This essay explores evangelical Christians and the public debate over gun rights in the recent past, when white evangelical activism on behalf of the Republican Party and conservative politics converged with the development of a gun culture that emphasized an individual right to bear arms. It argues that political partisanship, attitudes toward gun rights, and the embrace of gun culture have influenced white evangelical identity, revealing internal divisions and raising questions about the nature of their relationship with the secular world. It also examines white evangelicals’ distinctions between “good guys” and “bad guys,” an exercise that requires coming to terms with human sinfulness and evil. The white evangelicals analyzed here see themselves in a conflict that requires both guns and political power to defeat the evil that other people represent. Good guys include both people who protect (“sheepdogs”) and those who need protecting (“sheep”). This worldview envisions little distinction between true Christian identity and American national interests, and it views racial attacks in a colorblind vacuum that reinforces conclusions about the need for guns to defend themselves and their churches. Dissenters within the church criticize the emphasis on individual gun rights and the gun rights subculture many evangelicals inhabit and defend.

The worker priest movement in France between 1946 and 1954 was a significant attempt by the Catholic Church to reach out to the increasingly alienated working class. It foundered on the rocks of elite opposition, worker priest embracing of class conflict, Cold War currents of thought, and government willingness to sacrifice the movement in the name of collaboration with Rome on a suite of issues, most notably free education. The historiography of the movement has proven similarly complex, with observers allowing contemporary trends and values to color their perception of this unique moment in French history and remembering and forgetting both playing a role in the image of the worker priests handed down to future generations.

The question of how Christians perceived and related to non-Christians – heathens – is of pressing historical importance in every era of the history of Christianity. It lies at the core of the historical category of “religion,” particularly as it developed through European colonial expansion in the early modern era, and it plays important roles in the globalizing processes of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Kathryn Gin Lum's book, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, winner of the ASCH's 2023 Philip Schaff Prize, chronicles that history. Through her narrative, she queries the ways historians engage categories of difference and the role of religion in creating social and political hierarchies.

Lloyd Daniel Barba, assistant professor of religion at Amherst College, and Jonathan H. Ebel, professor and head of Religion at the University of Illinois, have written a pair of books that reframe the study of sacred space and the nature of religious communities while advancing the study of religion in the U.S. West. Each book does important theoretical and interpretive work on its own. Together, the books offer a rich picture of California’s Central Valley, a subregion that Kori Walker-Price notes has been “dismissed as a site of serious study” because of its factory farms, its mobile labor force, and its distance from the more iconic scenery of California and the west. But they do more than that. Both use their subjects to make larger arguments and claims about religion, methodology, power, race, and gender in the United States.

Readers of this journal will surely have noticed the remarkable proliferation in the past few decades of “handbooks” and “companions” devoted to major – and even obscure – topics, thinkers, and actors in religious history. The simultaneous appearance in 2021 of The Oxford Handbook of Calvin and Calvinism and Brill's Companion to the Reformation in Geneva provides an opportunity to reflect on the character and value of such volumes, the conditions of their production, and the reasons for their recent proliferation. Also discussed here for purposes of comparison will be an ambitious collection of essays of a more conventional sort: Protestant Empires: Globalizing the Reformations, edited by Ulinka Rublack.1

In 1768, Mohegan minister Samson Occom made a case for why he was a heathen. Shortly before Occom departed for London to raise funds for Moors Indian Charity School, ministers and fellow missionaries spread rumors doubting whether Occom had truly converted from “heathenism” to Christianity. Occom responded by drafting an autobiography defending his conversion. He cast his Mohegan upbringing as heathenism from which he escaped into his newfound Christian identity: “I was born a Heathen and Brought up in Heathenism, till I was between 16 & 17 years of age. . .[My parents] strictly maintained and followed in their heathenish ways, customs & religion, though there were some preaching among them.” However, these three mentions of heathenism in the opening were the only times the term appeared. Throughout the manuscript, he subtly transitioned to the term “Indian.” Occom then spent the rest of the manuscript highlighting his unfair treatment in the hands of his peers: he was underpaid compared to White missionaries and he was labeled an ineffective educator of Mohegan children. He closed the account attributing his failures to the fact that he was “a poor Indian.” The final line read, “I can't help that God has made me so; I did not make myself so.” It was hard for Occom disentangle his conversion from the possibility that he was always and already a heathen.

As a faculty member with a teaching load of four classes per semester at a public university, my approach to reading from Dust They Came by Jonathan H. Ebel and Sowing the Sacred by Lloyd Daniel Barba is born of the necessity of trying to streamline my workload as a teacher-scholar and bring new material to my students. My institution frequently ranks highly on lists that measure social mobility, largely because the students we admit are often among the least affluent in the state. It also ranks highly for diversity, as a Hispanic Serving Institute, and as the state university that leads the way in graduating Black students. But these students are also thoroughly urban, often with little travel experience beyond the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Histories of the state’s agricultural regions, places they often imagine as barren land, are a harder sell. Our majors, however, are curious both about the lives of people that have not been well-documented and about the world outside of our geographic region, and these books as a pair, can satisfy that curiosity if I can present related themes that resonate with the students. I have found that looking at the institutions in these works (the government camp and the church) as ones meant to serve as examples of an idealized way of American life, thinking about the way such institutions often regulate the poor, and looking at how geography impacts experience are all key components of these works that might be interesting to students.

I have been eagerly awaiting the publication of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History ever since I first heard that Kathryn Gin Lum was working on a long history of “heathens” in US history. I had, at the time, just finished my first book, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic (Cornell, 2015), and I had been doing a lot of thinking about “heathens” in nineteenth-century American culture. Specifically, I had trying to understand how white Protestant missionaries understood the concepts of heathenism, civilization, and conversion, and how these ideas shaped their decision-making about where they should focus their evangelistic attention. In Christian Imperialism, I argued that missionaries understood “the heathen world” to be a big place, but they did not understand all heathens to be equally heathenish. Some were more civilized than others, and thus made better candidates for conversion – and, as I found, those who were more “civilized” tended to be in or on the margins of Anglo-American empire. I called the rubric that missionaries used to judge the relative heathenism of different populations the “hierarchy of heathenism.” But I still had a lot of questions, and I hoped that Lum's work would answer them. I have not been disappointed.

I am so grateful to have been able to think with these authors while reading their books, for both have challenged me to think differently about my previous work and my upbringing in the “Golden State.” Those of us who study religion in the American West know it is still relatively marginalized in our guild, but I see such great hope in these sorts of studies. Not only do these books reveal a great deal about California both as a site of religious coercion and resistance, but they bring to our attention methods, sources, and ways of thinking about the interpenetration of traditionally “religious” ideas and material objects with labor, capital, foodways, photography, office spaces, and domestic interiors.

In his 1615 account of the Upper Guinea Coast Etiópia Menor e descripção géografica da Província da Serra Leoa, Portuguese priest Manual Alvares described at length the so-called “superstitions” of the Susu, Temne, and other inhabitants of the region which rendered the “Ethiopians” in need of the light of Christian intervention. According to Alvares, their superstitions were “those common to all heathen” and paralleled those of the “Moor and the Turk,” “heretics,” and “the Jews” who resisted Catholic missionaries’ evangelistic efforts on account of their incapacity for reason (262, 344–345). Consigning “Ethiopia and its peoples” to the realm of unbelievers, the priest proceeded to rally his fellow Christian brethren to the cause of enlightening those people who were bound to repeat the folly of their foreparents by adhering to ancestral traditions.

In the late 1930s, the activist and journalist Carleton Beals reported on the religious lives of recent migrants to California. His observations of these destitute new arrivals showcased the prejudices of the era and displayed his Menckensque style

Kathryn Gin Lum's Heathen is so rich and so vast, I struggled to know where to begin! As I read, I kept being prompted to think back to sources I had encountered in my own research over the years and to think about them in new ways. And so, rather than trying to summarize the book's arguments, I'll aim to preview some of Gin Lum's central interventions by running various bits of sources from my research through the filter of Heathen. My hope is that this process conveys what I see as the broad reach and significance of Heathen, while also raising a few points for further consideration. I have tried to align my research tidbits with particular threads and claims Gin Lum presents.