Review | Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum. Harvard University Press, 2022.
by Jordan Conlon, Smith College
Kathryn Gin Lum’s seminal book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History is, to put it simply, 368 pages of glorious scholarship. Gin Lum tells an epic story of the appropriations of the Protestant conceptions of the “heathen” that spans centuries, moving from the conception of America through to the Covid-19 Pandemic. Gin Lum, a Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University accomplished no small feat, effectively detailing how Euro-American imaginaries of “Heathen worlds” in need of salvation underwrite the facilitation and proliferation of racial hierarchies in America. Gin Lum moves through this book with accessible yet nuanced prose, delving deeply into the heathen worlds constructed by white Protestant America, infusing the book with anecdotes, personal stories, and archival recollections, paying special attention to the tensions of heathenism in the U.S. and the ways that it interacts with race, capital, and American identity.
One of the many points of brilliance in Gin Lum’s work is her attention to the ways that the heathen category was elastic, being appropriated and reappropriated by different groups of people to achieve varying political, economic, or cultural goals. To do this, she considers the ways that the heathen category was, at once, both homogeneous and stratified; it is this tension, she observes, that allowed for the general fungibility of the term to address the constructed Other and contribute to the stabilization and legitimacy of those racialized and gendered places in the United States. To put it more succinctly, “the heathen world has long been a site for both differentiation and homogenization, understood to house the sensorily and sensually exotic under the broad umbrella of the unsaved” (Gin Lum 363). In saying this, Gin Lum underscores the elasticity of the term, making clear the ways that the dominant forces at play were able to homogenize heathenism to make the Other the same in their “lack of saving knowledge and grace” while simultaneously differentiating them to employ different “civilizing” strategies (Gin Lum 233).
In the same vein, Gin Lum considers the ways that heathen worlds served as a foil by which white Euro-American Protestants could assert their own identity in a new nation. She observes, “Heathen countries served as a foil against which the English could reassure themselves” Gin Lum 44). This language of insecurity and tenuousness that Gin Lum ascribes to the newly constituted American Englishmen is of paramount importance, as it highlights the frailty of national and individual American identities. In other words, without the construction of the Heathen/Other, the stable identity of the blessed White Euro-American Protestant expression would cease to exist or, at the very least, be able to define itself. Gin Lum goes on to assert, “colonizers always had to stay on guard lest they turn ‘heathenish’ themselves” (Gin Lum 61). In saying this, Gin Lum makes clear the precarity of white protestant identity in America. This fear, rooted in diverging too far from the “chosen people” of England created the perfect storm for the construction of the heathen worlds. In this way, the construction of the heathen became integral in the assembly of American national identity in the wake of the American Revolution.
Gin Lum went on to underscore the ways that heathens were instrumental to the development of racialized capitalism which is a hallmark of America’s empirical development. She notes how “Heathen women and men become efficient laborers at gender-appropriate tasks; European missionaries and traders, their pockets newly heavy, rejoice” (Gin Lum 186). In this way, bodies that were synonymous with heathen inheritance were able to be exploited to a greater extent than the normative white Protestant figure for the development of American capital. This exploitation of “useful” heathens became a hallmark of racialized capitalism, as it became a prescriptive methodology to identify bodies that would do the invisibilized labor required to produce an empire like the United States.
Notably, Gin Lum also considers the ways that the heathen barometer was reappropriated for subversive ends, to consider the heathenish behavior of white Euro-Americans. Gin-Lum claims, “measuring them against the heathen barometer, Douglass diagnosed them as indeed worse: serving the idol of King Cotton, they had become despots of the most abysmal variety” (Gin Lum 201). This is, perhaps, the most potent indication of the ways that heathens employed the term for radical ends, exploiting white Protestant insecurity about being saved. Not only does this do work to subvert the ontological argument for heathenism by demonstrating white Protestants’ capacity to become heathenish by their own standards, but it also indicates the ways that heathenism was also able to function as a liberatory and subversive term for marginalized people to critique the violent and unchristian nature of white supremacy.
Gin Lum concludes her work with a rumination on the development and persistence of heathen conceptions in the white Euro-American imaginary, tracing the timeline through to the American response to the Covid-19 Pandemic. She asserts, “reborn under different names, the idea of a world ‘out there’ that needs saving has also continued to reverberate […] reinforcing a racial binary that elevates the White humanitarian over the deluded and degraded Other, and undergirding American exceptionalism over the ‘developing’ world” (Gin Lum 331). Despite this robust critique of neoliberal humanitarian aid, Gin Lum contributes a refreshingly self-reflexive offering, claiming, “the academic critiquing from a comfortable office chair is not morally superior to the volunteer bringing medicine” (Gin Lum 401). In saying this, Gin Lum makes clear that she isn’t just interested in offering a critique of humanitarian efforts; rather, she aims to interrogate its nuances and imagine new, liberatory possibilities for race relations in America by considering the insidious ways that the heathen has shaped neoliberal aid and been commandeered for the sake of nation-building.
Gin Lum probes us all to consider the frailty of dominant narratives undergirding white supremacy and elucidates the subaltern forms of heathen resistance. Admittedly, Gin Lum’s project is overwhelming at times, as it spans centuries, geographical territories, and transnational religious influence. That being said, the overwhelm is more than a fair price to pay for the amount of nuance that Gin Lum brings to conversations around the intersection of race, capitalism, and religion.
Works Cited
Gin Lum, Kathryn, Heathen: Religion and race in American history. E-book ed., Harvard University Press, 2022. Kindle.
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Jordan Conlon is a Senior at Smith College where she studies Gender Studies, Africana Studies, and Philosophy. Her scholarly work focuses on matters of empire, continental philosophy, American religions, and the intersection of race, gender, and power. She is a Connecticut native and spends her free time hiking, running, reading, and spending time with her cat, Cornelius.
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