Brad speaks with Stanford scholar of religion Dr. Kathryn Gin Lum about her new book Heathen. They discuss how White American Christians have used the label "heathen" in order to name those they deem not only different, but in need of saving. In this context, "saving" often meant the occupation of native lands, the overtaking of entire cultures, and the exclusion of those "unassimilable" to the American way of life. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in the United States, animating Americans’ sense of being a world apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples. Dr. Gin Lum reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have drawn on the same to counter this national myth. This is not a past phenomenon - it continues today in debates about reproductive rights and the rise of anti-Asian hate during the COVID pandemic.
Heathen by Kathryn Gin Lum: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674976771
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And today I'm joined by an amazing guest and someone who's just actually up the road for me here in the Bay Area, and that is Katherine Jin Lum of Stanford University.
I'm going to tell everyone all about your accolades and everything else in a minute, Katherine, but just want to say thanks for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm really grateful to be here.
I want to say we are recording this at a late hour, friends.
We are managing young children and work schedules and partner schedules.
So we don't know what's going to happen.
I just told Catherine that I drank boba at a dangerously late hour to stay alert.
So who knows?
I should have.
I apologize in advance.
40-year-old me got crazy tonight and had boba, so you never know what's going to happen.
So, Dr. Katherine Jin Lum is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University, is affiliated with the Center for Comparative Studies and Race and Ethnicity there, also a professor by courtesy of History, and affiliated with a number of other centers and programs at Stanford.
Professor Jin Lum's first book, Damned Nation, Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction, was published by Oxford in 2014, and it asks how widespread belief in hell influenced Americans' perceptions of themselves and the rest of the world in the first century of its nationhood.
So that's amazing.
Today we're here to talk about her brand new book, which just dropped and is absolutely fantastic.
And that is Heathen, Religion and Race in American History.
And I just want to say, first of all, Catherine, that as I was reading this book, one of the things I thought about is that not only did it teach me a lot about American religious history, but it made me want to teach religious studies, if that makes any sense.
And, you know, if friends are out there and you're a scholar of religion who's in the field, this is the kind of book where you're like, whoa, I'm learning so much.
But I also, in terms of its methodology and its presentation, it makes me want to go sort of talk to students and share with them, like, how we can do history and religious studies in a way that's really transformative.
That's awesome.
Thank you.
Let me just start by asking you this.
This is a book about the idea or the category or the concept of the heathen.
I think many people listening will be familiar with that term, whether that's at church or somewhere else.
Let me just ask you, where does the category of the heathen come from?
And specifically, how did it arise in a racist or racialized context?
Yeah, absolutely.
So, the Canada of the Heathen is a loose translation of the Latin pagan, which refers to the people who lived in the countryside, who continued to worship the Roman gods, and who didn't embrace the new religion of Christianity.
So, in an Anglo-Germanic context, heathen similarly refers to the people who live in the heath, basically the wildernesses on the outskirts of society, who refuse to give up the old gods like Thor and Odin, etc.
So initially, the term is used to create a kind of intragroup divide between those who accept Christianity and those who don't.
But as Europeans set their sights on the world, the term then expands to name intergroup difference.
So it takes in people from Different places and cultures all over the globe and it comes to include everyone who basically doesn't worship the monotheistic Abrahamic God, right?
So not Christians, not Jews, not Muslims.
Though in practice and for ordinary people Muslims were often actually clumped into the category of heathen.
Yeah, so the idea of heatheness becomes a way to basically divide the world into a stark binary of the people who need to be saved and the people who are the saviors.
And as such, it sets up a racial dynamic, I argue in the book, between the Christian West and the heathen West.
And this is before even the rise of pseudoscientific racism, which is a racism that's rooted in supposed biological difference.
So that's a form of race that's often tied to the transition to modernity, but it's not the only form of race.
So as a lot of scholars like Sylvester Johnson and others have argued, race is not just about skin color.
It's not just about inherent biological difference.
It's about colonial governance.
And the category of the heathen is really central to that.
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