In 1768, Mohegan minister Samson Occom made a case for why he was a heathen. Shortly before Occom departed for London to raise funds for Moors Indian Charity School, ministers and fellow missionaries spread rumors doubting whether Occom had truly converted from “heathenism” to Christianity. Occom responded by drafting an autobiography defending his conversion. He cast his Mohegan upbringing as heathenism from which he escaped into his newfound Christian identity: “I was born a Heathen and Brought up in Heathenism, till I was between 16 & 17 years of age. . .[My parents] strictly maintained and followed in their heathenish ways, customs & religion, though there were some preaching among them.” However, these three mentions of heathenism in the opening were the only times the term appeared. Throughout the manuscript, he subtly transitioned to the term “Indian.” Occom then spent the rest of the manuscript highlighting his unfair treatment in the hands of his peers: he was underpaid compared to White missionaries and he was labeled an ineffective educator of Mohegan children. He closed the account attributing his failures to the fact that he was “a poor Indian.” The final line read, “I can't help that God has made me so; I did not make myself so.” It was hard for Occom disentangle his conversion from the possibility that he was always and already a heathen.

The question of how Christians perceived and related to non-Christians – heathens – is of pressing historical importance in every era of the history of Christianity. It lies at the core of the historical category of “religion,” particularly as it developed through European colonial expansion in the early modern era, and it plays important roles in the globalizing processes of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Kathryn Gin Lum's book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, winner of the ASCH's 2023 Philip Schaff Prize, chronicles that history. Through her narrative, she queries the ways historians engage categories of difference and the role of religion in creating social and political hierarchies.

I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History ever since I first heard that Kathryn Gin Lum was working on a long history of “heathens” in US history. I had, at the time, just finished my first book, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell, 2015), and I had been doing a lot of thinking about “heathens” in nineteenth-century American culture. Specifically, I had trying to understand how white Protestant missionaries understood the concepts of heathenism, civilization, and conversion, and how these ideas shaped their decision-making about where they should focus their evangelistic attention. In Christian Imperialism, I argued that missionaries understood “the heathen world” to be a big place, but they did not understand all heathens to be equally heathenish. Some were more civilized than others, and thus made better candidates for conversion – and, as I found, those who were more “civilized” tended to be in or on the margins of Anglo-American empire. I called the rubric that missionaries used to judge the relative heathenism of different populations the “hierarchy of heathenism.” But I still had a lot of questions, and I hoped that Lum's work would answer them. I have not been disappointed.