has been used to justify violence against, and control over, racial and religious others.
Rather than focus on a single organization, community, or geographic location, the book seeks to capture both the disparate places that the concept of heathen bubbles to the surface and the discursive field in which the category has been deployed. The book is divided into three main sections. Part 1 traces the emergence of the category of heathen in Europe and the United States alongside changing conceptions of racial difference. Part 2 focuses on the 19th century to investigate how Americans struggled to define their relationship to the heathen world—including how notions of heathenism animated Protestant missionaries’ efforts to spread the gospel. Part 2 also addresses how the notion of heathenism operated within the United States as part of struggles to determine the boundaries of the nation state. Finally, part 3 argues that the idea of the heathen other has continued to inform American notions of racial and religious difference long after the term itself fell out of favor. Along the way, Gin Lum touches on early Christian writings and medieval theologies of paganism (chapter 1), Protestant missionaries in Hawaii and their role in the islands’ eventual annexation (chapters 3, 7, and 8), and even Franz Fanon and Third World theologies (chapter 10).
Of particular utility is Gin Lum’s analysis of how the “heathen barometer” (130) has served as a metric for demarcating inappropriate conduct and supposed moral degeneration both domestically and abroad. She convincingly contends that defining communities or practices in relation to the specter of the heathen has been central to American moral claims-making and to definitions of the body politic. While the category has often been used to reinforce systems of hierarchy, Gin Lum documents how the language of heathenism has repeatedly been turned against these systems. For example, in chapter 5, she shows how 19th-century Black Americans unfavorably compared white slaveholders to heathens. Similarly, chapter 6 discusses how Chinese American activist Wong Chin Foo embraced the identity “heathen” to challenge efforts to block Chinese migration to the United States.
One weakness of the book is that it leaves unspecified Gin Lum’s criteria for case selection within her broad remit. At times, one is left unsure as to whether and in what ways the particular people and narratives on which she focuses are representative of broader trends. This difficulty is perhaps most apparent in the book’s final chapters, where Gin Lum must operate without a single unifying term to constrain the analysis. Further, it is not always clear how exactly Gin Lum conceptualizes the relationship between heathenism and racial difference. Are religion and race two separate (if intersecting and entangled) categories of distinction, as the introduction seems to imply? Or does the category of heathen itself constitute a form of racial classification that functions as an alternative to more familiar models that draw on purported biological difference (247)? Despite these ambiguities, the book provides an impressive synthesis of apparently disconnected historical trajectories and will be of interest to a broad range of scholars studying race, United States’ religious history, and the Protestant missionary enterprise.
Andrew Chalfoun is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andrew Chalfoun
Date Of Review:
November 2, 2024
