This book review was originally published in Sojourners on October 12, 2022.
Kathryn Gin Lum’s Heathen: Religion and Race in American History evoked feelings of a past that continues to haunt me. I grew up in the “mission field” of the southern Philippines, surrounded by white Americans who dedicated their lives to missions and charity work.
When Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged our villages and cities in 2013 and took the lives of over 6,000 Filipinos, I remember when American missionaries arrived to help us. They watched the violent results of climate change in the Philippines as dead bodies, demolished homes, and damaged landscapes surrounded them. They said they were “sorry” for all the death and destruction that the “bad weather” caused while completely disregarding the correlation between the climate crisis and imperialism. At that moment, I witnessed the tragic history Lum describes in her work and how it continues to hurt many Indigenous communities today.
Heathen exposes how contemporary missionaries and missiologists colonized lands and designated Indigenous people as “heathens” in order to justify their conquest. Though the term heathen may have fallen out of common usage in the early 1900s, Lum argues that the idea continues to exist today.