On February 6, 2023, HDS hosted the second installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speakers were David F. Holland, John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History at HDS, and Kathryn Gin Lum, Associate Professor in Religious Studies at Stanford University.
It has long been a historical truism that, in the early modern West, pseudoscientific racial hierarchies replaced religious hierarchies as the dominant framework for understanding human difference and justifying oppressive colonialist practices, including slavery. Recent research has challenged this axiom to suggest how important religious conceptions of difference remained to the racist imagination into the modern period—and, indeed, into our present day. The convergence of racialist and religious orderings of humanity converged in American institutions like Harvard University, persisting in ways with which we have not sufficiently reckoned.
Hosted by Dr. Diane L. Moore, Faculty Director, Religion and Public Life, and Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Religion and the Legacies of Slavery. A series of public online conversations. Religion, Race and the Double Helix of White Supremacy. February 6, 2023.
DIANE MOORE: Welcome. On behalf of our Dean, David Hempton, welcome to our second in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery and this series is co-sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative, and HarvardX.
I'm Diane Moore, and I am the founding faculty director of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School. And it's my pleasure and privilege to co-host this series with my friend and colleague Melissa Wood Bartholomew, associate Dean for our Office of Diversity Inclusion and Belonging. On behalf of us both, and our many staff and faculty, colleagues, who have helped bring this series into being, I want to welcome the over 1,200 participants who are joining us for this presentation representing over 100 countries worldwide. We're grateful for your presence.
Tonight is the second in a series of six critical conversations building upon and beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report. Last week, Professor Karen King focused on what it means to recognize that Christian scriptures were formed in a social and historical context where slavery was commonplace. Tonight, we'll move into the modern period in a conversation led by professors David Holland and Kathryn Gin Lum on religion, race and the double helix of white supremacy.
In this series, we explore through head and heart what the academic study of religion teaches us about the tangled histories and legacies of slavery and racism here in the United States and beyond. These tragic legacies are alive and present in many forms as the news on any given day, in any part of the world devastatingly reveals.
We hope that gaining a deeper understanding of the complex roles of religion will enhance our commitments to reparative action and racial justice and healing in our own time and in our own context. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of a just world at peace healed of racism and oppression.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: [INAUDIBLE] We pause out of reverence. We pause to acknowledge and honor those who came before us who are Indigenous to this land and the African and Indigenous people who were enslaved in this country, including the more than 70 people of African and Indigenous descent who were enslaved here at Harvard University as detailed in Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report.
As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country. I am aware of the potential impact of hearing this tragic history. So we want to remind everyone that as we proceed through these difficult conversations and listen to these exchanges, it is important to be aware of what might be stirring up in us and happening in our bodies, particularly as we navigate our emotions regarding the current manifestations of the legacy of slavery as reflected in police violence against Black people in this country.
Remember to breathe and to take care of yourself during and after each session. We invite you now to take a moment to breathe with intention and to focus on your breath as we lift up the Harvard University Native American programs acknowledgment of the land and people.
We acknowledge that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.
But for the stolen land and the stolen labor, this country and this university would not be. Our acknowledgment of the land and people extends beyond words. It is expressed to our action and is connected to what we are doing through these conversations. This series is a part of the broader work stemming from our school's commitment to reading the Harvard & Legacy of Slavery report is our common text this year.
And as we engage with this report, we are discerning our institutional actions for redress and ways to support the university in implementing its recommendations and even expanding upon them. And we aim to further our vision of a restorative anti-racist and anti oppressive Harvard Divinity School. This is sacred work.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you, Melissa. It's my pleasure now to introduce my friend and colleague, David Holland. David Holland is the John A. Bartlett Professor of New England Church History. He has joined-- he joined the faculty of Divinity in 2013, and has distinguished himself as a respected scholar across the university, a beloved teacher and a valued and trustworthy colleague.
For his presentation tonight, he is joined by Stanford University Professor Kathryn Gin Lum and their topic is religion, race and the double helix of white supremacy. And I'll turn it over to you, David, to then introduce Professor Lum. And thank you both for being with us. We look forward to the conversation.
DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you so much, Diane. And thank you, Melissa. It's a great privilege to be part of this program and I'm grateful to everybody who has worked so hard to put it in place, to conceive of it so thoughtfully, and to include me on such an illustrious list of panelists.
It's my privilege this evening to be in conversation with Kathryn Gin Lum. I think I speak for Kathryn in saying we're both honored to be following Professor Karen King who kicked this important series off last week with an illuminating and really generative discussion of slavery and antiquity, and in the sacred texts of the Christian tradition.
In a sense, I think we can think of this evening session as building both chronologically and thematically on Professor King's presentations as we will move forward in time to discuss the intertwining discourses of religion and race in the intellectual history that informed institutions like Harvard University from early modernity up through the present moment. There are few scholars who could guide us through this material and its implications as well as Kathryn Gin Lum.
I've known Kathryn for two decades now going back to an era when she and I were an undergraduate and a graduate student respectively in the same history department. I've watched with enormous respect and appreciation since those days as Professor Gin Lum has assumed a place of prominence and importance as a leading historian of American religion.
She's become an essential voice in a number of our fields most pressing conversations, especially around the relationship of religion and race. Kathryn Gin Lum received her BA in history from Stanford and her PhD in history from Yale. During her undergraduate years, she also spent some time here at Harvard, and so it is in a sense wonderful to welcome her back to where her illustrious journey in higher education began.
She now serves as associate professor in the religious studies department at Stanford University in collaboration with Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in race and ethnicity. She is also associate professor by courtesy of history in affiliation with American studies and Asian-American studies.
As a faculty member, she has twice been awarded Stanford's prestigious Annenberg Faculty Fellowship and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Prior to her appointment at Stanford, Professor Gin Lum was on the faculty of religion at Princeton University.
I'd like to introduce our conversation tonight by talking in some detail about Kathryn's previous work because I think it provides a really valuable entry point into the themes for this evening. Kathryn's first book, Damned Nation, and I'll share a few slides here to give everybody a sense of the scope of her work as well as the work of those to whom she is often speaking in her work.
Her first book Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. Based on her award winning dissertation, the book traces American conceptions and invocations of hell from the late 18th century to the late 19th. In it, Gin Lum argues against the idea that Hellfire was simply a mechanism of social control.
And here, I might note a recurring theme through Kathryn's work and that is a refusal to indulge in the kind of reductionist approaches to religion that tend to reduce faith traditions and religious practice to mere exercises of power, or a way of coping with a world of injustices. Kathryn notes that a belief in hell was a deeply profound commitment, and source of cosmological understanding for those who believe deeply in the conception of an underworld.
True to her comfort with complexity, she doesn't replace one form of reductionism, that is, social control with another theological conviction, but instead she carefully illustrates the ways in which personal conviction and political concerns intertwined to create a particular culture of health in the United States. Among the many strengths of Gin Lum's book is that she integrates differences of race, class, gender, and region into her work with particular skill.
Showing for instance how Native Americans invoked concepts of hell against white imperialism, or how the concept intertwined with cultural assumptions about womanhood in the 19th century. She provides a remarkably inclusive rendering of American's engagement with damnation.
With this attention to diversity and commitment to the mutual influences of religious conviction and political power, the first book laid a foundation for what was to come, Professor Gin Lum's next major project was her co-edited Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race, which she published with Paul Harvey. The volume opens with an effective editorial essay on the reasons why the history of American religion and the history of race in the United States are more fully understood when studied as an inextricable pairing.
Ranging from recent racial violence in American churches to the deep anti-Semitic roots of American anti-blackness, Gin Lum and Paul Harvey show both through their own writing and the composition of their volume, the religion and race are mutually constitutive categories in American culture. The book structured both chronologically and thematically and including groups such as Pacific Islanders and South Asians that are too often marginalized in discussions of American racism and race. Events is the editor's distinctive capacity to bring a disparate set of topics in a diverse set of scholars into a coherent whole.
These two books by Kathryn Gin Lum bring us to the volume that serves as the centerpiece for this evening's discussion, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History published in 2022 by Harvard University Press. In order to comment specifically on the contributions of that book, let me say a few words about the scholarly context into which it situates itself. And to do that, I need to comment on one of the historiographical terms that Kathryn's book coins namely, the replacement narrative.
The replacement narrative suggests that historical framework-- that suggests a historical framework that holds that religious conceptions of human difference were supplanted by biological conceptions of human difference. In this telling, religion provided the structures of thought by which people determined how they were differentiated from the others they encountered in the world. But by virtue of a scientific revolution and an enlightenment that purportedly secularized Western discourse, there was a kind of succession of ontological frameworks by which religion faded away and biology and physiology took its place to account for the ways in which human beings are differentiated from one another.
This version of history to quote Kathryn's own work, "sees religion and race as categorically different: the religious subject is thought to be changeable through conversion, while the race subject is said to be perpetually inferior by the color of their skin." The implication of this narrative, the replacement narrative that Kathryn wants to argue against is that racism is seen as a secular category that can influence religion but largely functions independently of religion.
The legacy or the origins of this replacement narrative are fairly deeply entrenched in the historiography of American racism, including a definitive work by a scholar that Kathryn and I both worked with in our student days, George Fredrickson's Racism: A Short History where it may receive its sharpest articulation but it's appeared in many other works, including Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, Tanya Maria Golash-Boza's Race and Racisms, as well as The Complexion of Race, as well as many others, which we could cite. But it's deeply-- it has deeply informed much of the discourse about racism in American history.
Now this replacement narrative I think by Kathryn's own concession and she can correct me if she disagrees, but the implications of the replacement narrative are not wholly mistaken. I think the idea of an unchangeable physiologically rooted racial difference does come to the fore in the late 18th century and early 19th century. It's not a complete fabrication to suggest that something like this replacement narrative is in effect and it does infect areas of learning and research that see themselves as largely secularized in that period, including at places like Harvard, where the famed zoologist Louis Agassiz, which I noted there's a photograph of him on the flyer for this very event. Appropriately so, that was not planned.
But Louis Agassiz among others saw himself as breaking from the legacy of the Bible and Christian tradition by positing that the different races were actually the products of different original progenitors. They called this polygenesis as opposed to the monogenesis of the biblical narrative. This is a theory of polygenesis that tended to reinforce the sense of innate and immutable racial differences and a rigid form of white supremacy that rested upon it.
So there are historiographical and historical truths to this replacement version of history. What scholars like Professor Gin Lum have increasingly objected to however, is the sense that, one, these new biological conceptions of race pushed the older religious views of human difference essentially out of the cultural frame. And two, that modern racism was not deeply affected and by some tellings, fundamentally beholden to the religious cosmologies that preceded it.
Rather than seeing religious ideas of human difference as largely disconnected from the newer discourse of biology, this scholarship sees essential religious legacies that remain within the conceptual categories and patterns of cognition that inform the new ways of thinking. Into this category of scholarship, we might place J. Kameron Carter's 2008 book Race: A Theological Account, which among other things argues that the distinction European Christian thought makes between the Jewish Jesus and the universal Christ, one represented by a racialized body that must die before the other's transcendent whiteness can reign, creates a theological foundation on which much modern white supremacy rests.
Into this camp, we might also place Willie Jennings' 2011 book, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, which argues that Christian theology is unholy alliance with European imperialism provided the seedbed of modern racism. Jennings argues for instance, that when Christianity unmoored itself from the land of Israel, it subsequently claimed the whole world as its promised land, which provided the conceptual foundation for an imperialism that in European hands had to be justified by making non-white bodies subjectable to colonial power.
Terrence Keel's Divine Variations entered the conversation in 2018, to argue that some of the foundational concepts of Christian thinking, such as the idea of a purposeful universe with an intelligent design gave race and ontological reality and moral meaning that not only shaped but continues to shape even those scientific discussions of race that understand themselves to have left the biblical account of creation far behind.
The general sense of such literature is that modern racism is not so disconnected from the religious patterns of thought that preceded it, and that the religious aspects and implications of our modern discourse about race have not gone quietly into a secularized night.
I should pause here to note that this increasing attention to the role of religion in the creation of race runs on a kind of parallel track to the literature that has addressed the role of religion in the American history of slavery. From Albert Raboteau's landmark 1978 book Slave Religion, to John McKivigan's 1984 War Against Proslavery Religion, to Mark Noll's 2006 Civil War as a Theological Crisis, to Katharine Gerbner's 2018 Christian Slavery.
We have seen scholarship that pushes historians to see religion not just as epiphenomenal to the American experience with human enslavement, but as the essential cultural presence shaping the ways the brutalizing system was seen, debated, coped with and confronted in the United States and other Western nations.
The shared conclusion of this growing surge of scholarship cannot be escaped. To understand American histories of racism and slavery, one must understand this cultural force we call religion. This was underscored, I might note, by the recurring appearance of the Divinity School in the Harvard report on the legacy of slavery.
That brings me back now to Kathryn Gin Lum's 2022 volume Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. In this volume, Gin Lum shows us that a Christian tendency to divide the world into two camps, the Christian and the heathen, has bequeathed to the modern world a kind of binary way of thinking about human difference captured in a phrase like the West and the rest.
Gin Lum summarizes one version of this as. Follows race works in this conception as a binary us versus them, the white and the black, the helpers and the helpless, the civilized and the heathen. Gin Lum argues that the supposed mutability inherent in Christian conceptions of human difference was sometimes much more resistant to the idea of change than historians have supposed, and that even where that mutability is in full effect, belief in convertibility can functionally look more like biologically based versions of racial difference in terms of its destructive and subjugating power.
This problem is nowhere more vividly illustrated than in the relationship between the history of heathenism and the history of slavery. Because the Harvard Divinity School situated within Harvard University exists in an institutional space where persistently religious and ostensibly secularized discourses collide and intersect and intertwine, it is a particular gift to have Professor Gin Lum here with us tonight to discuss this history and its long lived [? bastoles ?] as we continue to consider Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. Welcome, Kathryn.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Thank you so much for having me. I'm sorry, I have a cold. I have a toddler in preschool so she brings back all the germs. I hope that you can hear me OK. And thank you for that very kind introduction.
DAVID HOLLAND: Well, you've come by your cold rightly, and you sound great. And it's really wonderful to have you here and to see you again. I'd love to get directly to your thoughts on some of the key issues raised in your book, Heathen.
As I've indicated, you argue against the idea that American thinking about human difference underwent a fairly stark shift from a different based on religion to a difference based on biology. Contrary to that narratilogical axism that has had such purchase in the historiography of American religion, you contend that religious ideas about human difference have had a tremendous persistence.
In fact, one of the things I really enjoy about your book, historians are often preoccupied with the idea that history as a discipline is the study of change over time. We were both acculturated in that idea that what we study is change. And what your books so powerfully demonstrate is that history is as much about persistence and stasis as it is about change. And that this concept of heathenism is one of those examples of the persistent and the static.
Now, contrary to the idea that human difference had this sort of biological shift in the late 18th century, you talk about religion as retaining its place in our discourse about race. And you posit a world in which both frames, the purportedly secularized scientific and the expressly religious continually interact with each other. An interaction that shapes our often unspoken assumptions when we think about race.
So among the implications of those religious ideas is that rather than the more graduated hierarchy of races, what we sometimes refer to as the [? sadial ?] view of human progression, which in that sort of enlightenment framework would posit that different races and different cultures were at different places in this kind ladder of progression on which all human beings are climbing. That you posit in contrast to a religious discussion of heathenism, which tends to be this binary, in which heathenism divides the world into simply two parts, those who have internalized the Christian truth and those who have not.
Now when this religious concept this binary of the world is racialized, which as you show repeatedly it often has been it results in what you call racial clumping. Another phrase coined by your book. Now, why do you suppose that it's important for us to recognize this persistent habit of mine? Why do we need to recognize this binary thinking that the concept of heathenism has bequeathed to our way of thinking about the world?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, well, thank you again. And I actually want to start way back when I was a student in your classes. Thank you for bringing me actually to the field of American religious history in the first place. I did not know that this was something that could be studied academically before I took your classes.
So for those of you who don't know, Dr. Holland, as I called you then, was one of the advisors for my senior thesis. And that thesis actually planted the seeds of what this book would become. And I don't know if you remember this, David, but I wrote about missions to the Chinese and gold rush era California. And one of the questions that I kept coming back to then was why the Chinese kept being denigrated by the term heathen and what this term encompassed.
I remember that I also came across a missionary map when I was researching for my thesis. And this was a map that color coded the world according to religion. And the thing that really stuck with me about that map was that the vast majority of the world was colored gray for heathen. And so that led me to another research question, which was about how Americans could look at vastly different parts of the world and lump them together under the same category.
And clearly, I failed to answer those questions in the senior thesis. So I kept returning back to them. And finally, really kind of face them head on in this book. And so it's really the question sparked by that map that I think gets at an answer as to why it's important to recognize this binary view of the world. I think in contrast to biological racism, which tries to as you explained divide and hierarchize people into a racial ladder, on the basis of supposed physiological differences, a Christian heathen binary sees much of the world as a kind of mass of unfortunates who need the help of the Christian to save.
So here, differences are really kind of subsumed under the Shared heading of wrong religion, which then becomes the reason for heathen's supposed inability to take care of themselves and of their lands. Now, how is this a racial binary and what makes this racial clumping? Here, I'm drawing on work by scholars like the ones that you named, also Sylvester Johnson, Judith Wiesenfeld, and Geraldine Hong, among others who argue for understanding religion bio politically and race non-corporeally. I can't say that word.
Johnson in his book African-American Religions, 1500-2000, argues that race is, as he puts it, a governing formation that has structured the political rule of Europeans over non-Europeans. And I think it's exactly this dynamic where one group believes that it has the right and the authority to save and then rule over another that I see as traceable to the Christian heathen binary.
And I want to make clear that this binary coexists with the hierarchy as you know, David. And I'm not trying to say that it's more important or that it replaces it either, I really like how you use the metaphor of the double helix to frame our conversation because I think that gets at the intertwining of these modes of racialization. So where racial hierarchies based on biology emphasize difference, pitting groups against each other and a kind of divide and conquer strategy, the binary works to lump people together as simply not white.
So these two modes of racialization are mutually reinforcing. For any group that tries to climb too high on a racial ladder, the binary of racial clumping basically works to cast them back into this massive unfortunates and to shore up whiteness as a condition of saviorhood and superiority.
DAVID HOLLAND: Among the many phrases, the resonant and illuminating phrases that you coined in this book, you coined the phrase the heathen ceiling to describe that limit. That the process of conversion and proselytism creates this possibility of entering the other side of that binary, but the racialized forms of thinking are so deeply entrenched that that ceiling is confronted in a way that has really brutalizing and destructive consequences, which is, again, so vividly and poignantly displayed in your work.
One of the differences you present and you've alluded to it here is distinguishing the racialized thinking that derives from the religious concept of heathenism from conceptions of biological racism that have often dominated the historical literature on race is that heathenism posits this complex possibility of change. So can you talk a little bit, Kathryn, about why a version of difference that allows for some change however limited, differs from a version of difference in which change is not possible and why do we need to recognize that dynamic.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: So I think you really put your finger on the key difference in these systems of racialization in the double helix. Biological racism holds that human difference is unchangeable that it's inherent. But the racism that comes from the Christian heathen divide sees human difference as a result of wrong religious orientation that is supposed to be changeable through conversion.
And so because of this, some scholars like George Frederickson as you brought up earlier, have seen religious intolerance as basically not yet racism. They've argued that racism requires a sense of innate difference. And they've also tended to see then religious intolerance as basically gentler than biological racism. So they've argued that monogenesis or the belief that all humans descend from Adam and Eve, had the effect of basically keeping full blown biological racism in check.
But that's not the perspective that I take in this book. So instead, I try to show that it's actually precisely the changeability of the heathen that has justified all manner of colonial impositions and violence. Violence is in the name of helping or saving them. The heathen has to be changeable in order for the European colonizer or governor to claim that I am going to go over there and help them.
So in my book, I call this the get out of jail free card or ticket. And I argue that it's rationalized everything from enslavement to the takeover of other people's lands, to the separation of children from their families in the name of Christianizing changeable heathens. And I should clarify that I'm not trying to argue that saving heathens was the only or even the primary reason for European colonialism. I'm not trying to say that religious motives were more important than greed, but what I am saying is that claiming the prerogative to save changeable heathens has allowed Europeans and euro Americans to essentially give themselves the cover of righteousness for acts that were anything but. And I think that's a powerful thing to recognize.
DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you. Now when you talk about these religious frameworks as persisting in time, that's one of the key contributions of your work is that this secular way of thinking did not come in in a kind of hegemonic way push these religious frameworks out of the discourse. This ties in to a intense and perhaps intensifying debate in American-- in the study of religion generally and in American religious history specifically, about what we mean by secularization, and whether something called secularization even actually occurred.
I assume that many in our audience tonight are aware of this debate. But for those that aren't, the argument is that these secularization thesis that became so powerful in the way people thought about historical change really from the mid-20th century on when they really achieved a kind of explanatory dominance in not just American history but in all kinds of historical subfields, is that the secular way of thinking about the world, a world in which there is no recourse to anything other than rationality and empiricism was sort of inevitably taking over.
And that when it encountered religion, it inevitably won. And that the world was secularizing and the Western nations were leading this charge. This theory of secularization really has taken a beating for a variety of reasons, one of which is the rise of political expressions of religious devotion around the world that were making headlines in the 1980s and 1990s and into today, which seemed to give the lie to the idea that the world was inevitably secularizing, and that religion was being pushed out of the public square all over the world.
So that's one sort of critique of the secularization thesis. Another critique of the secularization thesis is that the version of secularization that it posits looks more like a secularist dream or fantasy than it looks like something that can be empirically proven by the historical method. And so today, a lot of scholars would argue that secularization is a kind of myth and that one of the ways that myth works is that the things that we call the secular, the things that we call secularized ideas are in fact, often repackaged modes of religious thinking.
So as you think about your work in relation to these questions of secularization and the secular, how do they speak-- how does your work speak to that issue and what does that suggest about how scholars of religion might be particularly well equipped to engage these modes of thought that we once thought were the appropriate domain of scholars dealing with other secularized sciences?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Thank you for that big question. Basically, I write in the book that the story I'm telling is not-- it's not so much one of secularization as it is one of secularism. And that's to say that it isn't about the decline of religion, but it's about the changing managements, if you will, of what counts as good and bad religion over time.
So heathen has always been a marker of bad religion, but in a kind of ironic twist, the term heathen itself becomes itself a marker of bad religion by the early 20th century. So this is in large part because of people labeled heathen who push back against the term themselves, who say this is an intolerant concept. So by the early 20th century, using the term becomes a sign of intolerance and close mindedness. So it's really only fundamentalists and other Christian conservatives who continue to use the term seriously after that.
But even though the term itself drops precipitously out of use, I argue that the ideas underlying it do not. So instead, they get transformed into other secular terms or terms that are acceptable to use in the mainstream, but that signify basically the same things. So nowadays, most Americans would not use the term heathen to describe the parts of the world that they think they need-- that they think needs saving but they do use other terms. So terms like developing world, third world, or in the crass terms of the last president, S-H-I-T hole countries. These are all terms that have come to take the place that have reoccupied the position of the heathen world.
There are also terms in religious discourse that have come to take the place of heathen. So I mean, there are definitely still groups that use the term heathen, but most large scale mission organizations now instead use terms like unreached people, or frontier people living in the 1040 window.
So in making this argument about secularism as the afterlife of religious ideas that are rendered acceptable for wider publics, I'm really indebted to scholars like Vincent Lloyd and Jonathon Kahn's book on Race and Secularism in America, and then especially also to Terence Keel's book that you put up on the slide earlier Divine Variations: How Christian Thought became Racial Science.
And I think Keel's work is an especially good example of how scholars of religion can engage racism interdisciplinary. He's got a biocritical studies Lab at UCLA that brings together scientists and humanists with community leaders. And I think that lab really shows how scholars of religion can see and help to explain these underlying continuities and patterns that help us to see and diagnose the root causes of contemporary problems.
DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you so much. Now, this question will take us back maybe half a step to something you alluded to a little bit earlier, but your book is both a study of the origins and I think it's fair to say there's a strong ethical critique that runs through it of what we might call white saviorism.
And one of the questions that this sort of critique raises maybe particularly at a place like Harvard Divinity School, is how one might contribute to the causes of caring, how does one engage in projects of social justice while avoiding the patterns of paternalism that your book so painfully documents and indicts quite frankly. And does your experience in researching this history give you any kind of purchase on how to deal with that dilemma?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, I mean, this is a really hard one because even as our research can help us to diagnose root causes, where do we go from there? What do we do with that? You probably don't remember this, but when I was an undergrad in your class, I wrote a review for a book that basically blamed Christianity itself for racism. This was Forrest Wood's, I think the title of it is that The Arrogance of Faith.
And an argument like that, that just blames Christianity for racism kind of implies a pretty simple solution, abandon Christianity because it's racist. And I remember being very frustrated by that book as a Christian who is not white because I didn't think that either the history or the solution was so straightforward.
And I think some people want my book to offer the same kind of ethical and theological judgments but that's not what I'm after. I did not write this book to indict Christianity because there are many Christianity's and what I'm interested in is how humans have interpreted and carried out what they believe to be its most important precepts. Humans have done things that are justice-oriented and things that are absolutely appalling in the name of Christianity. And Christian ideas, as we've just discussed, can be transformed into the secular sphere so that people might not even recognize when they're doing things that stem from a Christian heritage.
So it's really not easy to say what we do with this, but I will admit that pretty much every time I give a talk about my book, almost without fail, I have undergrads in particular who come up to me and ask me just that question. And many of them are interested in humanitarian work to the so-called developing world. And I write in the book that I do not want to throw cold water on their enthusiasm, nor do I think that I am in any kind of morally superior position just by being an academic who's researching this history.
I also think that there's a difference, an important difference as scholars of humanitarianism have noted between emergency assistance and interventions that try to change the way that people live. So on the one hand, of course, sending aid in the wake of catastrophic and devastating events like the earthquake in Turkey and Syria is the right thing to do. But that is-- that's different from as an example high schoolers taking a one week mission trip to somewhere in the developing world that is as much about cultivating their own sense of gratitude and helpfulness as it is about fighting inequality.
Because if anything trips like that, can perpetuate inequalities because of the very paternalistic patterns that you brought up in your question. So I mean, I guess what I love the book to do is to spur questions and conversations because I don't think there are easy answers. So maybe that is just part of the point, not resting in the easy answers, asking why we want to do what we're doing, and to what ends. I mean, I'd love to hear what you think also.
DAVID HOLLAND: I think your goal of generating questions and conversations is clearly met by the book and its reception. And I appreciate the way that you frame that as the scholars role in providing space for critical thinking as we all think about our place in the world and the contributions that we can make to it. It certainly has done that for me as the reader of it.
One of the things that I appreciate most about your work, and I think this is true actually throughout all of your work it's kind of one of your hallmarks is that you demonstrate the agent of work of those who are often harmed or marginalized by these conceptual frameworks as they repurpose them for their own objectives and can use some of this in the pursuit of recognition of their own humanity and dignity.
As you think about the complex ways in which the category of heathen have been used, and think about the ways in which those who are subjugated by it, repurpose it for their own objectives, what stands out of you is a kind of particularly interesting part of that complexity to the story?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Thank you. I mean, I think that was my favorite part of the research. Finding how people label this heathen have engaged with the term. I mean, I think, especially because this is part of my own history too, again, I come from people historically considered heathen who were Christianized by missionaries.
So there's really a range of possibilities in how people have responded to being labeled with that term. Some people who converted to Christianity pretty much accepted and adopted the term and used it to refer to their former unconverted selves and to friends, family members, and ancestors who did not adopt Christianity. And some of them even became missionaries themselves. So that's kind of one end of the range.
At the other end are people who rejected Christianity and actually end up adopting the term heathen kind of as a badge of resistance, a badge of honor against Christianity. So one of my favorite examples of this is a Chinese immigrant from the late 19th century named Wong Chin Foo. He went around the country, traveled the country as a self described Confucian missionary. Basically saying that he preferred being a heathen to a hypocritical Christian and then urging Americans to come to Confucius.
And then I guess at the middle of the range are people who might have converted to Christianity, but who did so with clear eyes who were very well aware of white racism and hypocrisy. And so these people believed that Christianity was not what white people made of it and they fought back against the white co-option of Christianity by calling white Americans heathens themselves. Like turning the phrase back on white Americans and basically indicting them for worshipping their own idols, all sorts of idols from money, to their own whiteness, and destroying the land and harming people as a result.
DAVID HOLLAND: That answer, Kathryn, underscores another characteristic feature of your work, which is, as I mentioned earlier, your sensitivity to persistence of ideas and concepts even as you recognize the perpetual reality of change. So in that answer, you indicate that the category of heathen persists but its uses can be actually completely inverted and there are powerful changes taking place in that discourse.
When you think about your attentiveness to this give and take between the things that change and the things that sort of stubbornly hold on, I'm wondering how you think about that in relation to this question about whether things are getting better or things are-- or are not. I think as historians, we're constantly sort of on the horns of this dilemma that if you demonstrate the ways in which the world changes for the better, that you're undermining the moral bite of the critique, or if you emphasize the ways in which things don't change, that you demoralize the process of engagement.
And this is sort of a personal question, probably a unfair or a selfish one. But because you are, for me, sort of exemplary of a sensitive scholar who understands that some things change and some things don't, and these things are in constant complicated relation to one another, how do you approach that?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I mean, I don't have a good answer for that. It feels like it changes for me based on-- I fully admit that I am influenced by what's happening in the present. I am present in that way. And it changes for me based on what's happening in the present, absolutely. And so in writing this book, I was finishing it when the COVID pandemic started.
And so even if I might have felt one way while I was writing most of the book, to be finishing it in that climate, particularly in a climate of anti-Asian hostility, it was-- I titled my epilogue-- I think I titled the more things change and the last line of the book was going to be the more things change, the more they stay the same, but I was told that was too cliched so I just came up with some paraphrase for it. That's a really tough one. So I think it just changes for me as I write and engage with the world that we're in.
DAVID HOLLAND: What I love about your work, Kathryn, is I think that we're at our best intellectually and as people concerned with civic engagement, when we live in the tension of those two realities, that change is possible, but some kind of naive triumphalist narrative of progress is counterproductive. And when work like yours reminds us of the intransigence of these structures of injustice and oppression that we exist among. And also, that change is a perpetual reality and that human beings have been the agents of change for good and ill.
When we live in the tension and we're caught at the convergence of those competing truths, but a book like yours helps us illuminate that element of the human condition, and both tempers us when we get naively triumphalist, and also encourages us when we get discouraged. And I appreciate a work of history that's attentive to that complexity that allows us to position ourselves in relation to those two realities that we deal with.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I appreciate that very much.
DAVID HOLLAND: So this is sort of maybe a good place to segue to the particular questions of slavery and its relationship to the persistent institutions of American life, including a place like Harvard University which is really the context, in which these series of conversations are playing out.
The report that all of us have read and agonized over and tried to make sense of and thought about our own current institutional realities in relation to does exactly what your work does, which is to remind us of just how deeply entrenched these legacies of white supremacy have been and continue to be. And also, that history is never fully static. That we are part of the process of change and we have the choice to determine the course of this institution just as those who came before us determined the course of it in previous generations in ways that we now lament or in a few occasions, wish were more influential than they were.
So maybe we can kind of shift to think about the particular issue of American slavery and how it relates to your work, and then think about some of the institutional legacies that we live with. Slavery comes up recurrently in your book and that is to be expected. There would be no way to address the topic without a prominent place for slavery.
I was struck that when you for instance when you address Spanish colonization, you very thoughtfully engage a variety of implications for the concept of heathen for what that Western hemisphere slavery looked like. There was an intense debate between those like Sepúlveda, who believed that the concept of heathenism as applied to Indigenous Americans justified a really harsh and brutalizing form of colonial control as expressed in systems of enslavement. And to use your phrase, the demon-- or Sepúlveda's phrase that you use skillfully employed to kind of illustrate his position, the demon of heathenism required a kind of forcible suppression and slavery was a means to that end.
You contrast that to people like Bartolomé de Las Casas who believed that the idea that heathenism actually should limit that brutalizing colonial approach because conversion was possible, because that change that we've been talking about was intrinsic to Native souls. And you point out in your discussion that this debate about the enslavement of Indigenous Americans has implications for the ways in which American colonizers address the question of African slavery. Could you speak for a minute about those two different versions of the kind of heathen conception and what that means for American slavery?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah. So long before Sepúlveda and Las Casas were engaging with these questions in the 16th century, the European theologians were debating whether heathens were basically innocents who lacked access to the gospel, but who had some access to the truth or whether they were basically demonic and guilty reprobates who needed to be harshly dealt with.
So those who argued that heathens were demonic and guilty justified their position by looking to the Israelites treatment of the Canaanites in the Bible, where enslavement and extermination were supposed to be just punishment for their idolatry. And those who saw heathens as innocents on the other hand took a more kind of New Testament outlook, kind of missionizing outlook based in the Great Commission to go into the world and make disciples of all nations.
So Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda basically takes that first position and he adds to it an Aristotelian spin. So Aristotle believed that some humans were in his view naturally inferior and needed the help of superior humans to basically become less "barbarous". So for Aristotle, these inferior humans were natural slaves and their enslavement was just because they could not be trusted to fend for themselves.
So Sepúlveda argues that Indigenous Americans basically fit into Aristotle's framework of natural slaves. He said that they could end that they should be enslaved because they were in his words, impious servants of the devil, and that enslavement could convert them to becoming believers in the true God, and that's also his words. Now he made these claims without spending any time in the Americas.
Bartolomé de Las Casas on the other hand witnessed and actually participated in horrific violences against Native populations in the Caribbean. So his experience led him to take the opposite stance from Sepúlveda. So instead of seeing Native people as devil worshippers, he described them as gentle lambs. Basically, innocents who are only heathens because they'd never been exposed to the gospel. So for Las Casas, Native people needed gentle missionizing and not violent enslavement.
But Las Casas then made a move that was consequential for the development of slavery in the Americas. So even as he defended Native people against enslavement, he argued for the enslavement of African people to meet the labor needs of the colonists. So African people were also held to be unbelievers who could be rightfully enslaved, but for Las Casas and for others, there was a key difference between African and Indigenous Americans. And that was in their ability or their inability to claim Limpieza de Sangre or purity of blood.
So here I'm really drawing on the work of Maria Elena Martinez in Genealogical Fictions and she also has an article on this called the Black Blood of New Spain. So Limpieza de Sangre was a system that emerged from the Spanish Inquisition's attempts to basically force out Jews and Muslims and Jewish and Muslim practices from Spain. So in order to claim blood purity, there could be no Jews or Muslims in people's ancestry as far back as they could trace.
So because African people came from a "old world context" and had been exposed to and sometimes converted to Islam, they could not claim Limpieza de Sangre in the way that Native people in the Americas could, who had no prior exposure to Judaism or Islam. And so they could and they did sometimes try to claim Limpieza as did their descendants.
So this is an important context for understanding how someone like Las Casas could argue against the enslavement of Indigenous people but then argue for the enslavement of African people in the Americas. And of course, this isn't to say that enslavement of Indigenous people disappeared in the Americas because it clearly did not. Others also take up Sepúlveda's position later on including people in New England as Jorge Canizares-Esguerra has described in his book Puritan Conquistadors, there's actually a lot of similarities between the ways that English and Spanish colonization projects transpire.
DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you. That's a really helpful answer in relation to your overarching argument of this binary, which posits a world of heathen and a world of Christians, in a world that by empirical evidence, Europeans have to recognize is much more complex than that binary allows for. And the ways in which that internal discourse of heathenism makes allowance for that diversity and the reality that histories of slavery have their own distinctive trajectory and reality based on the ways in which that system of thought categorized the particular populations that were under colonial oppression.
So it would've been easy for your book to simply rest confidently in that binary framework, but you demonstrate the complexity that swirls beneath it, the reality of human diversity that colonizers had to deal with whether they wanted to or not, and the brutalizing consequences of some of the choices they made in response to them.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, a very elastic and flexible category. And that's why I came up with this idea of the get out of jail free card that it can be used to accommodate different kinds of circumstances.
DAVID HOLLAND: Which helps account for its persistence. It is elastic enough to meet the evolving needs of a colonial project, and therefore, its usefulness remains even as other modes of knowledge evolve. So it might be helpful for our audience I presume that there could be questions, and maybe this gets back to your heathen selling image.
But if heathenism is this important force in driving systems of enslavement, how do you handle conversion and retain slavery? And what are the implications of that elasticity and allowing systems of enslavement to persist even as Christianization has its own history in relation to it?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: That's such an important question. And I want to re highlight Katharine Gerbner's book on Christian slavery that you mentioned earlier, which is really devoted to answering exactly this problem. So initially as Gerbner has shown, Anglo Protestants excluded enslaved people from Christian evangelization, and from church membership because they believed that Christians could not and should not be enslaved. So they wanted to keep enslaved people heathen as a rationale for continuing to hold them under slavery.
So this changes for several reasons. And the first I highlight is the agency of enslaved people themselves. That enslaved people were interested in Christianity on their own terms and they interpreted scripture differently from white enslavers. They sought to practice and to participate in Protestant rituals like baptism and the Lord's Supper as Gerbner shows.
And then another reason for this shift is the arrival of missionaries. Quaker, Moravian, and Anglican missionaries and of the Anglo Protestant colonies who basically articulate what Gerbner calls a rationale for Christian slavery. A justification for slavery as a Christianizing institution. So what they do is they try to reassure enslavers that Christianizing enslaved people will actually make them better laborers rather than requiring their manumission.
And so this justification then gets picked up by later apologists of enslavement in the 19th century, like the Minister Charles Colcock Jones. So Jones argues that slavery was designed by God to teach enslaved heathens Christianity, and then Jones basically articulates an understanding of Christian slavery where it is necessary for enslavers to paternalisticly maintain enslaved people in the faith instead of freeing them once they were baptized.
So here's where that heathen ceiling comes into play. It's not that conversion just suddenly makes the heathen into the Christian, it's that, well, these people who have been historically heathen for so long, we cannot expect that Christianization would so quickly make them able to traverse that ceiling. And so it's going to take a long time to instruct them in all of these ways. And so this is this paternalistic defense of enslavement as a Christian institution.
For Jones, slavery itself basically ends up baptized as a Christian institution. Of course, enslaved people knew and showed this to be an absolute lie. So as we discussed earlier, those who have been labeled heathen flipped the term around and this was very much the case in arguments against slavery.
So David Walker, a Boston abolitionist who was born in North Carolina to a free mother and an enslaved father says that it's white Americans who are heathens or are actually worse than heathens because they're practicing a form of slavery that's infinitely worse than that found in the Bible. And Frederick Douglass just absolutely scoffs at the idea that slavery is a Christian and a Christianizing institution. Where he says, how can white Christians spend loads of money on the so-called heathen overseas while neglecting what he calls the heathen at their own doors. It's again, this interesting ways in which this term can be used back and forth.
DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you very much. We do want to reserve time for questions from the audience, but maybe if we can just fit in one final question for you, Kathryn, that gets us to Harvard specific context. I noted that Harvard University appears a few different places in the book. In the early period, for instance, you have the Harvard-trained minister Nicholas Noyes who takes it upon himself to defend the convertibility to malleability of Native American souls against his European counterparts, other observers who were skeptical of the proselytizing project in the New England colonies.
You also note William Ernest Hocking who was a Harvard anthropologist in the 1930s, who compiled a landmark report titled Rethinking Missions and this really speaks directly to your point about how the term changes and becomes a marker of bad religion in the early 20th century. You see Hocking his work at Harvard as a marker of the process by which the language of heathenism lost its currency and academic discourse.
Remarkably, though, if I've got my timing right, you can correct me if I didn't get this right, but I think it's a decade later, a decade after Hocking sort of demonstrates the way in which the concept of heathenism is losing its academic respectability when there's another Harvard anthropologist William White Howells who publishes a book of comparative religion titled The Heathens: Primitive Man and His Religions. Now I wasn't quite sure if he was doing that somewhat ironically or not, but regardless the title is the title. And that book was reprinted with that title as late as 1986, which is one of the more remarkable bits of information from that portion of the book.
Now, Howells was the curator of Harvard's Peabody Museum for many years and you may or may not be aware, Kathryn, that here at Harvard, we're in the middle of a soul searching reckoning with the practices of the Peabody Museum including the recognition that tens of thousands of human bodies are in the possession of the museum. And as a community, we're wrestling with the pain of that recognition and the moral and ethical responsibilities that come with it for how we might pursue some redress for the terrible injustices and violence that this institution has been complicit in.
And so Howells' role as curator of that museum and the fact that he used some of these human remains to make an argument for relative human equality underscores the complexity of this history that we're dealing with. You note that his book titled The Heathens demonstrates a legacy of thinking about heathenism that is not as progressed or advanced as even he believed it to be at the time. That it retains many of these persistent older ways of thinking.
You quote a passage that reads as follows, and I'll conclude my question with this and allow you to speak before we transition to the audience questions. Howells writes, "The anthropologist first duty is toward illiterate people who are unable to keep their own history and thus hoist themselves up into the realm of self criticism. Anthropology must do this for them." This is the academic version of the white saviorism that runs throughout your book.
You see in a passage like this a continuing sense of white Christian supremacy. Can you just in conclusion here elaborate on how that sense of religious superiority continued to affect religious studies discourse as in the case of Howells or anthropological discourse in the case of Howells? Long after academic fields like his and institutions like Harvard had purportedly left this discourse behind.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I mean it's not just religious studies and anthropology but history too. As I argue in this book and also in a spinoff article, heathens were thought to be people who never developed in history because they supposedly wasted their time worshipping false gods in nature instead of creating new technologies to domesticate it. And so they were thought to be incapable of keeping their own history, which is what that quote from Howells alludes to.
But in the last chapter of my, book I also discuss several scholars who offer counter scripts to religious studies into Western science's treatment of other than Christian people. So I talk about Charles Long and Vine Deloria. Long in Significations and Deloria in God is Red who both criticize the rational Western intellectual tradition as Long puts it for blinding us to an adequate appreciation of the diversity of the human. So deloria indicts Western religious thinkers and Western science for rejecting a priori many thoughtful and useful systems of belief of ancient people.
So basically, as we've seen the development of these disciplines, African and Indigenous American epistemologies have long been silenced and ignored, their histories have been sidelined as myth, but thankfully, I think this is changing although I think still the lack of Indigenous studies and Africana studies positions in many religious studies departments is telling of the ways that the discipline still needs to evolve.
DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you so much. Let's turn to our audience then. And I think Diane and Melissa will help moderate that part of the conversation.
DIANE MOORE: We will. And there are lots of good questions here. I think we want to just jump in quickly to just maybe follow up with a few of the many incredibly rich threads that you both have woven here in this conversation. I want to just-- I want to pick up on what you just were speaking about, Kathryn and David, relevant to the study of religion itself, which is indicted in all of these questions. And that's what your articulation has made really prominent. Not exclusively Christianity, but the way that the study of religion itself evolved.
So part of my question then is relevant to what you were just talking about, what are the particular gifts relevant to the study of religion, different than anthropology different than, if you think there are, then history, that can not only just illuminate the power of the binary that religion Christianity particularly has been so powerfully indicted in constructing? But is there anything in the study of religion that can help us deconstruct that binary relevant to the complexities of what it means to really move beyond the binaries themselves of oppressed and oppressor? Which is another dimension of what you've illuminated here so beautifully.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I don't want to be the one answering all the questions. I don't know, David, if you want to jump in first maybe.
DAVID HOLLAND: Well, I'd love to hear from you, but I will just offer maybe a provisional answer to that, which is that religious studies is I think of all the humanistic disciplines the most self reflective about the genealogies that has inherited as its structures of investigation and analysis.
So I mean, this sometimes is a source of some navel gazing and preoccupation with our own disciplinary histories, but what it does is it provides a kind of language of critique that perpetually invites us to analyze our disciplinary inheritances. I think about a book like Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religion and the ability to look at that religious studies discourse as an instrument of coloniality.
And we have I think developed discursive capacity to bring our own assumptions into the hard light today. Now, it's the assumptions you don't notice that are the dangerous ones so this is an ongoing project and we always run the risk of becoming self satisfied with wherever we are in that process. But I think as a discipline, we're particularly attuned to the necessity of that process.
And I think Kathryn's book is illustrative of it when it concludes with somebody like Howells who thinks he's advancing the sort of self-awareness of the discipline and in fact, is still harboring so much of that previous pattern of thought that he was advocating against. This is the kind of disciplinary habit that I think we are especially attuned to and I think that gives religious studies a kind of experience and habit of mind that is really useful for engaging the very sorts of [? bastoles ?] that Kathryn's book highlights.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: So I agree with that and I'll just add not about my book, but about the discipline. Thank you, David. I would just add to that I think that for me, religious studies-- I was trained as a historian all the way through actually. All of my degrees are in history. But what's been really freeing and exciting for me about religious studies is the ways that some people in the discipline are asking these really hard normative questions and trying to think about how to answer them interdisciplinary.
In my book, I don't really do that. The book is primarily a history but a book like Willie James Jennings' The Christian Imagination is not just a history but it's also political theology in a sense. It's offering ways forward and I have increasingly been in conversation with political theologians. I'm actually working on an Initiative with Vincent Lloyd, who I mentioned earlier called across the normative divide where theologians and ethicists who are thinking about issues of religion, race, and justice and historians who are doing the same are trying to talk to each other and figure out exactly how we can address these kinds of questions that you raised.
DAVID HOLLAND: Diane, if I could just follow up on that. Since Kathryn a little bit earlier referenced Terrence Keel's work, I mean, one of the points that Terrence Keel makes is that racism is a system of belief, and it persists in much the same ways that systems of belief that we recognize as religious persist.
And so the tools by which we analyze these systems of belief are applicable to the very sources of white supremacy, these kind of dogged retentions of notions of human hierarchy that fly in the face of scientific evidence. They are subject to the very tools that have been sharpened to address other forms of belief that constitute the subject matter of religious studies.
DIANE MOORE: Great. Thank you. Thank you. Excellent.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I'm just so appreciative, David, of you and Kathryn for this conversation. And I have a question that it alludes to what you covered earlier. It's not a question that has an easy answer, but I want to just-- I want us to grapple with it together. And it's the understanding of the reality that these ideas persist.
Kathryn, we talked about the fact that heathen is a term that without a vogue and then just we continue to-- they morph into other terms that just speak to the same underlying ideas and beliefs. And David, you mentioned, just not too long ago, about the pattern, the habit, the habit of thought. So my question is as students of religion, as scholars of religion, as ministers, Professor King last week reminded us of accountability and we are to be-- we're accountable to this history.
So my question is, how do we get from under these ideas? How do we break these patterns of thought? I mean, how do we-- because the reality is, these ideas, these beliefs are embedded within our culture and actually are embedded within us and embedded within in our psyche. So how do we get up from under the weight of these ideas and these beliefs because if we don't, we're going to be here 50 years from now or another group of scholars would be here 50 years now, talking about the same thing but they'll be a different frame that we'll be talking about.
And then, Kathryn, I love the fact that you highlight the-- what did you say? Oh, the demon. The demon of heathenism. We got to address the demon. How do we address the demon? How do we address the demon? And then the last thing you said before we transition to the questions when you start talking about you referenced Charles Long, and Vine Deloria and the importance of attention to African and Indigenous epistemologies. And I think that that's like an entry point for us to consider as a response to how we actually get to the heart of the matter and break these vicious cycles of thought.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Thank you for that. I think that's exactly right. I mean I think that the first thing to do to break these patterns of thought is to recognize them, to expose them, to understand them for what they are and where they came from. But then yes, the last chapter of my book is called counter scripts and it is exactly about people who are trying to generate these counter scripts who are trying to identify and to push back against these patterns.
So Long, Deloria, Sylvester Johnson also whom I mentioned, both as kind of a scholar who's informed my work but also in this chapter becomes almost a kind of source that I'm thinking with as well, particularly in his first book, The Myth of Ham where he articulates a sense of writing from the underside of history and identifying with the Canaanites, because I think for so long in American history, there's this identification with the Israelites from multiple groups. And so Johnson encourages us to think about how we might see these histories from different angles, how we might break the patterns by doing that.
DAVID HOLLAND: In some ways it speaks directly, Melissa, to Kathryn's comment about how religious studies and maybe particularly at Divinity School differs from other academic disciplines like history. Like Kathryn, all my degrees are in history. We share that in common. And I would say that most academic disciplines, including religious studies are a lot better at diagnosis than they are at prescription.
They're primarily-- it's the nature of the Western academy to sharpen these diagnostic tools, but we tend to kind of lose our footing when we begin to prescribe solutions. And I think to some degree, there is value in recognizing the limits of the traditional academic disciplines as prescriptive instruments. That we have a kind of division of labor here and part of what we do in the academy is to diagnose, to name, to expose, to do the things that Kathryn's book does so well.
But part of that can also be, even if we ourselves don't feel particularly well equipped to propose solutions to these deeply embedded problems, we can as Kathryn's final chapter does, provide space for those who do and for the wide array of human endeavor that is prescriptive rather than diagnostic. And so we provide the tools, the diagnostic tools by which those who are envisioning new futures can address what they've inherited and move on to something better.
And we need to do that-- part of that process we need to do our job well and seriously and devotedly and be serious to our students who are going to go on and change the world.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I was just thinking that, David, because we are training students to go into the world to address and to try to impact change and to care about practices. So both projects are so relevant for us. Thank you both.
DIANE MOORE: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I just want to-- we're going to turn to a couple of questions if we've got time. I just want to underscore something that I think is really obvious, but I think it's important to name, which is that the scholarship that Kathryn has been the heart of this conversation and frankly, that informs this entire series is that it is embedded in normative prescriptions of assumption that inequality is problematic, is wrong, and that there's some hope for transforming these social systems.
And I just want to be clear about it because the other I think fog that can happen in the academy is that there's something neutral about our work and it's not neutral. No work is. No academic or educational work is ever neutral. And I think naming the lens through which we do that work and the judgments we make and the heart of the foundation of those judgments I think is really, really important, and your book does that so powerfully. So thank you.
I'm going to turn to-- partly because we have hundreds of people from across the world representing a variety of different religious perspectives, traditions, so I'm going to turn to John Templeton's question. How does the heathen binary show up in other world religions? Obviously, the major religions, Islam comes to mind but potentially, other more local religious traditions with respect to Islam in particular, I wonder how race factors into this binary?
It's a complicated question, I know, to put to both of you but can you help us with the kind of implications around this perspective of binary and heathen and its impact on the way we think about and have shaped other "world religions" I think would be a really helpful to hear your thoughts on that.
DAVID HOLLAND: Can I go, Kathryn?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Go for it.
DAVID HOLLAND: Well, I'll just-- it's a terrific question and partly this will be a cop out that part of what it means to be a historian is to be trained in particular geographical context. And so I would be hesitant to speak too confidently about things beyond my expertise. But I will note that one of the distinguishing features of the Christian conversation about human difference is its universalizing frame, which means that it is by its own remit obligated to convert the world.
And what that means is that those that are on the converted side of that division have a particular relationship to those who are, to use Kathryn's version of the kind of modernized phrasing of heathenism, the unreached. And so any cosmology that is universalizing and conversionary to that extent is going to I think share similar conceptual patterns to-- not reducing these things to their similarities but to the extent that universalizing tendencies drive some of this where you find that universalizing, you're likely to find some of this same kind of dynamic.
What we see in many other cultures and many other religious traditions is a deeply particularizing view of humanity, which accepts that other people have other origin stories and other people have other cultural frames, and there isn't the same universalizing expectation. And I think that particular understanding of humanity comes with very different implications with regard to a kind of binary conception of the world.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, I would-- the only thing I would add to that is that the book is by necessity, limited in scope. And so there's a lot that it doesn't cover and I hope that people ask these questions and explore these questions outside of the framework that I was looking at, which is primarily about the American history of thinking in these binary terms. And that's not at all to say that people in other contexts don't always-- don't also tend to think in binary terms as well. So I think that-- I very much welcome other scholarship on those subjects.
DIANE MOORE: OK. Great. We have time for maybe for one more question. Melissa, go ahead. But the answer will have to be very short because we're almost against time.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: OK. So this question comes from Demetrius Nelson. Would you say that Protestant or Catholicism used heathen labeling to warrant enslavement? Would you say that there were certain denominations within the Protestant faith that used heathen labeling more because it helped to advance the underlying white supremacy saviorism?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: So that's a really interesting question. So I don't know that I would say that in my research I encountered particular denominations using the term more than other denominations, but I definitely encountered Protestants using the term against Catholics, and Catholics using the term against Protestants. And so this again speaks to kind of the elasticity of the concept where it could be used to label anyone whose way of being religious did not align with one's own.
So Protestants for instance, claimed that Catholics were not sufficiently separated from the Roman pagan past. And so that then the people that they evangelized also had not fully separated from a kind of pagan past. And that therefore, Catholics were still practicing certain things that to Protestants seemed heathen and so they needed to be converted as well. So it becomes this politicized term that can be really used in multiple contexts
DIANE MOORE: Great. Well, with that we are going to have to close. There are so many more excellent questions and so much more to say but we can't thank you enough, Professors Holland and Lum. A really incredible conversation illuminating on so many spheres. And really again, that the heart of really what it means to ask self-reflective questions not only of our own discipline but self-reflective questions that then open up pathways to challenge the persistence of those binaries I think is a really critical gift that you've given us to move forward.
So I want to thank you both again for this really rich conversation. I really want to thank our colleagues behind the scenes who have made this whole series possible. There are legions of them and we couldn't be doing this without you. And I want to thank all of you who have joined us tonight. Thank you for your presence, for your patience, for your excellent questions. I hope that you will ponder and talk with others about what you've heard here knowing that some of it is very maybe difficult and disturbing to hear.
Certainly, hopefully, illuminating but please do make sure to share your reflections with others as you ponder the implications of these conversations. And please do join us next week as we continue our series on February 13 with Professor Dan McKanan, who will be speaking on Harvard Divinity School and slavery family stories. Thank you again for being with us and we look forward to seeing you next week. Good night.
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SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.