Maxwell Institute Podcast #145: The Idea of the “Heathen” with Kathryn Gin Lum

Joseph Stuart: Kathryn Gin Lum, welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Kathryn Gin Lum: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Excited to talk with you.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah, the pleasure is all ours. So we're going to be talking about your new book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. In the introduction, you tell a story about participating in a play at church. Could you tell us about this experience?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah. So as a child, I sang in the church choir and we put on shows every year. It was one of the highlights of my childhood, I would say actually. A lot of those plays were, you know, biblical stories. So we did a play about Noah, we did a play about Josiah, Jonah, etc. But one year, we did a play that really stuck with me. And yeah, to this day, I remember it very vividly. It was a play called The Mission Connection and it was about children who hop aboard a train called the Jesus Express and these are children who are explicitly referred to as All-American children, hop aboard that Jesus Express and bring the gospel to the world. There was a missionary in this play called Miss Shanary. She had a song that I really liked, really wanted to sing. And I auditioned for her part, I did not get it. I was instead passed as a Native American, which was not the term used in the musical. I actually ended up buying a copy of the musical as I was writing the book, so that I could go back through it again and it was every bit as horrifying as I remembered, if not worse. But essentially the play, you know, divides the world into these All-American children who ride on the Jesus Express and the people that they encounter, many of whom have no speaking lines or just kind of meant as foils and some of whom the Native Americans have speaking lines, but they are just really embarrassingly bad, you know, played for laughs. So that play, you know, as a child growing up in this church, a child who is a descendant of Chinese immigrants, that play really kind of stuck with me. It just raised questions for me about, you know, what about all of these people in the world that we're supposed to bring the Great Commission to? Are they damned if we don't do that? Is the responsibility of us as children to go and save these people? And if we don't, what happens to them? And then I thought about it from my own perspective too as somebody again, descended from Chinese immigrants. I grew up believing that I was really lucky to have been born into a Christian family in the United States, but wondered to myself well, what if the missionary and the people aboard the Jesus Express had never missionized my people? What if I had been left in China and I had grown up as a heathen, what would have happened to me? So I think some of those questions really actually inspired my first book, about hell: interested in the concept of damnation. Who gets damned? And then also this second book about the heathen because the majority of people understood to be going to hell were supposed to be heathens.

Joseph Staurt: And you write in your introduction that your book is a story about how Americans have set themselves apart from a world of sufferers, as a superior people and a humanitarian people. Why is it important to the folks you're writing about that they view themselves as both superior and as humanitarian?

Kathryn Gin Lum: The backdrop to this is that when the English and then later Anglo Americans looked at what they called the “heathen world”, they felt a mixture of both gratitude and guilt. Because they compare themselves to other cultures, they believed that they were superior because God had especially blessed them as his new chosen people. But at the same time when they looked at the world, they felt guilty about having all of these blessings while other people didn't, and then guilty that they weren't doing enough to help. Right? So humanitarianism is a way of alleviating that guilt and at the same time, humanitarianism also reinforces and reassures them of their superiority. So it sets them up as the people who are the helpers and it defines other people as the people who need to be helped. So humanitarianism and charity also comes to define everybody as a hallmark kind of Christians in the West, while so-called heathens were understood to be uncharitable, unfeeling towards each other. So humanitarianism and superiority or white supremacy, are like mutually reinforcing.

Joseph Stuart: Yeah and please feel free to push back on this, but I think that the humanitarian idea in some ways, is reinforcing a social order, especially a racial order, as you write about in the book, without having to say, I'm white, I'm better. It gives a more palatable tone to saying we are better than those people.

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yes, exactly. And I think that the understanding of race that underlies that, what you just said, for me really comes from Sylvester Johnson's work on African American Religions, 1500 - 2000: Democracy, Colonialism, and Freedom. There, he writes about race as not just something that's rooted in the body, right? It's not just about skin color, it's about the division of the world, the colonial division of the world into the governors and the governed Europeans and non-Europeans. And that, I think, really underlies this kind of humanitarian dynamic, where Europeans, Euro-Americans claim themselves to be the ones who can and should govern the other. And part of that is this humanitarianism, bringing help to the other because they need it.

Joseph Stuart: So as you're setting up the historical background to your book, you show how imagining what a heathen was meant projecting ideas or meanings in at least three different ways. So one is origin stories, one is landscapes, and one is bodies. And as soon as I was reading that I was thinking about how hard it would have been to grow up without access to Google or encyclopedias where you can't just see what is going on in a nation or see what an individual might look like. So what sort of primary sources or evidence were you looking at? That helps you to see what white American Christians were thinking about as they were constructing the idea of the heathen?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah, I love that kind of question. Like, historian's craft, what kinds of sources did I use? So a good part of the research for the chapters on landscape and bodies, somewhat on origin stories as well, came from time that I spent at a library company in Philadelphia. And basically what I wanted to do was to read what Americans were reading. So I wanted to know, what kinds of books and what kinds of sources do they have access to? What kinds of images were they looking at? What kinds of maps that helped them to formulate their ideas about the so-called heathen world? So I read things like children's stories, textbooks, newspapers, and magazines, travel narratives, state agent reports, missionary periodicals, and sermons just to get a sense for, how are they imagining the so-called “heathen world”. And then basically what I did with those sources was that I built a database. And I would pull key quotes from these sources, images from these sources, and then I built a kind of key word index, if you will. So I built up key terms that just kept on coming up, key tropes that were associated with heathenness or heathen bodies or heathen landscapes. And then I keyword coded all of these sources so that I could then pull them and organize them into these chapters. I know that's really getting into the weeds.

Joseph Stuart: No, I think it's important for listeners to understand how historians work. It's not just that you went to Google Book and put in heathen, it's that you're going through these sources and seeing what religious people were saying for themselves. And I was particularly interested in what you argue about landscapes. So for instance, how did these Euro Americans, how did they imagine India and how did that come to view how they viewed not only the people that lived in the Indian subcontinent, but the landscape itself?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Let me just backtrack a little bit to talk about how they're conceiving of the idea of a heathen landscape in the first place. So the thing about landscape, is that it's very different in the places that Americans imagined to be part of the so-called heathen world, and they recognize this. So they just describe some places as essentially deserts that are arid and barren. They describe other places as lush and overgrown. At the same time, they see all of these places as heathen and they believe that they share important similarities. And this really traces to I think, the root of the term heathen, which lies in the heath. The wilderness is where the old European heathens were supposed to wander, worshiping the old gods like Thor and Odin because they refuse to accept Christianity. Biblical passages reinforced this notion of even landscapes as wildernesses that needed help to blossom as the rose. So regardless of what they look like, missionaries are kind of filtering them through this idea that they're wildernesses that need help. But the interesting thing with India and also with China is that American missionaries and travelers did not initially necessarily see them as fitting into this paradigm of like overgrown wildernesses. They recognize that India and China were ancient civilizations, they recognize that they had extensive built environments, and at first they were actually somewhat in awe of the landscape. So you can see travelogs describing the landscape as colorful, it's sensory overload in some ways, and then the very same travelog often will then take a turn and say, but these are inhabited by heathens. And if you scratch the surface of these landscapes that initially appear gilded and beautiful and whatever, you'll see that actually, they hide essentially the same kind of lack or the same kind of problems that we've seen in other places in the heathen world. For India and China in particular, they argue that they're masking populations that are too big to be sustained and that these regions because of the heathonism of the people, they understand that people to be wasting their time and their energy worshiping false gods and as a result, failing to develop agricultural technologies to enable them to domesticate the landscape to the extent necessary for the populations that they have.

Joseph Stuart: So what I'm seeing here is that not only are Europeans and Americans connecting ideas about landscape, but also civilization, the idea that if you are worshiping correctly, if you are participating in the correct religion, you are also going to live a certain way. Not recognizing maybe that people can just choose to live in the ways that best fit the landscapes that they live in.

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yes, exactly. And probably get to this later, but one of the ways in which people labeled as heathens pushed back against that label was specifically on this issue of landscape and specifically in the ways in which whites, Westerners, Europeans, and Americans have decimated the landscapes and many of the places to which they've gone. And so they've said who are you to say that we are quote unquote heathens who don't know how to take care of the wilderness. You're the ones who are not taking care of the environment.

Joseph Stuart: So that is fascinating to think about how these ideas about landscape are being projected onto these quote unquote, “heathen peoples”. The idea is that even if you're in a lush jungle, there's still something unsettling or not right underneath all of this beautiful plumage. Or if there's a desert there that there is something that even with just a small change, could blossom as a rose, as you say. So I'm curious, how did this play out in thinking about racial difference on heathen bodies? So for instance in the 19th century, some Americans thought the Latter-day Saints were different biologically, or that there was something physically wrong with them because of the religion that they adopted. Is something similar playing out in other locations and with different groups?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah. So I think the key there is because of the religion that they adopted. So heathenism is understood to be the reason why heathen bodies are inferior to Christian bodies. But similarly to landscapes, they're understood to be changeable. So through conversion, they're understood to be able to blossom as the rose too. So heathen bodies were thought to be susceptible to disease, they were thought to be deformed because of the religious rites and penances that so called heathens were participating in, heathens were thought to misunderstand the nature of their bodies and again, to misunderstand the nature of technology, because they spent so much time worshiping the wrong things. So instead of praying to the great physician and innovating medicines and your healing technologies, they instead prayed to idols or false gods to heal them when they were sick. This was the way that white missionaries are understanding human bodies. But through conversion, you see these narratives emerge about heathen people who are essentially, it's like their race becomes changed in the process of conversion. And then they're described in different ways once they become Christians. So along with the change of heart, missionaries described changes in the bodies of so-called heathen converts. And this is read both in the clothing that they wear, their ornamentation, but also they describe changes in complexion even. And they'll say about people, you could hardly tell that this person had been a heathen. We can hardly tell that this person came from a particular people because they had converted. I think that that's— it's a really interesting thing where the heathen body again, it's changeable so it's not read in skin color.

Joseph Stuart: I think that that's really helpful. And something that I'm seeing in the book that I just found fascinating and so useful, was the idea that non-white Christians are pushing back against these narratives that are being placed on them both in the United States and abroad. So for instance, how did African-American Christians push back against racist narratives that they were inferior because of the color of their skin or their ancestry?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah, so non-white Christians, and people who are labeled as heathens are able to push back against the heathen narrative by basically flipping it back onto a racist white society. So everything that white Americans were saying about them, they could turn around. So I think earlier I mentioned with landscape, that they do this and say your landscapes are worse than ours. They do this with idol worship also, accusing white people of worshiping their own idols without realizing it, so idols of money, of technology, of white supremacy. So on white supremacy, I'll just give an example, Mary Church Terrell who is a late-19th, early-20th century civil rights activist, women's suffrage activist, and she flipped the narrative to great effect when she argues that lynching shows just how demonic and barbaric white Americans had become. She writes this article in 1904 for the North American Review and she asks in that article, how can white Americans claim to be sending missionaries overseas to save the quote unquote heathen when they're acting so much worse than the heathen that they are purporting to save? So really, they're the ones who need saving themselves. And this is a really powerful argument to make in the late 19th, early 20th century as a period when American imperialism was rampant and Americans are arguing like we are bringing civilization and the light of Christianity to the world. And she's saying, what kind of Christianity is this when people are coming from church and going to the scene of these horrendous murders and behaving in demonic like absolutely demonic and horrifying ways?

Joseph Stuart: Thank you so much for sharing that in addition to African-Americans, Chinese and Chinese-Americans are also resisting being labeled as heathens. What sort of arguments are they using? Are they different than African-American arguments or are they related?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah. So it's both different, but it's also similar. So some resist the label of heathen. Some actually adopted the term as a badge of pride instead. So I'll just give you an example of one of my favorite characters in the book, a man named Wong Chin Fu. From the late 19th century, he converts to Christianity as a child. As a teenager, he comes to the US for education and then he unconverts as he experiences American hypocrisy and racism. He ends up going on the lecture circuit as a kind of self-styled Confucian missionary instead. And basically, part of his argument is that China is an ancient civilization. It's been around for so much longer than America. Who are you to tell us what to do? He argues that Christianity is selfish, it's individualistic. So this is like a direct argument against the claim that white Christians are humanitarians who are charitable people. He’s saying no, you're individualistic. He also argues that it's a promise of heaven for anyone who converts, basically allows people to get away with murder. And he says at one point that he would not want to go to heaven that housed the likes of someone like Denis Kearney, who was a prominent anti-Chinese Labour leader in the Exclusion Period. So Wong offers Confucianism as an alternative. And he says that China as an ancient civilization knows more about survival than America. America is this constantly striving young nation, it's making all these machines, but to what end? Generating all of this technology, but all that's doing is putting people out of work. And in China, maybe they're not generating steam engines in the same kind of technology. But that means that people have more jobs. And so he makes these effective and rhetorical arguments that, as with Mary Church Terell was probably very hard to respond to. But he's holding up this kind of mirror to Americans and saying everything that you say is wrong with us, is wrong with you.

Joseph Staurt: Yeah, I’m thinking about a sort of rhetorical jujitsu where you're using the weight of someone else's argument to push them in the direction towards your own. So another way in which white Christian Americans are working to convert the heathen as they would say, was through education. And so how did this play out in Hawaii? And how do these schools show not just a commitment to education, but to white American Christianity?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah, so in Hawaii you have cases where missionaries are setting up schools along a New England model like very explicitly so, where even the structure of the schools mirror schools in New England. And the schools are meant to teach literacy, they're meant to teach small scale farming and again, the landscape is so important, and then obviously Christianity, which is supposed to underlie all of these things. The literacy rate skyrockets, small scale farming that is quickly supplanted by industrial farmers, much to the chagrin actually of the missionaries. Christianity is adopted by the Hawaiian monarchy and by much of the population but importantly, not as an unquestioning wholesale replacement of former beliefs. And here, I want to mention just a phenomenal book. It's David Chang's, The World and All the Things Upon It. So he writes not only about what missionaries brought, but more importantly about how Native Hawaiians interpreted it, how they translated textbooks to include their own Indigenous ways of knowing, and then how they passed those ways of knowing on to students. So education can also be a site of resistance and I think that that's really important to note.

Joseph Staurt: So I can imagine hearing about education in Hawaii and in other places and say, education is a positive thing. It's something that you're giving to people who might not have had those opportunities otherwise. How is it showing how humanitarianism is an important aspect of constructing the idea of the heathen?

Kathryn Gin Lum: You know, I think we can look to the devastating effects of residential schools or Native American children in the continental U.S. and Canada for an answer to this also. Yes, you can argue that there are benefits to education. But at the same time, the very claim that other people need to be educated again, sets up these colonial binaries of the educators and the “needy” people, the governors and the not. It sets the people up who need to be educated. It makes that into an excuse for all manner of horrors in the name of Christianizing and educating them. So in the book, I call this a “get out of jail free card” for excusing awful things. Scholar John Paul in his book, Empire of Sacrifice, described this as blessing brutalities, to obscure the violence of colonialism. You know, it's easy to say like I'm bringing education, I'm Christianizing the heathen, but this excuse was used for the creation of residential schools for the enslavement of people of African descent.

Joseph Stuart: Again, just thinking this through, I want to be clear, you're not saying that religion automatically leads to racism and colonialism.

Kathryn Gin Lum: Right. Yes. Thank you for that. No, I'm absolutely not saying that religion automatically leads to racism or colonialism or that Christianity is an intrinsically racist religion or anything like that. I'm a historian and I approached my sources. I approach the story as a historian, which means that I'm interested in how humans take religious ideas and religious practices and how they put them into motion. But I'm not interested in evaluating the truth claims of religion. I'm not trained to do that as an academic. But I'm interested in what humans do with them. And they can do wonderful things with religion. Americans have used Christianity to fight for social justice, but at the same time, they've also done horrible things with religion. I think that's just you know, it's a sign of humans as people who are flawed, who do wonderful and terrible things in this world and no less with religion than with anything else. So yeah, I'm glad that you asked me that. Because by no means I'm trying to say that, you know, religion is intrinsically colonial or Christianity is intrinsically racist, but it's used by people who are doing things with them that are colonial and racist.

Joseph Stuart: In one of your final chapters, you share how academics have pushed back against colonial narratives of non white people using religious narratives or unpacking religious narratives. How did they do that?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah. So you know, they do that in a similar way to others who've historically been grouped into the heathen category. And they do it by developing counter scripts that emphasize the potential for solidarity and being grouped together contra-white people. The notion of counter scripts comes from Natalia Molinos’s wonderful book, How Race is Made in America, she writes there that counter script can link people together in quotes, unlikely anti-racist alliances when groups recognize the similarity of their stories and the collective experiences of others. So the academics that I write about in that chapter, they emphasize the thinness and the impoverishment really, of white ways of thinking about people historically labeled as heathens and the ways in which this thinness in white ways of thinking has affected the academic study of religion, of science, and of history. And what they call for is an enrichment of academic approaches that don't dismiss as myth, the ancient but still very much alive epistemologies of people who are historically labeled as heathens. And that affects you know, not only the study of religion, but also the study of science. And then they call for enriching also the study of history, not just reducing history to patriotic caricature, but plumbing its depths and its devastations and decolonizing its methods. That's kind of an oversimplification, but I guess you’ll just have to read the book for more.

Joseph Stuart: Well, thank you. I love the close to your book, where you share poetry from Onani Kay Trask and she writes this poem. “How is it now you are gone?” [Poem]

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah, so those are actually— that's a couple of different poems that are from her 2002 collection, Night as a Sharkskin Drum. And some of the poems in that collection are just absolutely devastating. So the first one that you read, showing the damage done to the islands by missionaries, and by flaunting foreigners as she puts it. But Trask doesn't just give us damaged centered narratives and that's a phrase that comes from a powerful scholar Eve Tuck. Trask ends the collection with a poem that I think offers a really powerful counter script to the devastation that Westerners brought to Hawaii and that's the poem titled Into the Light I Will Go Forever. And here I think what's so powerful about is the way that she inverts the long standing equations of light and Christianity, darkness and heathenism. The light that she's going into forever, is not the light of Christianity. She invokes Hawaiian deities, she invokes the sacred beauty of Hawaiian landscapes, “the light of our sovereign suns and the mana of Hawaii.” And so yeah, for me, that's just a way of flipping the story again, just like so many people have done.

Joseph Stuart: We have one final question. Joseph Smith received a revelation that implores Latter-day Saints to learn from the best books. What are three of your best books that you would recommend to our audience?

Kathryn Gin Lum: Yeah. Only three is so hard. I mean, first, I should just say that I truly could not have written this book without the incredible scholarship out there on religion and race in America. There's so much good literature. My book is based on primary research, but it is also synthetic, right? It's an attempt to learn from, build on, and to bring together some of that incredible work that's out there. So I'll name three for you. But again, there's so much more and a couple of these I've already brought up. So Sylvester Johnson's African American Religion, an absolute must read. It's field changing. It changed how I think about race. Maybe I'll cheat and just sneak another book in there too. His book on The Myth of Ham, also just essential reading. Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration, also field changing. She's developed the idea of religio-racial identity, co-constitution of religion and race, how religion informs the ways in which people's racial identities play out and it's a book that's just inspired so much scholarship even like for my grad students. Every single grad student is like Judith Weidenfeld is the theoretical underpinnings of what I'm doing. And then finally, David Chang's The World and All the Things Upon It which I mentioned earlier, truly a paradigm shifting book. It's about Native Hawaiian geography, which is to say that it's about how they viewed the world. So instead of looking at missionaries looking at Hawaiians from the U.S., it flips the orientation, and it's just so good.

Joseph Stuart: Well, thank you so much for visiting with us today. Again, the name of the book is Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum. Have a blessed week y’all.

Kathryn Gin Lum: Thank you so much.