Q&A With Kathryn Gin Lum, Author Of ‘Heathen: Religion And Race In American History’

A painting by Ehrhart, Samuel D. approximately 1862-1937. Published by Keppler & Schwarzmann, Sept. 8, 1897. The print shows a vignette cartoon with Uncle Sam at the center placing money in a box labeled “To Save the Heathen of Foreign Lands,” while around him are vignettes showing pigeon shooting, cockfighting, boxing, a turkey-grab and a lynching. Creative Commons.

In the past few years a national conversation has ignited about the character of racial and religious outsiders, who belongs in America and under what terms and conditions they belong. Former President Trump emphasized rhetoric and claims about how many Mexican immigrants are criminals or bring diseases with them. He also placed a ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. With the rise of COVID-19, we’ve seen reccurring rhetoric about Asian countries being unclean and unhealthy.

Kathryn Gin Lum is an associate professor in the Religious Studies Department of Stanford University, in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. She is also an associate professor of history by courtesy, in affiliation with American studies and Asian American studies. Photo courtesy of Stanford University.

According to Stanford historian Kathryn Gin Lum in her latest book “Heathen: Religion and Race in American History,” these ideas and American conceptions of race can be traced back to the religious and racialized concept of the “heathen.” The heathen was someone in a non-Christian — predominantly non-White — country who often didn’t care for their bodies and their land by White Protestant standards. White Protestants used these ideas to justify the mistreatment of such people.

ReligionUnplugged.com contributor Kenneth E. Frantz interviewed Gin Lum over Zoom, and they discussed the history of the heathen. They also talked about how the concept persists today and has impacted topics like Asian hate, Trump’s policies and how the United States interacts with the “third world.”

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kenneth Frantz: Your book traces the history of the concept of “heathen” throughout American religious thought. So why did you consider that important to write about?

Kathryn Gin Lum: I considered the category of the heathen significant to write about because it's often thought to be a category that is out of date, that's antiquated, that people don't really use anymore. So people might use the terms “heathen” or “pagan” in the context of like neoheathenism or neopaganism. But they don't use it in the same way that people used it in the 19th century or the 18th century. But that said, the ideas that underlie the concept continue.  So in the book I argue that they resonate to the present day. And I think that it's important to see how and why they do that to understand how even though we might think that we've moved beyond some of the ways in which the kind of othering that's embodied in the figure of the heathen works, we haven't really moved beyond it. I would say that I considered it an important subject to write about because it's still lasting with us today. There's still a lasting significance to it today. And to understand that that significance tells us something about the relationship between religion and race in this country.

Frantz: The underlying concepts of the word heathen follow us even though the word may not, so would you elaborate on some of those underlying concepts?

Gin Lum: So the figure of the heathen is understood to be a kind of the religious “other” to the Christian. So the heathen is understood to be a person who does not subscribe to or does not believe in the Abrahamic God. Traditionally there's the understanding that there's Christians, Jews, Muslims and heathens. Jews and Muslims are understood to be apostates. So they're aware of the “one, true God”; heathens are not. So heathens are polytheists; they hold wrong beliefs. They are supposed to worship spirits, ancestors, idols who are embodied in nature or are their former ancestors or whatnot — anything but the one true God.

So the term “heathen” is fundamentally rooted in this notion of wrong belief, but as I argue in the book, wrong belief manifests on the body. It manifests on the “heathen” environments; it manifests on this supposed development or lack thereof of heathen societies. The book has chapters on origin stories, so heathen histories, heathen landscapes, which are said to be barren, deserted, wild and uncultivated — even though like missionaries who go to different places to try to missionize people realize when they go, these places are not baron. They read them through that lens of heathen wilderness. And then heathen bodies are understood to be diseased. Even as they understand that “heathen” people oftentimes — like the figure of the noble savage — seem to be better able to survive certain climates than like White Europeans for instance, but they still render it through this understanding that heathens don't know how to take care of their bodies because they fail to understand the one true God and what God has dictated that humans should do with their environments and with themselves.

Frantz: Building on that, land and body play a predominant role in your book. I guess White Christians use the concept of heathen as justification for subjugating, both the heathens' land and their bodies — you talk about that. Would you mind like elaborating on that?

Gin Lum: I write in the book, so the title of the introduction is “A Heathen Inheritance,” and that comes from a verse from the Bible. “I will give you the heathen for thine inheritance in the uttermost parts of the earth for thine possession.” That's Psalm 2:8.

They use this verse, Psalm 2:8, as basically license to renovate the lands and the lives of so-called heathen peoples. So they see themselves as bearing the responsibility to save the heathen. So in the book, I describe this as a kind of a get-out-of-jail-free ticket or a get-out-of-jail-free card that renders excusable all manner of awful things in the name of saving the so-called heathen. The enslavement of people of African descent is justified as a means to Christianize the so-called African heathen, residential schools for native American children justified as a means of Christianizing the heathen, the annexation of Hawaii also justified as a means of governing heathens who can't govern themselves. This rationale, or this idea that the heathens are the inheritance of the Christian, becomes a really powerful way to make OK White Christian interventions in the world.

Frantz: You talk a lot about — you don't use the word but the concept — of White saviorism. It does show up in the book even through modern-day through missionary efforts and the pamphlets, how they portray other cultures. Could you like elaborate on how that plays a role in the more modern context?

Gin Lum: I think you're referencing some of the pamphlets from humanitarian organizations, from the 20th century even to today. And there's also some material in the book that goes beyond the context of religious organizations. So I think there's a brief interlude in the book about the Silicon Valley and the tech impulse to save the world. This book is about how the figure of the heathen creates the White savior. The White savior is not going anywhere. I could give a bunch of examples; I'll focus on the Silicon Valley because that's where I am right now.

I'm in the Silicon Valley, and I see this kind of impulse to do good. It's kind of a two-pronged impulse. And I write this about earlier periods too, is that going out and saving people who need help is also a way of helping oneself. And so in the Silicon Valley, that same impulse is at work. You help yourself by doing good, by helping others in the Silicon Valley. This impulse to save the world, it manifests in very similar ways in terms of like the creation of large maps of the world showing the parts of the world who need help. And this, like I argue in the book, traces back to this 19th century kind of blanket “othering” of the “heathen” world nowadays.

So we might call it the developing world, the third world. These are terms that come up in secular discourse. But in mission organizations in the modern or the contemporary era, there are other terms that mean essentially the same thing as heathen — so “frontier peoples,” “unreached peoples,” “the 10/40 window.” These are also very blanket terms that group together people who are in need of help, who are in need of the White savior. I argue in the book that race is not just about skin color. And the notion of the White savior — whiteness doesn't just have to be a characteristic of skin color in that regard. It's a characteristic of believing oneself to be the colonizer, the governor, the person who is helping the other.

Frantz:  I guess you also talk about how White people would use the heathen as a kind of barometer to evaluate their own Christianity. Since we're on race, can you elaborate on that?

Gin Lum: So the heathen barometer is a metaphor that I use in the book as like a way to detect heathenness. So it develops out of these characteristics associated with the heathen that I talked about earlier. So like a lack of development, a lack of historical development and inability to domesticate the landscape or to cultivate the landscape, an inability to take care of one's body, to keep one's body healthy. So polytheism and idolatry. All of these things become part of the heathen barometer in a way of detecting heathenness, and so White Christians, they apply the heathen barometer obviously to people in the so-called heathen world. But I think one of the really important things that I've found in the course of my research is the ways in which the heathen barometer can be used by people who are labeled heathen to flip back onto White Christian America itself.

So, they use this kind of heathen barometer and say, “Look, you're accusing us of all these things. You're doing the exact same thing. You just don't see it.” So they'll use the heathen barometer to say, you know, you're idolizing money for instance, or you're idolizing White supremacy. You're idolizing things that you don't understand, that these have become your deities. You are not taking good care of your land. So this becomes an argument that really emerges. I see it a lot in the late 19th century into the present day with the rapacious destruction of the land — people who are classified in the heathen category say, “White Protestant Americans, what are you doing to the land? You're destroying it. So you're actually doing exactly what you're claiming that we're doing, but we're the stewards of the land.” So that becomes a really powerful way to turn back the accusation on White Christians.

Frantz: In the book you talk about how inclusion and exclusion can both be a way of “helping the heathen.” So not wanting Chinese people to come work on the railroad, or inclusion, trying to include the Hawaiian Islands in the United States. Could you talk about how those two very different topics intersect?

Gin Lum: So I talk about exclusion and inclusion in this section of the book on the body politic — how the figure of the heathen comes to shape what American identity or the American state is supposed to look like, particularly in the late 19th century. And I argue that there are actually kind of two sides of the same coin. So I have a chapter on Chinese exclusion, and there the argument is that the fear that Chinese “heathenness” is going to take over America reveals this kind of deep anxiety about what America is. So Chinese exclusion really shows the deep significance of White Christian nationalism in this country and the desire of exclusionist anti-Chinese demagogues to keep America, as they see it, as a White Christian nation.

But in making that claim, they end up arguing with essentially missionaries who say, “But the gospel is universal. It's for everyone. And actually we should welcome Chinese “heathens” who are coming to this country because this is a great opportunity to Christianize them. So if we believe that everyone is made of one blood, why don't we accept them into the country?” But Chinese exclusionist, anti-Chinese demagogues say, to make that claim, you are basically making the same claim that pro-slavery apologists made. And this is after the Civil War. And so they say, “Who wants to make that kind of claim? We shouldn't be doing that. Really what you're doing is supporting these rich capitalists who are importing Chinese labor into the country, and you are justifying it in the name of the heathen get-out-of-jail-free ticket.”

That's essentially the kind of claim that they make. So it's this really interesting kind of back and forth. They say, “We're not opposed to Christianizing the heathen. We just think you have to go overseas to do it. Don't let them come in here because if you do, you're threatening our country.” And that really shows, I think, the fragility of this White Christian identity. How does inclusion then work with that? So in the chapter on inclusion, I focus primarily on Hawaiian annexation. But then I also look at changing ideas about the afterlife and the inclusion of the heathen and the afterlife. And I argue there that inclusion is not like the benevolent counterpart to exclusion. I mean, inclusion is also violent, it's forcible, and it's on the terms of the White Protestant American right.

So Hawaiian annexation is justified on the theory that the Hawaiians are heathens who are incapable of governing themselves, and to make that kind of argument requires — I mean the Hawaiian monarchy had accepted Christianity for decades by the late 19th century. But annexationists make the claim that actually, beneath the veneer of Christianity, they're heathens, and then they say the same for Hawaiian people. And they say, “Because of this, they cannot govern themselves. We need to govern them. We need to bring them in.” That's extraordinarily violent.

And the same with the inclusion of the heathen in the afterlife. That's also on Christian terms. Liberalizing Protestants in the late 19th century, they start to become concerned about the justice of hell. I mean there were some who were concerned about that before as well, but by the late 19th century, this becomes even more widespread. And they begin to argue that actually the heathen can be incorporated into the Christian afterlife. But again, it's like on Christian terms; it’s kind of forcible inclusion. And the heathens are always behind the Christian in this kind of progressive vision of the afterlife because they're always learning; they're always catching up.

Frantz: One thing about exclusion in the modern-day context is that we are not too far removed from the Trump presidency. And part of that was the “Muslim ban.” And you also, even though I feel like Mexico is a primarily Catholic country, you do kind of have that attitude of like, “Oh, they're not bringing their best. They don't take care of themselves. They don't take care of each other,” that aspect. Do you see parallels between that chapter, and the recent politics?

Gin Lum: The first part of the book I look at Catholic and Protestant missions, and Catholics do have this notion of heathenness also. But as part of the kind of reformation, polemic Protestants see Catholics as heathens — or at least they argue that they are. It's like they apply heathen barometer to Catholics. And they say that because Catholics have the veneration of the saints of the Virgin Mary, they have a plethora of deities. And so basically what they're practicing is idolatry, and they haven't sufficiently removed themselves from the Roman pagan past. They look at Catholic missionaries and the ways in which missionaries incorporate and work with Indigenous practices and say that's heathen also. They're not sufficiently cleansing that kind of heathenness.

So yeah, when you see rhetoric around Catholicism and immigration from White Protestants, I think you can see echoes of that kind of anti-Catholic heathen barometer at play. And then in terms of the treatment of Muslims historically, I think there's a scholar that I quote in the book who says that scholars understood that Muslims were different from heathens, but ordinary Europeans and then ordinary Euro-Americans did not so much make those kinds of distinctions. And so in the 19th century, you'll find material on pagan or Muhammadin and heathen countries — it just kind of groups it all together. I think, similarly, you can find resonance there in the travel ban. And I would say that probably the most direct resonances of the chapter on Chinese exclusion in terms of today's politics is in anti-Asian hate in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. And I've seen just a lot of the same exact kind of rhetoric you can see in the media at times.

Frantz: Would you mind elaborating a bit more on how rhetoric like "the Wuhan virus" fits into the overall scope of your book.

Gin Lum: It traces back again to the idea that the Chinese or the heathens can't take care of their bodies because they eat filthy things — they're too close to the creeping and crawling creatures. And so they're diseased, right? So in the late 19th century, a lot of the rhetoric against so-called Chinese heathens was that they supposedly ate rats and dogs. And the argument there was because the Chinese were heathens, they spent all of their money, all of their time on their ancestors. And they failed to do anything like improve the present day, including their own circumstances. So they were willing to live in very terrible conditions because all they wanted to do was save their money for the ancestors. So that's used to explain why there's disease, et cetera, in the late 19th century. Now in the COVID-19 era, I've seen articles about how the wet markets are unsanitary, that they are evidence of Chinese “magical” practices and the strange things that they eat.

There was one article that I think I quoted in the book titled the “Chinese wet markets must go.” And that's a direct echo of Dennis Kearney’s “The Chinese must go” in the late 19th century. So even though they're not using the word “heathen,” they're still using the exact same ideas.

Frantz: In the final chapter of your book, you talk about liberation theologians, Christians abroad, who are grappling with their own faith but also with their own people's history of colonialism and how they're handling the concept of the heathen. So how they turned the critique toward White people. So building on what you just said, how do those liberation theologians play into this conversation?

Gin Lum: I'll focus on the ecumenical association of third-world theologians and the ways in which they take the concept of the third world actually is a source of strength. And this, I think, emerges from a theme that I also try to trace throughout the book, which is the ways in which some of the people historically categorized as heathen have actually taken that concept and drawn strength from the very umbrella quality of the term. So they've basically said, hey, okay, you're going to like group all of us, you know, people who are not White under this umbrella of heathenness, like that's actually a powerful way of finding solidarity, right?

They talk about the power of the third world, the way in which the third world actually kind of expressly emerges from cultures that are historically non-Christian — many of them — and how they can draw strength and meaning from non-Christian cultures rather than dismissing them as heathen; and they definitely use the heathen barometer. So they make exactly the kinds of claims that I was talking about earlier to flip back on the ways in which the Western Christians have dubbed themselves superior. And they say, no, you're not. Like a god of the idolization of money means that you have forgotten the god of the poor. God is on the side of the poor. God is on the side of the oppressed. God is on the side of the third world. So they flip these things around. They talk about the destruction of the landscape.

Kathryn Gin Lum’s “Heathen: Religion and Race in American History” is published through Harvard University Press.

Kenneth E. Frantz is a freelance writer who has written for ReligionUnplugged, Sojourners, Real Clear Religion, and Religion and Politics. Twitter: @KennethEFrantz.