Mission, with Kathryn Gin Lum
About the Guest
Kathryn Gin Lum is a historian of religion and race in America. Her books include Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction and Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Christian Century. She is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, at Stanford University.
Best Books
Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, by Kathryn Gin Lum.
The World and All the Things upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, by David A. Chang.
Transcript
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I'm both the us and the them, right?
So I was raised in this conservative Christian tradition to believe I was so fortunate to have been born into a Christian family in the United States. You know, if my family had not come from China to the United States, I might have been in, quote-unquote, “heathen China,” growing up as a heathen. And in the book, I write that “childhood me” could be a primary source for “historian me,” and actually, you know, “adult me”—I could still be a primary source for myself.
These ideas are ongoing. They continue to inform the ways Americans think about the world and think about themselves. And I'm part of that story.
BLAIR HODGES: You won't hear the word "heathen" very often today. Christians originally used it to describe unbelievers, people who clung to the old gods out in the wilderness. But Christians also thought they could detect heathen unbelief on people's bodies, by the color of their skin, or the shape of their landscapes. Race and religion became intertwined.
Over time, people became less comfortable using the term, it sounded harsh and judgmental and xenophobic. But even though the word itself has been mostly erased from White Christian vocabulary, the troubling ideas behind it have persisted, and spread beyond religion.
Kathryn Gin Lum outlines this history in her book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. She joins us to talk about it in this episode.
Quotation marks – 01:33
BLAIR HODGES: Kathryn Gin Lum, welcome to Fireside with Blair Hodges.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Thank you so much for having me.
BLAIR HODGES: And we're talking about your new book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.
I want to begin with your “Note on Terms.” This is a page at the beginning of your book, and it says you chose not to put words like “heathen” and “pagan” in quotation marks for the most part. It's a little disclaimer here that seems simple enough, but I think it actually says a lot about the history you're about to tell, because you're going to use those terms a lot throughout the book—a history of how people have used heathen as an identity label. So let's talk about that note on terms, and the power of punctuation. What does it mean, to not put it in quotation marks?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, thank you for asking me that. Nobody has asked me that so far, actually. You know, I started off, when I was writing this book, putting heathen and pagan in quotes, because these are obviously terms that nowadays people see as problematic, right? They're very problematic terms, unless you're using them in the context of neopaganism, or neoheathenism, for instance. So I was doing that.
But then, as you note, obviously, the term has come up repeatedly in a book with the title Heathen. And so it was just getting difficult to parse which uses of those terms were my uses of those terms, and which were quotes. And so I decided, pretty early on actually in the writing of this, that it was just too clunky to keep doing that. So I would just include a note right up front.
So, you know, in early chapter drafts, that would be like footnote number one in the chapter draft, it would say, “For the sake of textual clarity, I'm not going to put these terms in quotes when I use them. Tthey will obviously be in quotes when they come from sources, and it should not be taken to mean uncritical uses of those terms. Like, clearly, they're problematic, and I'm not intending to use them, not as such. So that's a great question.
BLAIR HODGES: Right. It reminds me in disability studies, for example, there are terms like “idiot,” which is an old old term, and also a newer term, like “retarded,” which are now seen as problematic. Idiots has kind of lost that, people kind of have forgotten that it was connected to intellectual disabilities. But with retarded, that's, you know, that's a slur still. And so in disability studies I've seen a similar disclaimer where people say, you know, “we're going to be using this when we're quoting people, and when we're talking about the historical context, because that's the word that was used. But we're not going to keep throwing that quotation mark.”
But I think it really does speak to the power of quotation marks as this marker of, “I understand, and I'm using this word deliberately.”
Another word is the word, "White". And you note that you're going to capitalize that in a lot of cases, talk a little bit about that decision as well, because race is a central theme to this book.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, yes. So that was a decision that I really gave a lot of thought to, and kind of went back and forth on and, you know, the capitalization of White is obviously a problematic thing, because that has been coopted—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it could seem like honorific or something. “White Power” or something.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Exactly, Exactly, and that is not at all how I am or why I am doing that.
So in the note on terms, I reference an article by Nell Painter on why White should be capitalized too, and the argument she makes there—and others have made it as well—is that capitalizing White has the effect of showing Whiteness as a racial category. Not capitalizing White makes it seem like an unmarked. normative category against which every other group is raced. And it has a jarring effect, I think, capitalizing White has a kind of jarring effect, to mark it as a racial group, right. And that's really part of the project of this book, is to think about Whiteness as a racial category. And to mark it as such. And so that's the reason why I did that.
Not, again, not at all to give it any sort of like, honorific designation, but to simply say yes, Whiteness is a racial category, and it needs to be studied seriously as such.
“The Mission Connection” and Gin Lum’s background – 05:18
BLAIR HODGES: You had to do a lot of thinking about that. And you know, scholars today really are very aware that they're writing from their own perspectives. They come from a particular perspective, racial background, gender, sexual orientation, all kinds of things.
Let's begin with your background a little bit. And you do this in the book by introducing us to a little musical that I had never heard of. It's kind of this thing that—I think Christian communities would kind of put on this little play about missionizing the world. So tell us a little bit about your background and a little bit about that play.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, there's a long history to Christian communities putting on shows, plays, having children dress up as so-called heathens. Hillary Kaell’s book on it, I think it's called Christian Globalism at Home, gets into that history a bit.
But yes, so I grew up in a conservative Christian tradition. And I was in this play when I was, I think it was probably seven. I don't know, sometime in my elementary school years, I was in this play called "The Mission Connection." And the play is about quote, unquote, “All-American kids,” he actually uses the term All-American kids, who get on board a train called the Jesus Express that goes throughout the world to evangelize people who need the gospel.
So the play itself doesn't use the term heathen because by the 1990s—which is I think when I was in the play, again that term had basically fallen out of use. So one of the claims that my book makes is even though we no longer use the term, the ideas are still very much there.
BLAIR HODGES: Right.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: So the play follows a missionary named Miss Tionary. It's—yeah, she has this solo and it's very—she has a father named Dick Tionary, her mother's name is Stace Tionary. I really wanted to be Miss Tionary, did not get that part. I was instead cast as a Native American. And yeah, the stereotypes and the tropes in this musical are pretty appalling.
So I actually ended up buying a copy of the musical as I was working on the book, it was still available, and going through it again, was just—yeah. [laughs] It was an experience.
BLAIR HODGES: It strikes me that you were chosen—so was it predominantly a white Christian community that you were part of?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: So were you—do you think you received that role because of your race as well? Like, there's this awkward thing that of like, “Well, we can't make her Miss Tionary.” I don't think anyone would say that explicitly. But did you kind of—do you get that sense?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I mean, when I was a child, I, you know, “I guess I just have a bad singing voice!” But, it's quite possible, right? It's quite possible.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So in this musical, the other thing I think is interesting is that it's a train, like it's going around the world, but it's this very localized sort of American frontier idea of this train, which you might run into some problems when you're trying to go overseas on a train. [laughter]
KATHRYN GIN LUM: It's a good point, good point. The Jesus Express. Yeah, it's very nineteenth century in many ways, right? Like, the train is kind of the symbol of American technological progress. There are images in this musical too that I thought about, I tried to include in the book but ran into some permissions issues there with the publisher of the musical, you know, basically not wanting me to include images in a book. But yeah, it was it was interesting.
BLAIR HODGES: It is. So this kind of kicks off the book, where you're positioning yourself as a scholar of religion, but also someone who came up through a conservative Christian tradition and someone who, you're not a white person in America, you're coming at this from a different perspective there as well.
So you position us really well to understand this history of the word heathen, and how, as you said, it's kind of fallen out of use, but it's also very—the ideas behind it continue to persist. Let's go back to the beginning of that word, heathen.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, no problem. I mean, maybe I can also just kind of comment that, you know, as you talk about my “positionality.” I write about myself in the introduction, as I'm both the us and the them, right? So I was raised in this conservative Christian tradition to believe that I was blessed, I was saved, and to believe that I was so fortunate to have been born into a Christian family in the United States.
Whereas if I had, you know, my family had not come from China to the United States, I might have been in, quote unquote, “heathen China” growing up as a heathen, ending up in eternal damnation. And so as a child that was always kind of something I struggled with and thought about.
And in the book, I write that childhood me could be a primary source for historian me and actually, you know, adult me, I could still be a primary source for myself. Like, these are still questions that I am grappling with, that I'm thinking about, you know? This is important to me. And you know, like I write in the book, these ideas are ongoing, they continue to inform the ways that Americans think about the world and think about themselves. And I'm part of that story, right? I don't want to set myself up as, you know, somebody who's above this story or has moved beyond it in any way. I'm part of it. Absolutely.
BLAIR HODGES: The Christian part, as well? Do you still practice Christianity in some sense as well?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I do. Yeah.
The origins of the term “heathen” – 10:01
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Toward the end of the interview I really want to dig into the conclusion of the book. [laughs] I don't want to give any spoilers now, but stick around people because there's some very interesting stuff at the end of the conversation. But thank you for giving us that perspective of where you're writing from.
And let's talk about heathens. This is a word, as you mentioned, that has fallen out of out of use, it's generally seen as an offensive word, but the ideas behind it persist. That's your main argument as you show throughout the book. So let's go back to the beginning of when heathen was born at all. What did this mean originally? Where did it even come from?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: The term heathen is like an Anglo Germanic translation of the Latin pagan, paganus, which referred to the people who dwelled in the countryside, essentially, and failed to adopt the new religion of Christianity. So they're the country dwellers who continue to worship the Greco Roman deities.
The term heathen is again a kind of rough translation of that. And the root of the term heathen is the heath. So it's understood to refer to those people who are wanderers in the heath, those Anglo Germanic tribes who continue to worship, you know, Thor, Odin, et cetera. And so, the origin of the term, it's really a European kind of concept to distinguish between, first of all those Romans who didn't accept Christianity, and then those Europeans who didn't accept Christianity. And then as Europeans realize there are other people in the world, the term heathen then has to kind of stretch to encompass people from different parts of the world.
BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so heathen pertained not only to—I would think it's kind of about beliefs, but it's also like, they don't have the right beliefs, right? So as you said they worship the old gods. But it was also tied to location—where they were, kind of on the margins, to the language that they had, to—maybe even to the nature of their intelligence itself. Maybe this kind of country bumpkin vibe, right? Or like, hicks out in the sticks kind of thing, these pagans that are just maybe undereducated or stupid.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: So it talks about religious belief and practice, but also location and intelligence. And then race gets tied up into this. Talk about how that started to happen.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, so as you know, one of the arguments is the continuity and the lasting significance of the term. But really, one of the other central arguments of the book is that this category of the heathen is really important to how we understand racialization and the ways in which the racial “other” is formed.
So, as you note, heathenness is understood to be this quality that is about wrong belief. But wrong belief is never just an interior status, it manifests in many ways. And it's understood to manifest in the ways that so-called heathens take care of, or failed to take care of the lands that they live on. And then it's also understood to manifest on their bodies. So their failure to take care of their bodies.
So, heathenness is thought to be a kind of changeable characteristic, right? So the heathens are people who are backwards, who are needy, who don't know how to take care of themselves. And therefore that sets up the Christian as the person who can come in and save them. And in terms of the ways in which hedonism connects to race, some scholars have seen race as a quality that is understood to be innate, right? So it's the social construction of human hierarchies based on innate human difference, something that's supposed to be, you know, read on the skin, it's supposed to be visible and phenotypical.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, so color, head shape, body shape.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Exactly, yeah, exactly. And so scholars who adhere to this kind of understanding of race see heathenism as not a fully racial concept because heathenism is changeable. Like that's the very point of heathenism, is it's supposed to be converted away.
But in the book I draw on the definition or understanding of race that Sylvester Johnson poses in his book African American Religions, which is that race is really about colonial governance. It's with the division of the world into colonizers and colonized, Europeans and non-Europeans. It's kind of a binary process, and the heathen is central to this binary process, right? It's actually the very changeable quality of the heathen that makes it so important in this racializing process of, you know, some people declaring themselves to be colonizers who can uplift, or take over or, you know, teach the so-called heathens, how to live.
BLAIR HODGES: And people also differed about whether this heathenism was something inborn, like natural, or if it was something circumstantial, and this had an impact on how Christians would approach heathen. Say a little bit more about that about this inborn thing versus circumstantial, and how Christians would react as a result of that.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah. So and that could change over time, like, in a very short amount of time, actually, that some Christians would see certain people as heathens who could be changed. And then as a result of warfare, for instance, then they might change their minds and say, “no, actually, these are inborn heathens.”
And this is something that Rebecca Goetz argues in her book, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race. So she argues that this idea of hereditary heathenism arises out of colonial warfare and the notion that certain people actually, “we tried to save them, but we couldn't save them, so therefore they must be hereditary heathens,” right? This must be an innate characteristic. And so that's something that I touched on in the book as well.
But I also write in the book about how—even if theoretically, you know, the idea is that the heathen can be saved and should be saved, in some cases Christian missionaries, you know, Christian colonizers would describe a certain quote-unquote “heathen societies” as so entrenched in their heathenism because of the many, many generations that they had been heathen that basically they were so historically heathen that they couldn't be easily saved.
So in a sense that's not quite the same as hereditary heathenism. It's not that they're understood to be inherently heathen, but that the historical weight of heathenism on societies over time seemed so significant that it could not be changed overnight.
You know, this was used as a kind of excuse, right? So for Chinese exclusion, that's where I primarily write about this. That's used as an excuse for saying, you know, “the Chinese are historically heathen, and they've been heathen for so many generations. We cannot allow them into the country.”
BLAIR HODGES: It seems like a convenient way to explain why Christian mission efforts maybe weren't as successful as people hoped they would be. What do you think about that?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Exactly. That's exactly right. Yes, hereditary heathenism and historical heathenism are convenient ways to say, “We tried, but you know, it was so entrenched we couldn't make the difference that we hoped to.”
BLAIR HODGES: So your book talks about how White Europeans and Euro Americans really managed to combine a whole bunch of different peoples into this singular category. Did they wrestle with that in seeing, like—
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: “Okay, we're using the same term for people who are clearly very different from each other.” And what did that wrestling look like?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, so heathenism functions as this kind of umbrella or blanket category that clumps people of the world—very different kinds of people of the world—together. And it not only clumps people geographically, but it also clumps people across time.
So it's not just like people in different parts of the world, but it also stretches back to the Greco Roman world. And that really creates some, you say wrestling, with like, “How do we fit such different people under this broad term?”
So there's debates over the classics, debates over whether the classics should be taught in schools, for instance, that's how you see some of this wrestling playing out. Heathenism doesn't neatly overlap onto civilizational ladders, so-called “civilizational ladders,” so people who were so-called heathens, you know, were understood to be on like all spectrums of the so-called civilizational ladders. And so there's some wrestling there as well.
BLAIR HODGES: Do you mean like, whether they have certain kinds of buildings and advanced technology, or whether they live in a more rural situation, or—
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right, like literacy, yeah, exactly. So Emily Conroy-Krutz writes about this in her book Christian Imperialism, she talks about hierarchies of heathenism, and how missionaries basically typologized the so-called heathen world, with some heathen societies that were viewed to be like at the top of civilizational ladders, and others viewed to be at the bottom. And they tried to direct their energies at first to the middle of these ladders, because they thought that would be where their work would bear the most fruit, I guess, right?
Because they didn't want people who were so entrenched in their ways that they would just basically say, “No, we don't need you.” And they didn't want people who were supposedly at the bottom of these ladders, who would require a lot of European intervention. So they tried to go for the middle. That's what she argues there. So that's also where you can see this kind of wrestling.
But what I write in the book is that despite this wrestling, despite this problematic overlay of this category onto these ladders, the concept of heathenism, the umbrella concept, the blanket quality of this category, was actually very helpful for White American Christians in creating a kind of ceiling to civilizational ladders. That if they felt threatened by particular, quote unquote, “heathen civilizations,” seeing them as heathen essentially swept them off civilizational ladders into this morass of shared heathenism.
Changing heathen landscapes – 18:48
BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk more about landscapes, because one of your chapters, chapter three, talks about how the idea of the heathen has been closely connected to how landscapes are valued. And I think this connects to civilization in general, right?
So American Protestants would point to the Bible, they would point to scriptures like Isaiah 35, where it says “the desert and the solitary places will blossom as the rose.” And they would look and see, maybe, indigenous peoples who weren't doing the kind of European cultivation of the land that they valued, or other people in other countries that weren't building the kind of buildings that they would build, and having the kind of crops, and living the kind of ways they were living. And so they could kind of judge based on the landscape itself as to where they fell on this heathen—well, you call it a heathen barometer, right, this sort of—you can judge how heathen they are. Talk a little bit more about this landscape situation.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah. So I mean, the landscape situation, again, is like a place where you can see them kind of wrestling with the broadness of this category, because the book of Isaiah depicts heathen landscapes as barren wilderness, as deserts overrun with thorns and brambles. And so, in some cases, missionaries going out into the world could very easily, from their judgment of what a built landscape was supposed to look like, in some cases they would go and say like, “Yes, this is a heathen wilderness, right? And so that justifies our interventions.” In other cases, they would go out into the world, and they would encounter built environments that, you know, more closely aligned with their expectations of what architecture et cetera should look like from a European perspective. And so, you know, that made them think, “Okay, so how does this fit into this heathen paradigm of a landscape that is overrun with brambles and thorns, et cetera,” right?
And so you get descriptions of, for instance, China and India, that are really interesting, because they start off with like, “Oh, wow, we see these beautiful buildings, they're so colorful, they're ancient, they've been here for thousands of years!” And that's kind of threatening to their self-conception as superior White Christians. And so then what they end up doing is this move of basically reading these landscapes through the book of Isaiah saying, you know, “Behind these gilded surfaces, you might think these are gilded surfaces, but underneath, what you really see is decay, you know, overgrown environments, these people don't actually know how to take care of their landscapes. This is why there's famine in these countries all the time, you know, their farming technologies are inferior and backwards, they don't have machines.
And so the only reason why these places have been able to sustain their people for so many generations is because they have so many people. The people turn into the machines that cultivate the land, but because they don't have the machines cultivate the land if there's any sort of natural disaster famine strikes, and it's terrible,” right? So this is the way that they just read them all through the same kind of lens, and that's where I argue that this kind of blanket heathen category comes into use.
BLAIR HODGES: Talk about some of the images, too. I know you couldn't get any, unfortunately, any pictures of Jesus Express or whatever. But you could get some of these nineteenth-century images that missionary societies would send, like before and after pictures, you know, that we'd see on weight loss stuff on the internet, right? This like before and after heathen land situation going on.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right, right. Yeah. So some of the images, yeah, in the landscape chapter—images from Hawaii, I think, are really interesting, because Hawaii was really held up by American missionaries as a kind of paradigmatic success case, right? And so you see these images, that were actually engraved by Hawaiian students, that showed Hawaiian landscapes that had been transformed to look like what New England missionaries believed the ideal landscape would look like.
So there's one image of Lahainaluna, the school at Lahainaluna in particular, that looks very similar to an image of Cornwall, Connecticut, right? So you see the same kind of houses, farmlands—
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, you have them right next to each other here and they look so similar.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: And yeah, exactly. So again, that's like, showing the transformation of these lands.
Let's see. Also, in this chapter, there's an image here that I kind of went back and forth on whether to include this one in the chapter on landscapes or the chapter on bodies. But it's an image called “Rude Farming,” from a children's periodical from the 1860s. And this is an illustration of, you know, what I was just talking about with stereotypes about India in particular, and the lack of farming implements according to Euro American understandings of what those look like. Here the depiction is of people who are doing the farming without the use of much in the way of machinery, again, by Euro American standards. So the word rude here is supposed to signify again, this kind of like backwardness, right, and the inability to make the land blossom as the rose without intervention.
BLAIR HODGES: Let's look at that Hawaii example a little bit more, because you get into how indigenous Hawaiians themselves were reacting. These missionaries were coming in and showing them different ways to create pastures or do farming or whatever, and not everybody was happy with that. So what kind of reactions were happening amongst Hawaiians, for example, as people were saying, let's make your land blossom as the rose.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right. Right. Well, Hawaiians wrote back against that in the nineteenth century, you know, they were writing in newspapers, writing in exchanges back and forth with each other, and writing their own histories and basically saying, “Look, we have been cultivating the land, we were cultivating the land for generations, we cultivated it in a different way,” right?
And, yeah, at the at the end of that chapter I think I include a Hawaiian historian who writes about the coming of the Americans and says, “As for us, we regret the loss of our former ways,” right? So they're very, they're very clear about what's happening there, they’re documenting it in real time as it's happening.
And actually, you know, I think something that's quite interesting, too, that I note briefly in that chapter, is that missionaries also lamented the rapid transformation of the Hawaiian landscape. So missionaries wanted Hawaii to look like Cornwall, Connecticut, right? So that picture that we just talked about, they wanted these kind of small-scale—
BLAIR HODGES: That's so sad. It's Hawaii!
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, yeah. They wanted these small scale farms, right. But what happened, what was happening was the introduction of these large-scale plantations. And so the missionaries themselves, you know, they lamented this like, you know, “What is happening here, boiling centrifugal huge machinery, like this is not what we were expecting.” So you have this kind of yeah, the close of the chapter was both Hawaiian missionaries and Hawaiian, native Hawaiian, historians lamenting what's happening there.
Changing heathen bodies – 25:03
BLAIR HODGES: Alright, so we've talked a little bit about how landscapes were viewed, and how Christians would come in and suggest it needs to be changed as part of responding to the heathen or saving the heathen. And we've talked a little bit about bodies. But chapter four gets more specific about that. So nineteenth-century Americans had particular ideas about heathen bodies, and race and religion seemed really entwined, as we've mentioned. Let's talk a more about the heathen body and what Christians believed needed to happen with the heathen body.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, so if landscapes were viewed through the lens of the book of Isaiah, heathen bodies were viewed through the first chapter of Romans. The book of Romans, which discusses heathens as people who are filled with unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, et cetera, they worship creeping and crawling things, and as a result, their bodies become the same.
And so in the chapter on heathen bodies the point I'm really trying to make is that again, heathenness is not just this kind of interior state of wrong belief. It's a state that manifests—or was understood to manifest on bodies in very significant ways. So heathen bodies were thought to be susceptible to death, whether it was babies who were subjected to infanticide, or whether it was sick people or old people who were neglected because supposedly heathens did not have any charity, any sense of charity towards their own.
Heathen bodies were also supposed to be susceptible to disease because they failed to understand the nature of the true God. They failed to understand the great physician and so instead they turned to remedies that were superstitions or otherwise, right, this is the kind of stereotype that arises. So yeah, heathen bodies were understood to become sickly, susceptible to disease, susceptible to famine, unable to care for themselves.
BLAIR HODGES: You mentioned infanticide. It seems like that was a kind of an obsession with Christians. This would show up in a lot of literature they made, or other Christians when they were sort of justifying needing to go save the heathens
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: Was infanticide happening? Like, where was this idea even coming from? Talk about infanticide a little bit, it is killing babies basically.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right. So the discussion of infanticide basically argued that it happened kind of along a spectrum. That on one end of the spectrum there were heathen mothers who were so basically lazy, profligate, uncaring, that they didn't want to put any energy into caring for their babies. And so they would essentially just kill them. Or if they were sick, they wouldn't take care of them so that they could go on living in their lazy, profligate ways. That's one end of the spectrum.
On the other end of the spectrum—
BLAIR HODGES: Unlike your “industrious Christian mothers who would never do something like that.”
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, exactly. So what the trope of infanticide does is it sets up the Christian mother, by contrast to the heathen mother, the Christian woman in contrast to the heathen woman. So on the one hand, there's this stereotype of the lazy heathen woman. On the other hand, there's the trope of the suffering heathen woman, the heathen woman whose society so oppresses women that she does not want to take care of or raise girl babies.
So it's particularly girls on this other side of the spectrum, that she doesn't want girls to have to be born into the same hard lot that she is facing, right? So by contrast, the Christian woman is supposed to dedicate her energy, supposed to want to raise her children, and is supposed to be held up on a kind of pedestal in her society to do this task. So again, that's the contrast that's created through that trope of infanticide.
BLAIR HODGES: Was it even accurate? Like, was exposing babies, was that a thing? I mean, when I hear that I think of like, ancient Rome or something.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right. So that's—I mean, so what the one thing that the book doesn't do is to consider—so it's about the tropes, and about the stereotypes that are generated about the so-called heathen world, and it's not so much about like, what are the actual figures that are being encountered here? What's the actual data that's giving rise to these tropes? It's more about what is the use of these tropes? Like what are these tropes doing?
BLAIR HODGES: It seems convenient to me at the very least, I think we can say that the childhood poverty in America was an issue, and to zero in on this as a problem of the heathen was to overlook things that were happening right here, quote unquote, “at home.”
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Precisely.
BLAIR HODGES: And just basically setting up an unfair contrast however it shook out, but did Christians expect conversion to change actual bodies, like that heathen bodies themselves would change?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, yes. They not only expected it, they wrote about it, right? So they published these paradigmatic kind of hagiographic accounts of quote unquote “heathen converts,” and in one of them, the account of Catherine Brown in particular, this is—let me just find this. Yeah, Catherine Brown who dies of tuberculosis in her early twenties, a Native American woman, she is described kind of the before and after—you know, we were talking about the before and after with landscape pictures. In the before and after that is used to discuss so-called heathens who convert to Christianity they describe a kind of change in bodies as well, right?
And that's not only with their dress, you know, ornamentation—that's discussed. But also, there's a quote here from, gosh, from somebody who describes Brown's personal appearance, saying from a quote unquote “wild untutored girl, she had become graceful and polite. Some of my acquaintances were unwilling to believe she was an Indian.”
So this kind of transformation is read onto bodies as well.
BLAIR HODGES: We see a little bit of that in my own tradition, Latter-day Saint tradition, that would think that conversion would even lighten skin, or you'd be able to see on someone's face that they had converted, the facial features might change, right?
So I was struck to see that happening in broader Christianity as well, kind of in a little bit different of a register, but the same idea, that conversion—in that description, you say she went from this wild to this—I mean, that was a bodily description, right? They're talking about hair, they’re talking about how she walked, and how her body looked. And yes, there's a lot packed into those terms.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Exactly.
Japanese and African American critiques – 30:44
BLAIR HODGES: That's Kathryn Gin Lum. She's associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University, and today we're talking about her book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.
Okay, so far we've covered part one of the book. In part two, you introduce us to a fascinating person. You've talked about these accounts that Christians gave of converts, they would have this heathen convert and they would kind of tell their story and see how they change. In part two we meet, I don't know if I can pronounce this correctly, but Uchimura Kanzō, is that right?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes.
BLAIR HODGES: A Japanese person who converted to Christianity and published a book in the late 1800s. Let’s spend a little bit of time with him.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: It’s not your typical conversion narrative.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right, right. Yeah. He’s one of my favorite characters in this book. So he writes this book called The Diary of a Japanese Convert. And in the diary, so he describes the diary as kind of the log of a biologist, like what a biologist might write about the process of conversion. And throughout the diary he pushes back against the idea that conversion is this kind of immediate day to night transformation. And he writes of himself as a body in the process of converting. It’s a process. And it’s a process that he is fully aware of, and a process that he undertakes with the full awareness, in addition, of White American racism and Christian hypocrisy.
So he is not—he is not becoming a Christian because he's being forced to, although he does describe the kind of situation like that when he was a youth. But yeah, it's just such a rich and complex source.
BLAIR HODGES: How would Christians perceive him at the time? Would they see him as, “oh, you're joining?” Obviously, they would believe he's joining the true religion, but how would they perceive him? Like was this kind of a victory, like a heathen is joining the correct religion now?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, yeah. So his initial conversion process happens in Japan when he goes to Sapporo Agricultural College, which is then under the influence of an American missionary educator, who basically seeks to convert the entire school. So a revival kind of setting sweeps the school, Uchimura is the one student who holds out and then finally he gives in. So again, there is this kind of sense of pressure, peer pressure, as he initially converts. And then he comes to America. And he's basically paraded in front of gatherings as an example of a heathen convert, of a body that has changed.
And he pushes back against this in really descriptive terms. He describes these gatherings as circuses, right, circuses, where heathens who have converted to Christianity are like the, he calls it “regenerate rhinoceroses, who are paraded before these audiences,” you know, “made to speak of their conversions.” And he does not like this because he sees it again as a process that he's still undergoing, and why should you look at my body, you know, as this outcome of your process.
BLAIR HODGES: He picked up on that racism, how else did he perceive White Christians? I mean, this is the religion that he joined and at this point his location was predominantly White. How did he wrestle with that?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, so he was very clear-eyed in understanding the racism that he encountered in the US. When he first comes to the US, he expects it to be this land of enlightened Christianity. And he begins to see Japan as a land of heathenism that is shrouded in ignorance.
And then coming to the US, he begins to see things in you know, shades of grey, essentially. He writes this. He sees, you know, White American racism towards African Americans, and he writes about that. He writes about White American racism against Chinese immigrants. And he writes about that, and he says, you know, how this hypocrisy is just so clear, right? That to still choose to convert to Christianity, or to be in the process of conversion for him is, again, a wrestling that happens over the course of this diary. And that's why it cannot be this kind of night to day overnight experience.
BLAIR HODGES: I was impressed as well that he came to apply the heathen label himself kind of in a new way, he began applying the heathen label to White American Christians.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, yes, exactly. And so I use him to introduce a chapter called “Barometer,” with this notion of the heathen barometer, which you brought up earlier. But basically, you know, the idea of the heathen barometer is that there are these certain characteristics that, it's like a checkbox, a list of things that if you detect this, if you detect that, if you detect, you know, all of these things, then beep, beep, beep, you've discovered heathenism. [laughter]
BLAIR HODGES: The heathen threshold has been crossed.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right, exactly. But the thing with the heathen barometer is that it can be flipped, it can be flipped back on White Christian Americans themselves as a very effective rhetorical strategy to say, you know, “Actually, what we're detecting here is hypocrisy,” right? And so Uchimura Kanzō does this.
BLAIR HODGES: We also see this in African American critiques of slavery and racism. And I wanted to spend a little time there, if you want to give some examples of African American critiques using the heathen label, similarly to how Uchimura Kanzō did.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, exactly. So one example is David Walker's “Appeal” from 1829. The “Appeal, in Four Articles.” Walker does what Uchimura does with the term heathen, with flipping it back on White Christian America. And he writes about, I should just—maybe I can just read a quote from the appeal.
He writes that, "The white Christians of America who hold us in slavery, or more properly speaking pretenders to Christianity, treat us more cruel and barbarous than any heathen nation did any people whom it had subjected or reduced to the same condition."
So he's comparing White Christian America to the quote unquote, “heathen nations” in biblical times that engaged in practices of enslavement, and saying that Americans are more heathen than those, than the heathens in the days of the Bible, right? And to say the words like “the pretenders to Christianity” really, I think makes explicit here, “you're not Christians,” right? “You are more heathen than the heathens that you read about in the Bible.”
BLAIR HODGES: They could use Christianity to critique the way that Christianity was being practiced. And, were there receptive audiences for that? What were the kind of reactions they would get with these, frankly, really bold pronouncements about heathenism, turning that back on white American Christians?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Well, I mean, David Walker's Appeal was met with fear, with great fear, right? It led to a kind of a repression, a crackdown against literacy. He ends up, you know, smuggling copies of it, sewing it into the lining of clothing that he is buying and reselling to sailors.
So this kind of rhetoric is really met with fear. A recognition that it is powerful, a recognition that it challenges one of the justifications of enslavement that White Christian enslavers were giving, which was that slavery was supposed to be this kind of institution that helps to Christianize enslaved people.
BLAIR HODGES: “Heathens.”
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Exactly, exactly. And so for Walker to expose that this is actually a hypocritical, unchristian, heathen kind of plane is a very powerful argument to make.
And so yeah, there's a crackdown, there's a lot of fear about the Appeal being spread and read. Walker manages to find ways to get it to enslaved people. He sews it into the lining of the clothes, used clothes that he's selling to sailors, encourages people to read it out loud to enslaved people. And yeah, so it is met with fear. Absolutely.
Chinese as quintessential heathens – 37:54
BLAIR HODGES: Also, in chapter six, Kathryn, you talk about how Chinese people came to be seen as the quintessential heathens, for White American Christians in particular. And I was really drawn to internal debates that actually happened between Chinese people in the book.
I'm thinking of Wong Chin Foo, who claimed the term heathen kind of as a point of pride, and then Yan Phou Lee who was distancing himself from heathenism. Talk about those two figures and what they say about the history of the word heathen.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, also a couple of my favorite figures from the book. I'm actually hoping to write my next book on them, to do a deeper dive into them.
BLAIR HODGES: Great! Well, I could see there was a lot there. That was a fascinating part of the book.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: There was lot there. Yeah.
So really interesting, and kind of similarly to Uchimura, they both initially convert to Christianity and then Wong, like Uchimura, comes to the United States. I mean, they both come and see the hypocrisy, the racism here, but Wong ends up unconverting, and he ends up traveling the US as a lecturer and as a self-styled Confucian missionary, very interestingly claims the title of heathen for himself, and he writes a piece in 1887 called, “Why I am a Heathen” that basically inverts the ways in which the characteristics of heathenism had come to seem, you know, negative, problematic, and says, “actually heathenism is the source of China's strength and longevity for all of these many years, and Americans would do well to learn something from heathens,” you know, “Americans who are endlessly striving, who are building all of these machines. What are they doing that for, you know? building these machines, putting people out of work, Americans have no charity, you know, they don't care about people who are impoverished, they don't care about people who need help. They're the ones who are uncharitable, not the so-called heathens and so you need to learn from us”
Lee, by contrast, writes a piece a month after Wong's called, “Why I am Not a Heathen.” And that piece is interesting because he does acknowledge white Christian racism and hypocrisy, but what he does is to try to separate that from what he sees as a pure Christianity. Yeah, so Lee discriminated between what he called true Christians and hypocritical ones.
So he says, “Confucius says it is impossible to carve on rotten timber. Christianity is not responsible for the acts of morally rotten men. And yet where there is any soundness at all, it has demonstrated its power to heal and save,” right? So he's again, differentiating between Christianity that's been practiced in a way by racist White Americans such as Denis Kearney, who's somebody that Wong talks about as well.
Denis Kearney, a Labor leader from the late nineteenth century, who's, you know, one of the most prominent anti-Chinese demagogues, Wong says, I don't want to go to a heaven where I see Denis Kearney, that would be appalling!” And Lee says, you know, “the transformative power of Christianity is such that even Kearney could repent and become changed into somebody lamb-like who could come into heaven and say, ‘The Chinese must stay. Heaven is incomplete without them.’”
So they're describing Christianity in different ways, but both of them coming from the same perspective and background of understanding, again, with clear eyes, what this country is about.
BLAIR HODGES: And they're both appealing to Chinese sources. They're both appealing to their heritage. It's a really important reminder, I think, of the diversity that exists within communities that often get lumped together.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes.
Romanticizing the heathen – 41:08
BLAIR HODGES: There's a lot of diversity within Chinese communities. And we see these really powerful and excellent writers, these great figures, Wong Chin Foo and Lee, who were really challenging each other. And I look forward to seeing more work about them. Now, that part was really interesting to me.
That's Kathryn Gin Lum. She's an associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University, and we're talking about the book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History.
Well, we don't hear the word heathen as often anymore, as we've mentioned, and so the word started to decline. One of the ways it started to lose power was it started to become a way to kind of give backhanded praise. There was this romanticization that happened amongst White people in particular. Talk a little bit about that, it almost became a term of nostalgia before it became a term to be embarrassed about using.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, I write about that in a chapter about preservationism and this kind of turn towards, like you say, this kind of romanticization of heathenism as part of humanity's past, right?
So this turn happens—even in like a single individual. There's a figure in the book, Nathaniel Bright Emerson, who is the child of missionaries in Hawaii. He is an ardent annexationist. He writes these really negative things about Hawaiian heathenism as justification for annexation of Hawaii. But after annexation, he turns into one of these romantic preservationist who writes about the Hawaiian past as, you know, part of humanity's legacy that we need, that he as this kind of White American Savior essentially needs to preserve so that we remember it and so that, you know, the White— there's this concern in the late nineteenth, early 20th century about over-civilization, the over-civilization of the White American, and the nostalgia of the so-called heathen past is basically held up as a way to kind of ward against these fears about over civilization.
So this is the era of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and, you know, concerns that Americans are becoming too effete, you know, they're sitting in offices, they're not connected to the land anymore. And so so-called heathens are supposed to basically demonstrate what humans used to be able to do, like, how they used to understand the land, and to teach White Americans certain things that they might be able to preserve of these ways that have essentially become defanged, right?
So for Emerson in particular, he kind of stands in as a paradigmatic figure here of someone who initially describes heathenism as very alive, very threatening. And then it becomes this defanged, you know, for him, part of the past that we can learn from, that we can selectively pick from to enhance, you know, White American civilization.
BLAIR HODGES: I see echoes of this today in when White people say like, “that's my spirit animal,” or they talk about or borrow indigenous terms to talk about environmentalism or something. And so this romanticization seems to persist even to the present.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yes, absolutely.
The idea of heathenism persists – 44:04
BLAIR HODGES: There seems to be an increase in respect, and maybe religious pluralism. Instead of a blanket term like heathen you see in literature, people more often will refer to Hindu and Sikhism. And so being more specific, was that a gesture of neighborliness? What was behind the shift to those terms?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, that's a good question. So I mean, part of the story of the category of heathen is a story of growing world religions awareness. Well, first, it was kind of a binary categorization of the world's religions, right? Christians, and all else were heathens. And then this kind of four-part categorization arises in 18th century compendia of the world's religions: Christians, Jews, Muslims, and heathens. And then by the late nineteenth century this category of the heathen breaks into this proliferation of terms.
So you see, like, at the Worlds Parliament of Religions, you know, traditions are named, traditions are understood to have their own names. But as I write in the book, that kind of narrative of the increasing expansion of understanding of world religions, it suggests that the category of heathenism is just replaced by all of these other terms, that it no longer matters, and that it's become part of the past, of like the academic study of religion. But I don't think that that's actually so much the case, right? I think that still, this idea that certain traditions emerge from this lineage of the heathen world, continues to inform.
BLAIR HODGES: This is where your book makes the most important intervention, I think, is it's more comfortable for me to believe that as a White person, I've left all that silliness behind. I don't say heathen, I don't use those kind of offensive terms. It's just part of history, and the world has continued to become more enlightened, and so on and so forth.
When in reality, as you point out in the book, the ideas that were animating that label of heathen persist today. I'd like to hear from you where you see that. Like, what are some examples of: we might not use that word, heathen, but we're still seeing quote unquote, “heathens,” and that is still happening, right?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right. Yeah. So there are a number of terms that have come to stand for the term heathen today. Third World, developing world, unreached peoples, frontier peoples—these are all terms people use all the time nowadays and don't necessarily think about where they come from, or the ideas underlying them, what is the history behind that? Now, these are all terms that, as we talked about with the category of heathen before, have this kind of umbrella or blanket-like quality that sweep people together.
In the book one of the things that I had hoped to do but didn't, because the press was concerned about how the printing quality would come out, I'd wanted to include maps side by side—nineteenth century maps of the so-called heathen world that are color coded, that basically color the so-called heathen world all the same gray, for instance, or brown. And I wanted to put that side by side with contemporary maps of the world that show the so-called Third World, right, or the developing world, unreached peoples, and see, these ways of viewing the world, like the idea that you could just sweep people across the world under the same heading, that, that has long roots, right?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: So in the book I talk about the continuation of these ideas, both in the realm of humanitarian organizations, some of which are religious, and some of which are not. I also talk about it with—I actually talked about Silicon Valley techno-salvationism briefly, partly because this was where I am. And so I'm very—this was in my face all the time, the idea that there is a needy and suffering world out there that we can do something about, that we can save.
You know, I've been to some of these Silicon Valley tech-salvationist events, and the language, the maps, the images, are just so similar to what you see from the nineteenth century, you know, depicting needy and suffering people and putting the power to save them in the hands of Americans.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I've heard it called “poverty porn,” for example.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah.
BLAIR HODGES: Something that excites and gets people interested. How do you grapple with this too? Because, you know, I think it's—I think we both agree that digging some wells in a country that has water access problems would generally be a good thing, right? But there's this hard tension that exists in humanitarian work, where it can be colonial, it can be overbearing, it can be self-righteous, versus it can be helpful, and it can be meaningful. So how do you see that negotiation now, having done this work?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, it is so hard.
BLAIR HODGES: I don't expect you to have all the answers for it either—
KATHRYN GIN LUM: I don’t!
BLAIR HODGES: —I’m just wondering because you’ve had to wrestle with it. Yeah, because I don't either!
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, right. I am wrestling it, right? In the conclusion I go back again to this, my positionality is both the us and the them, right? And I write in the conclusion that like, I'm not morally superior in any way by virtue of being an academic, right? Academics critique from these comfortable office chairs, like, I'm not the person digging the well, who am I to critique that?
But on the other hand, I hope that what this book does is that it opens a conversation, that it maybe exposes a history that, again, like you mentioned earlier, many people think is just long gone. That it's in the past. And that it encourages people to ask questions about why they're doing what they're doing, what they hope to come out of it, and you know, who it's really for, I guess.
But it's—yeah, again, it is really hard. Really hard questions. And whenever I talk about this book for audiences, particularly for audiences of students, that's always the question they ask at the end, you know? I've had students who have been planning to go into humanitarian work after they graduate. And they asked me, like, “Should I not do this?” You know, “I hadn't thought about this this way.” And I, you know, I say I want you to ask those questions, I want you to think about it. And, yes, have those conversations with others.
BLAIR HODGES: You also point out that history itself has been a colonial type of discipline that, itself, has been used to define heathens and to help “the advance of civilization,” and so on and so forth. And so you grapple with that, as well. And I was impressed in the concluding remarks you make, that you're very straightforward about that, saying that you recognize problems within your own tradition. As you're levying a critique, there are critiques that could come right back at you.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Right. Yeah. So I write about—not only in this book, but actually in an article I was writing as I was thinking about the book—about history and how the discipline of history was formulated against the supposedly history-less or stagnating heathen, right?
I'm not by any means the first scholar to write about this. There’re many scholars who've made this kind of claim, but the very story that I'm narrating, it’s really about how White American Christians, White European Christians, set themselves against the so-called heathen world as progressive history making people whose interventions into the world would basically jumpstart the world into the process of history, right? Of changing over time, because heathen societies were depicted as stagnant, as unable to progress. And so yeah, I write in the book this critique of the discipline of history, you know, the emphasis on change over time. Part of the book's point is that things don't just change. There's a lot of continuity that we see. And I try to show that throughout the book.
BLAIR HODGES: Kathryn, before we go, I just wondered if you could say a little bit more about the relationship between your religious faith and the scholarship that you've been producing.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Like I mentioned earlier, I've been grappling with these questions to some extent or other since I was a kid. The way that I understood them has changed over time.
But for me, actually, going into the study of religious history has been a way to think through these questions, to think about how humans in history have dealt with these questions. To think about the kinds of answers they've given. The tradition I was raised in does not ordain women. Women are not allowed to become pastors or ministers, and I think if I had maybe been raised in a different tradition, I might have gone down that route. But instead, I went into academia, and so the entire book is a kind of continued grappling, like, this is just it's—I don't know, this is my life's calling, [laughs] I guess, to think about these questions and to think about how people have dealt with them.
And you know, the various characters that we discussed today, I see myself in people like Yan Phou Lee, Wong Chin Foo, Uchimura Kanzō, you know, that the kinds of issues that they dealt with, that they grappled with, I find community with them and, thinking about the ways that they talked back.
BLAIR HODGES: That's Kathryn Gin Lum, associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University, and today we talked about her book Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. She is also author of a book called Dammed Nation, which is a history of hell, the idea of hell in America from the revolution to reconstruction, a really fascinating book as well.
So we're gonna go take a quick break, Kathryn, and then come back and get a best book recommendation from you if that's all right.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, absolutely.
[BREAK]
Best Books – 56:20
BLAIR HODGES: It's Fireside with Blair Hodges. Kathryn Gin Lum is here, and we talked about her book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, a great book.
And Kathryn, now it’s time for you to recommend any book. It’s the best books segment. So what did you bring for us?
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah, so hard to narrow it down to one.
BLAIR HODGES: It really is. It’s almost an impossible question. I know.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Yeah. So I’m gonna bring up a book that I read recently, even though there’s so many ones I could talk about. But I want to bring up David Chang’s The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration. Such a good book, it's a really compelling read and what it does is that it reorients a history that so many have told from the perspective of the United States such that, you know, Hawaii is on the periphery, and Hawaiians are people who are quote unquote, “to be encountered.” But instead, Chang again, reorients this and offers an incredible study that centers Hawaii and looks at the world from the perspective of Native Hawaiians who had their own geographic imagination and took their own voyages of exploration.
So to give just one example from the book, Chang's discussion of Henry Obookiah is just revelatory. So he's a Hawaiian man who came to the United States in the early nineteenth century out of geographic curiosity and interest. But most histories, starting in the nineteenth century itself, actually have discussed him as just kind of a “lost manchild,” as Chang puts it, who converts to Christianity, and who ends up becoming the subject of some of these hagiographies I talked about before, and spurs the mission to Hawaii. Chang completely changes how we understand him. He's not a boy. He's an agentive adult who trained for the Hawaiian priesthood, who was interested in learning about Christianity as part of his broader religious explorations. It's just a transformative read. And I mean, it's a real academic page-turner, so I highly recommend it.
BLAIR HODGES: That looks really good. I'll have a link to that at firesidepod.org, and also links to your book and other books that we've talked about. And if people use those links I get, like, 50 cents from Jeff Bezos, because it's Amazon links and I get like 50 cents or something. So I mean, I think people should probably patronize their local bookseller, I should say, do that first. But if you're gonna buy it on Amazon, use my link and I'll get like, you know, twenty-eight cents or whatever from that sale. [laughter] So that's how I'm getting rich off of Fireside.
All right, Kathryn, thanks so much for spending the time with us. Again, your book is Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. And I recommend this book. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk about it with me, Kathryn. This has been a lot of fun.
KATHRYN GIN LUM: Thank you so much for the opportunity, and for really wonderful questions. Really appreciate it.
Outro – 58:58
BLAIR HODGES: Fireside with Blair Hodges is sponsored by the Howard W. Hunter Foundation—supporters of the Mormon Studies program at Claremont Graduate University in California. It’s also supported by the Dialogue Foundation. A proud part of the Dialogue Podcast Network.
Alright, another episode is in the books, the fire has dimmed, but the discussion continues. Join me on Twitter and Instagram, I’m at @podfireside. And I’m on Facebook as well. You can leave a comment at firesidepod.org. You can also email me questions, comments, or suggestions directly to blair@firesidepod.org. And please don’t forget to rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts if you haven’t already.
Fireside is recorded, produced, and edited by me, Blair Hodges, in Salt Lake City. Special thanks to my production assistants, Kate Davis and Camille Messick, and also thanks to Christie Frandsen, Matthew Bowman, and Kristen Ullrich Hodges.
Our theme music is “Great Light” by Deep Sea Diver, check out that excellent band at thisisdeepseadiver.com.
Fireside with Blair Hodges is the place to fan the flames of your curiosity about life, faith, culture, and more. See you next time.
[End]
NOTE: Transcripts have been lightly edited for readability.