If an eighteenth-century cleric 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.
Kathryn Gin Lum is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department, in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford. She is also Associate Professor, by courtesy, of History in affiliation with American Studies and Asian American Studies.