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.

As a faculty member with a teaching load of four classes per semester at a public university, my approach to reading from Dust They Came by Jonathan H. Ebel and Sowing the Sacred by Lloyd Daniel Barba is born of the necessity of trying to streamline my workload as a teacher-scholar and bring new material to my students. My institution frequently ranks highly on lists that measure social mobility, largely because the students we admit are often among the least affluent in the state. It also ranks highly for diversity, as a Hispanic Serving Institute, and as the state university that leads the way in graduating Black students. But these students are also thoroughly urban, often with little travel experience beyond the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Histories of the state’s agricultural regions, places they often imagine as barren land, are a harder sell. Our majors, however, are curious both about the lives of people that have not been well-documented and about the world outside of our geographic region, and these books as a pair, can satisfy that curiosity if I can present related themes that resonate with the students. I have found that looking at the institutions in these works (the government camp and the church) as ones meant to serve as examples of an idealized way of American life, thinking about the way such institutions often regulate the poor, and looking at how geography impacts experience are all key components of these works that might be interesting to students.

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.

I am so grateful to have been able to think with these authors while reading their books, for both have challenged me to think differently about my previous work and my upbringing in the “Golden State.” Those of us who study religion in the American West know it is still relatively marginalized in our guild, but I see such great hope in these sorts of studies. Not only do these books reveal a great deal about California both as a site of religious coercion and resistance, but they bring to our attention methods, sources, and ways of thinking about the interpenetration of traditionally “religious” ideas and material objects with labor, capital, foodways, photography, office spaces, and domestic interiors.

In his 1615 account of the Upper Guinea Coast Etiópia Menor e descripção géografica da Província da Serra Leoa, Portuguese priest Manual Alvares described at length the so-called “superstitions” of the Susu, Temne, and other inhabitants of the region which rendered the “Ethiopians” in need of the light of Christian intervention. According to Alvares, their superstitions were “those common to all heathen” and paralleled those of the “Moor and the Turk,” “heretics,” and “the Jews” who resisted Catholic missionaries’ evangelistic efforts on account of their incapacity for reason (262, 344–345). Consigning “Ethiopia and its peoples” to the realm of unbelievers, the priest proceeded to rally his fellow Christian brethren to the cause of enlightening those people who were bound to repeat the folly of their foreparents by adhering to ancestral traditions.

In the late 1930s, the activist and journalist Carleton Beals reported on the religious lives of recent migrants to California. His observations of these destitute new arrivals showcased the prejudices of the era and displayed his Menckensque style

Kathryn Gin Lum's Heathen is so rich and so vast, I struggled to know where to begin! As I read, I kept being prompted to think back to sources I had encountered in my own research over the years and to think about them in new ways. And so, rather than trying to summarize the book's arguments, I'll aim to preview some of Gin Lum's central interventions by running various bits of sources from my research through the filter of Heathen. My hope is that this process conveys what I see as the broad reach and significance of Heathen, while also raising a few points for further consideration. I have tried to align my research tidbits with particular threads and claims Gin Lum presents.

In her review, Emily Conroy-Krutz writes that “One of the joys of working in scholarly community is learning from each other when we approach the same set of sources with different questions and different interpretive lenses.” The essays in this roundtable reflect the questions and lenses that these brilliant scholars bring from their respective areas of expertise, and they reflect the joy of being in conversation and community with each other. I so appreciate Michael Baysa, Conroy-Krutz, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh, and Rachel Wheeler for engaging with my work so generatively and generously. I am also grateful to Katherine Carté for organizing the panel on Heathen at the 2024 American Society of Church History meeting and to Jon Butler for organizing our comments into this roundtable. While I do not have space to respond to every point raised, I will respond to themes that I see cutting across the reviews.

California has historically been imagined as larger than life – a place of excess and grandeur. The organizing power of the myth of the American West is especially evident in the work of Ferenc Szasz, which has helped historians think about the distinctiveness of religion in the region. In the years since Religion in the Modern American West was published, the region has emerged as a productive test site for exploring religion’s relationship to colonialism, the formulation of diverse racial and ethnic groups, and the role of place and space in scholarly analysis. The work of Jonathan Ebel and Lloyd Barba adds to this literature by uncovering the religious dynamics hidden in California’s non-coastal cities. Located in an area known as the Central Valley, cities like Bakersfield, Tulare, and Wasco are bordered by mountain ranges that separate the interior from coastal metropolises and beach towns. Far from the Pacific Ocean breeze, these cities are hot, and their reputations as “rural” towns propped up by an agrarian-based economy have historically fueled stereotypes about the people who live there. As such, the region has tended to be dismissed as a site of serious study.

My driftin’ memory goes back to the spring of ‘23.

I am grateful to receive such thoughtful responses to my book and to have it placed in conversation with Lloyd Barba’s powerful work. The questions raised by the responses and the points they make about pedagogical usefulness, terminology, sources, and methods are all so important. It is hard to know where to begin. But it is mid-November as I write, and my mind is on our current moment. It is clear to me that we continue to blame the displaced for their displacement, and the migrants for migration. Migration is indisputably essential to the functioning of the American economy, yet migrants continue to endure suspicion, fear, anger, and hatred.