Post-Civil War California was the most racially and religiously diverse state in the Union. Given its perch far from the seeming centers of American civilization in the East, and with such exceptional demographics, California might seem like a poor case study for evolving American attitudes toward race and religion during the era of Reconstruction. But in his new book American Heathens, Joshua Paddison proves otherwise. As he puts it in his introduction, “this uniqueness was precisely what made California the ultimate testing ground for what could be considered American” (3).

American Heathens asserts and satisfactorily demonstrates two primary arguments. First, that religion was a crucial component of the debate around race and American citizenship in the post-Civil War era. This is meant to correct the frequent blindspot that historians, especially those of the West, have demonstrated toward religion in these processes. Second, Reconstruction was a process that occurred in many sites throughout the United States, involving multiple races (not just black and white), which led to a reconceptualization of America and therefore of who could belong to such a country. This is a reply to the overwhelming attention that has been put on the South and African Americans as the important factors for understanding the history of Reconstruction.

Paddison's story is essentially about the varied uses that Christianity can be put to in America, especially as related to politics. The presence of Chinese and Native American men and women became the provocation for a battle between two competing visions of triumphalistic Christianity. The first was based on anti-Catholic Protestant solidarity and racial improvement, and therefore left possible room for Chinese immigrants and Native Americans, if they became convincingly Protestant, while potentially marginalizing the largely Catholic Mexicans and Irish. The other was based on permanent white Christian supremacy, which elevated white Christians regardless of denomination, gave African Americans a permanent but second-class position as citizens, and cast a jaundiced eye toward supposedly Christian Chinese and Native Americans.

Ultimately the latter won, making room for African Americans and suspect Catholics in part by pushing the Chinese out of society and breaking up the Native American reservation system. The debate culminated in the 1880s with separate policies: expulsion for the Chinese and cultural genocide for Native Americans. Even as some Chinese converted and became English-speaking missionaries, the white majority conclusively decided that the Chinese were foreign, racially unassimilable, and indelibly non-Christian, and so had to be excluded. Native Americans were cast as racially different and non-Christian too—but they could not be dealt with through immigration exclusion and so had to be destroyed as a people and remade as discrete Christian families divested of their tribal customs, isolated from one another in a sea of purifying whiteness. National reconciliation between East, West, North, and South was accomplished not merely at the expense of these groups, but actually achieved through the exclusion of Chinese and Native Americans from citizenship, autonomy, and full personhood. Through it all, it was the rhetoric of Christianity that shaped all sides of the discussion. As Paddison observes, “only after church leaders came to support exclusion and allotment did those policies become enacted into federal law. With Christianity the language of American politics, ministers wielded unique power to sway public opinion, even as they responded to the shifting opinions of their laities. Their embrace of immigration restriction and allotment played a critical role in the enacting of those policies, as they joined politicians in support of a pair of solutions that promised to finally resolve the Chinese and Indian questions, not through uplift and inclusion but through marginalization and erasure” (141).

American Heathens is instructive in how it manages to use its particular case study to explicitly or implicitly speak to a great many concerns current in the discipline. It is simultaneously a regional and national project, demonstrating to those of us who work on regional studies how to conduct them in ways that are immediately relevant to scholars without such particular foci. Ostensibly about Chinese and Native Americans, it is just as much about the production of whites as non-whites, and thus belongs comfortably in the growing field of whiteness studies as in ethnic studies or Asian American studies. There is something here for a wide range of readers, be they historians of Christianity, of race, of politics, of the nineteenth century, of Reconstruction, of the West, or of the United States more generally.

One of the best aspects of the book is Paddison's finely honed sensitivity to change. The same groups and even the same individuals are seen constantly refining and re-conceptualizing their positions on race, religion, society, and policy as circumstances altered, always with an eye to what best benefited their own in-group from moment to moment. Particularly strong is the demonstration of how in an environment of white Protestant supremacy, Catholics, African Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, and others made vicious racial and religious attacks on each other in order to leverage themselves into more acceptable categories.

The book draws on a huge amount and variety of sources, including dictionaries, newspapers, journals, books, pamphlets, letters, speeches, conference reports, sermons, congressional records, court cases, government reports, state and federal statutes, and editorial cartoons. Yet while wide-ranging, the very breadth of the book makes apparent those voices that are largely absent. Paddison adeptly shows us how some Chinese and Native Americans attempted to assert their own readings of Christianity in order to improve their situations and express their grievances against the white majority, and he pays attention to African Americans and various “off-white” groups such as Mexicans and Irish. But the reader is left wishing to hear the opinions and strategies of non-Christians amid the roiling debate directed around and at them. The restriction of the research almost exclusively to English-language materials mostly prevents this. Paddison also pays attention to the role of gender in the debates, and offers us occasional female voices, but again this reader is left wishing to hear even more.

The writing is sharp and clear, and the book should work well in undergraduate classrooms. Neutral in tone, Paddison never overtly judges his sources, even as they lie, dissemble, contradict themselves, and call for genocide. American Heathens is thus a model that instructors can use to demonstrate how researchers can work responsibly with aspects of the Christian and American past that may seem repugnant to contemporary sensibilities. Most importantly, American Heathens underscores how categories of racial and religious identity that today are (allegedly) comfortably disaggregated were inextricably entangled in nineteenth-century America.