Heathen: Religion and Race in American History Unavailable

This is a fantastic book. In a sweeping history of religion and race in the United States, Kathryn Gin Lum's Heathen offers an elegant narrative that succeeds as both archivally compelling revisionism and stunning synthesis. It deserves a wide readership and will likely direct conversations in the historiography of religion and race for the foreseeable future. Lum's primary intervention convincingly rejects what she calls “the replacement narrative”: the belief that the dawning of modernity caused racism to displace religious understandings of difference. Historians like Rebecca A. Goetz, Richard A. Bailey, and Katherine Gerbner have shown how Anglo-Protestants drew established religious hierarchies that developed into white supremacy. Some scholars, most notably the historian George Fredrickson and sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant have gone further, seeing religious bigotry as a teleological prelude to racism. Lum resoundingly succeeds in showing the persistence and malleability of religious frameworks in both maintaining and resisting...