182: Kathryn Gin Lum: How The Label Heathen Shaped the World

No Small Endeavor with Lee C. Camp

When is the last time you heard the word “heathen”? The word was originally used to delineate between European Christians who tended to be in urban centers and pagans in rural areas.

“Heathen exists in the mind of the person doing the labeling, right? It's a label that one people foists onto another.”

Our guest today, Kathryn Gin Lum, walks us through the history of the term heathen and how it has utterly shaped the world. We discuss her book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. The idea behind the term was wielded as a weapon to justify colonization and enslavement, and though the term has fallen out of use, she says the mental map of the world it has created has not.

Show Notes

Resources mentioned this episode:

"Heathen: Religion and Race in American History" by Kathryn Gin Lum

"The Origin of Others (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)" by Toni Morrison

Similar NSE episodes:

Willie James Jennings: The Christian Imagination

Eugene Cho and Karen Korematsu: Fear, Home and the Asian-American Experience

PDF of Lee's Interview Notes

Transcription Link

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