Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum (review)

Reviewed by: Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum Philippa Koch Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022) Kathryn Gin Lum's Heathen tells a story about our present that is deeply rooted in the colonial world. She describes an early American past that is complex and global, in which views on race and religion were shaped both by missionary and Enlightenment discourses of the "heathen" and by so-called heathens themselves. She demands we attend to the afterlives of this colonial thought in the way modern Americans see race through a lens chipped and shaped by these discourses and experiences. The US has changed, the place of Christianity in American life has changed, these discourses have changed, and even the word heathen has fallen into disrepute. Yet, Gin Lum argues, the racialized concepts, and the "elastic category" of the heathen (9), have remained ever present in modern Americans' "mental maps" (12), as we give money, develop technologies, and imagine ourselves vis-à-vis the world. Gin Lum's account is both rigorously academic and personal. The book's opening gambit pulls on a story of her childhood, when she, the "daughter of a Christianized Chinese American family," was cast as a "Wanna Wiggle Indian" in her church youth performance, though she desperately wished for the role of the evangelistic "Miss Shunary." She now sees "that childhood me could be a primary source for adult me" (3–5). Gin Lum's transparency in these early [End Page 265] pages sets the groundwork for her passionate pursuit of the unpleasant past. Her account of her childhood is uncomfortable. (She intimates some discomfort in even sharing the story, following it with a statement describing her childhood pastors as "among the kindest human beings I have ever known" [5].) But the unpleasant aspect of history is important. Gin Lum wants to "return the gaze," a phrase she borrows from Dipesh Chakrabarty in framing her prologue (6). She repeats this provocation from subaltern studies periodically throughout the book, and it informs her final section, on "counterscripts." Like Mark Charles and Chan Rah—two authors in her section on counter-scripts—Gin Lum seems to want to "return the gaze on White Americans" and see them "not merely as oppressors but as themselves 'a traumatized people.'" Their "unresolved trauma," Charles and Rah argue, make White Americans unable to produce "accurate history" (and here Gin Lum brings Charles H. Long into the conversation as well): "White Americans are aware that their past is not pure but are in deep 'denial' about it." For Charles and Rah, the answer is to "call for White Americans to join with people of color in the healing power of lament,' a lament that necessitates 'humility' and 'truth telling'" (277). Gin Lum's account is her work of truth telling—a recitation of stories that make you cringe and sigh (and I say that as someone who has long studied the colonial world; I imagine for some audiences these stories would shock). She begins with the origins of the word "heathen," its precedent in the form of "pagan," and the development of the degeneration theory, which suited both "the Christian idea that all descendants of Noah could be held culpable for once possessing the revealed truth and losing it" and "the Enlightenment notion that all humans had original access to natural light but that some humans' ability to see and understand it had declined over time and in different environments" (71). In this section, Gin Lum works primarily with published sources to trace an intellectual history that shaped missionaries, politicians, and more. She convincingly explains how the degeneration theory and the concept of the heathen shaped American ideas of race and proved critical to the development of the academic study of "world religions" (213). The following chapters build on this groundwork, exploring the accounts of missionaries and travelers. She focuses on how European Americans saw and interpreted landscapes of wilderness and heathen bodies and practices of health and death. The book moves next to "how the heathen concept could be deployed to demarcate certain groups as belonging to the...