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Heathen - Religion and Race in American History (Hardcover)
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Heathen - Religion and Race in American History (Hardcover)
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An innovative history that shows how the religious idea of the
heathen in need of salvation undergirds American conceptions of
race. 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 the early 1900s, leading some to imagine
that racial categories had replaced religious differences. But the
ideas underlying the figure of the heathen did not disappear.
Americans still treat large swaths of the world as "other" due to
their assumed need for conversion to American ways. Purported
heathens have also contributed to the ongoing significance of the
concept, promoting solidarity through their opposition to white
American Christianity. Gin Lum looks to figures like Chinese
American activist Wong Chin Foo and Ihanktonwan Dakota writer
Zitkala-Sa, who proudly claimed the label of "heathen" for
themselves. Race continues to operate as a heathen inheritance in
the United States, animating Americans' sense of being a world
apart from an undifferentiated mass of needy, suffering peoples.
Heathen thus reveals a key source of American exceptionalism and a
prism through which Americans have defined themselves as a
progressive and humanitarian nation even as supposed heathens have
drawn on the same to counter this national myth.
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