Episode 392: Kathryn Gin Lum, Religion and Race in Early America

What does history have to tell us about how we, as Americans, came to define people by their race–the visual ways we group people based on their skin color, facial features, hair texture, and ancestry?

History provides a LOT of answers to this question! In this episode, we’ll focus on one aspect of the answer to this question by focusing on some of the ways religion shaped European and early American ideas about race and racial groupings.

Kathryn Gin Lum is a Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She joins us to explore the connections between religion, race, and the concept of “heathenism” with details from her book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.

Feature image courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

About the Show

Ben Franklin’s World is a podcast about early American history.

It is a show for people who love history and for those who want to know more about the historical people and events that have impacted and shaped our present-day world.

Each episode features a conversation with a historian who helps us shed light on important people and events in early American history.

Ben Franklin’s World is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

Episode Summary

Joining us is Kathryn Gin Lum, a Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. She’s the author of numerous articles and books, including Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction, and her most recent book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.

During our investigation of race and religion in early America, Kathryn reveals information about the religious landscape in Europe between the fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries; The ways Europeans and later Americans used Christian religions as justifications for colonizing the Americas and the peoples who lived there; And, details about how Europeans and later Americans used religion and ideas about the concept of the “heathen” to define and form categories of race and their national identities.

What You’ll Discover

• Religion in early modern Europe
• Origins of the word “heathen”
• Reasons for European colonization
• Religion as a justification for colonization
• Doctrine of Discovery
• The Black Legend
• Differences between English and Spanish colonization
• Puritans versus Separatists
• Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative
• The Enlightenment’s influence on ideas about race
• The role of religion in American identity formation
• The legacies of ideas about heathens