Heathen

Religion and Race in American History

Kathryn Gin Lum

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674275799
• Sujet: Theologie & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Kirchengeschichte

Philip Schaff Prize, American Society of Church History
S-USIH Book Award, Society for U.S. Intellectual History
Merle Curti Award in Intellectual History, Organization of American Historians "A fascinating book…Gin Lum suggests that, in many times and places, the divide between Christian and 'heathen' was the central divide in American life."—Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker "Offers a dazzling range of examples to substantiate its thesis. Rare is the reader who could dip into it without becoming much better informed on a great many topics historical, literary, and religious. So many of Gin Lum's examples are enlightening and informative in their own right."—Philip Jenkins, Christian Century "Brilliant…Gin Lum's writing style is nuanced, clear, detailed yet expansive, and accessible, which will make the book a fit for both graduate and undergraduate classrooms. Any scholar of American history should have a copy." —Emily Suzanne Clark, S-USIH: Society for U.S. Intellectual HistoryIn this 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.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.

PART I Imagining the Heathen World

John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress is one of the best-known images from the nineteenth-century United States, reprinted in just about every contemporary American history textbook to illustrate the idea of manifest destiny. Columbia, a pale woman in a sheer white gown, wearing the Star of Empire on her complacent forehead, leads bearded White men from east to west. She carries a schoolbook and strings a telegraph line along the way. Steam engines follow her; partially clothed Native Americans and buffalo flee before her presence. Light bathes the image from the east, suffusing the darker clouds with sunbeams and forcing the Native Americans who look backward to shade their eyes as they gallop into the darkness.

Gast’s was not the first image to employ such motifs of westward “progress.” A much less familiar set of lithographs anticipates Gast’s iconic artwork by four decades.¹ Printed on life membership certificates for the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church beginning in the 1830s, the lithographs similarly feature a pale woman in a diaphanous white gown, moving from east to west. Light emanates from behind her, dispelling the darkness around her, as a figure cowers from its blinding rays.

These membership certificate lithographs also differ from Gast’s painting in important ways. The central woman here is not America but an angel, bearing the Holy Bible instead of a schoolbook, and blowing a trumpet of the Lord instead of stringing a telegraph line. The light from the east emanates from a pointing hand instead of the sun, and in place of the Star of Empire, a dove of peace flies beside the angel. The scene below her is not primarily the American West, as in American Progress, but a montage of places depicting the heathen world, a realm Protestant Americans imagined to extend both geographically across the globe and temporally into the past. On the bottom right, a “converted Black family kneel[s] and reach[es] toward the heavens; broken shackles and swords beside them” suggest the Gospel’s power to both set free and to pacify. In the middle, a missionary clad in a long black cape preaches to a group of Native Americans sitting in a semicircle by a cluster of tepees. These are the receptive heathens, the good listeners for whom the river of life spills forth from a raised cross. To the left of the cross, a pale woman recoils from the angel, a snake around her neck. Her flowing white dress perhaps signifies the draped togas of ancient Greco-Roman pagans, while the objects in front of her may indicate the trappings of Roman Catholicism. A skeleton sporting a crown lies next to her, showing the deadly consequences of heathen unbelief on the fallen monarchs of yore. Behind her, a Mughal structure crumbles in the distance, a toppled Chinese-style Buddha at its base, representing the various heathens of the “Orient.”²

George A. Crofutt, American Progress, ca. 1873. Chromolithograph after 1872 painting of the same title by John Gast. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-09855.

As with Gast’s American Progress, these images were likely meant to be displayed. Each certificate measures over sixteen by twenty inches. They are dated, inscribed with the names of the donor to the missionary cause and the amount expended, and signed by members of the missionary society. Their large size and official appearance communicated their importance. The individual details of each vignette invited close examination, rendering variations in skin color through lighter and darker shading, and differences in landscape with symbols like huts, tepees, palm trees, and temples.

Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, life membership certificate, Philadelphia, ca. 1835. Mezzotint (51 × 41 cm). Issued to Eliza J. Hamilton on April 7, 1846, signed by John Whitman, president, and Saml. Sappington, secretary. John Sartain, engraver, Edward Williams Clay, artist. Library Company of Philadelphia.

But difference is not the only, or even necessarily the primary, significance the images convey. A viewer stepping back to take in the whole would understand sameness, too: the sameness of the heathen world as a realm where differently appearing people, landscapes, and time periods belong on the same visual plane and require the same angelic intervention. Taken as a whole, skin color does not predict capitulation to the gospel, nor does the magnificence of a built environment. The heathen woman wrapped in snakes is the palest of all the bodies in the image, but also the most endangered. The fallen minarets and Buddha behind her may once have been impressive, but they are no match for the power of God. The juxtaposition of symbols conveys not ignorant confusion but purposeful conflation: the fundamental error and neediness of the heathen world no matter what its material manifestations might be.³

Viewers contemplating the certificate would have read an allegory of progress onto it, no less than in Gast’s painting. The angel is sent by the hand of the Lord; everywhere the heathen must capitulate to the light or die in the darkness, as the proud buildings and despots of the heathen world crumble to the ground. The dynamism of this change could be seen on the static two-dimensional page, and the Americans whose names were proudly emblazoned on these certificates could witness the fruits of their contributions in the outstretched arms and patient postures of the saved, while hoping that their dollars might bring down other idolatrous temples and crush more obstinate heathen kings.⁴

Such dynamism and purposeful conflation of very different peoples and places are also apparent in nineteenth-century missionary maps that swathed the heathen world in undifferentiated colors like gray and brown. These maps were not merely matter-of-fact depictions of the world as it is, but showed what needed to be done to turn the drabness of the heathen world into the saving light (often rendered blue or yellow) of Protestantism. A typical such map was widely disseminated in the Congregationalist women’s missionary magazine Life and Light for Heathen Women, which boasted a circulation of nearly four thousand women and one thousand life members a year after its inauguration. The map was first displayed at the Second Annual Meeting of the Woman’s Board of Missions in Boston’s Park Street Church on January 4, 1870. Explicitly dubbed a “Moral Map,” it was painstakingly “drawn and painted for the use of the Board of Missions by Mrs. Miron Winslow” and “hung in full view of the audience,” in order to show “the moral condition and religious aspect of the world, by the use of appropriately distinguishing colors.”⁵ Brown, for “Heathen,” is the dominant color of the map; Protestants are a yellow that is few and far between. Yellow stars denote missionary fields that dot the edges of the heathen world in various places; the stars—representative of light—presumably augur Protestantism’s eventual takeover of the world.

Winslow described the map for the audience, and her description, along with her map, was reprinted in the magazine. “Let us look at the eastern hemisphere,” said she: “Asia is buried in the night of heathenism and Mohammedanism. Africa about equally divided between the same.… A sadly small portion of Northern Europe is Protestant. Turning to the western hemisphere, how large a portion of it we find still under the darkness of superstition! while the United States seems like a sun to scatter the moral darkness of the world. For this, God has opened the gates of mighty empires that had been shut during long ages.”⁶ Winslow knows the hand of God is in her map of the world no less than in the missionary certificates. Where the certificates show light emanating from behind the angel, light comes from the sun of US righteousness in Winslow’s map. Through visual aids like these certificates and maps; in lectures, sermons, and displays; and in widely disseminated tracts, books, and magazines, Americans formulated their ideas about the heathen world as an elastic and shifting realm that could stretch to incorporate people and lands from past to present and from east to west, even as it could also recede before the saving light.

The heathen was not, of course, a nineteenth-century American invention. The figure of the heathen was born on the other side of the Atlantic. She was the younger, Anglo-Germanic, and sometimes indistinguishable sibling of the Latin pagan. Both the heathen and the pagan were defined by who they were not: not a Christian, not a Jew, not a Muslim. (In practice, ordinary Europeans tended to lump Muslims in with other heathens, while theologians and church leaders generally did not.)⁷ The term “heathen,” like “pagan,” originally referred to the rustic country folk who resisted the spread of Christianity. It was not until the warring tribes of Europe were Christianized, and then set out in search of the treasures of other lands, that the elasticity and capaciousness of the heathen category grew to require broader explanation. The heathen were no longer just the uncouth people who lived on the outskirts of society. Europeans’ realization that another world lay across the Atlantic generated new explanatory problems about the origins of, and similarities and differences between, heathen peoples the world over, particularly those whom the Bible did not explicitly reference. The idea of a heathen world grew out of attempts to explain what features the heathen shared in common, as Europeans and then Euro-Americans learned more about the diversity of the world’s people and their practices, and attempted to differentiate themselves as superior. Euro-Americans continued to imagine heathenness as a cohesive category, even when the evidence gleaned from colonizing and missionizing ventures might seem to have pointed in a direction other than cohesion.

1 PRECEDENTS

Early English travel literature did not enjoy a stellar reputation. Writers were known to exaggerate; some authors pieced together elaborate travel narratives solely on the basis of other publications. Fantastical stories of monstrous creatures, part human and part beast, tickled the fancy of readers but could hardly rescue travel literature from being “ranked among the lowest and least respectable kinds of writing.” To preserve his reputation, clergyman and traveler William Biddulph published his 1609 Travels of Foure English Men and a Preacher under cover of an “editorial persona named ‘Theophilus Lavender.’ ”¹ Lavender purported to have compiled the letters of William and his brother Peter from their journeys to “sundry” places, including “Africa, Asia, Troy, … and to the Blacke Sea,” and “Palestina, Ierusalem, Iericho and to the Red Sea.” The purpose of the text was to be didactic and moral, in contrast to the perceived frivolity of other travel literature. The title promised that the book would be “very profitable for the helpe of Trauellers, and no lesse delightfull to all persons who take pleasure to heare of the Manners, Gouernment, Religion, and Customes of Forraine and Heathen Countries.”²

The primary lesson readers were to take from reading about these “Forraine and Heathen Countries” was gratitude for their own blessings and confidence in the superiority of Protestant Christianity. In the preface, Lavender set up a series of contrasts between “Heathen Countries” and England. The former were groaning under “tyrannous gouernment” while loyal subjects of the “good and gratious King” enjoyed the benefits of his “mercifull gouernment.” The heathen lay in “blindness and palpable ignorance, not knowing the right hand from the left in matters that concerne the kingdome of Heauen,” while the English luxuriated in the “inestimable benefit of the preaching of the word amongst them.” Heathen women languished in “slauerie” and “subjection to their Husbands,” while English women enjoyed such “libertie and freedome” as to teach them to “loue their Husbands.” Heathen servants were “beate … like dogs,” and their “poore men” “liue like brute beasts,” which should encourage English servants to be “faithfull and dutifull to their Masters” and the English “poore” to “bee thankefulle to God for their benefactors.” Even rich heathens were to be pitied, since “in other Countries no man is master of his owne,” while rich men in England could rest in the confidence that they had “libertie and freedom” not only of their “Conscience and persons; but of their goods also.”³

In a nutshell, then, “Forraine and Heathen Countries” served as a foil against which the English could reassure themselves of their political, economic, social, and religious superiority. In the English Protestant imagination, failing to recognize and worship the one true God had implications that reverberated throughout the lives of heathen individuals and their societies. “And who knoweth what good may redound vnto others, by reading of this discourse of other Countries?” asked Lavender. “For hereby all men may see how God hath blessed our Country aboue others, & be stirred vp to thankfulnes.”⁴

But gratitude was not the only response that awareness of non-Christian, non-monotheistic cultures provoked. For gratitude raised other questions, too. Why were the English so peculiarly blessed (as they saw it)? Would they always remain so, even if they moved far away from England, perhaps even among the heathen themselves? A...