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Heathen: Religion and Race in American History

byKathryn Gin Lum

Kathryn Gin Lum traces the category of the “heathen” through American religious and racial history. Missionaries, settlers, reformers, officials, and writers used the term to divide civilized from supposedly backward peoples and to justify conversion, removal, conquest, and unequal citizenship. The book follows these ideas from colonial encounters through slavery, expansion, immigration, and overseas empire, showing how religious judgment helped construct racial hierarchy. Lum demonstrates that the heathen was never merely a theological outsider: it became a flexible political figure against which Americans defined whiteness, nationhood, morality, and their imagined role in the world.

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Publication date

2022

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9780674976771