The story of the "heathen," writes Stanford religious studies professor Kathryn Gin Lum, in her new book, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History," is a familiar one. It's a story "about how Americans have set themselves apart from a world of sufferers, as a superior people and a humanitarian people — a people who deserve the good fortune they have received and have a responsibility to spread it to others."
The necessary center of that story is the idea of "the heathen": whether in its historical sense of people holding the "wrong religion" or its contemporary incarnation as a pitiable "third world" other, but always a figure in need of transformation and salvation. Under the supposedly beneficent mission of offering that salvation, Gin Lum writes, the concept has served as a wide-ranging "get out of jail free ticket" that "renders any harm excusable if done in the name of eradicating wrong religion."
