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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Kathryn Gin Lum, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Description: If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between "civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far," the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical narrative, Kathryn Gin Lum shows how the idea of the heathen has been maintained from the colonial era to the present in religious and secular discourses--discourses, specifically, of race.Americans long viewed the world as a realm of suffering heathens whose lands and lives needed their intervention to flourish. The term "heathen" fell out of common use by...