Excerpts from @KGinLum’s new book, “Heathen,” a critical addition to the #HindooHistory reading list, along with @MichaelJAltman’s “Heathen, Hindoo, Hindu.” Will add to this thread as I go through the book!
“The sustained rise in the term’s use reflects the deliberate fashioning of the heathen world as a cohesive category in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
“The idea of the heathen world was not unknown before then, but it flowered with the emergence of significant foreign missionary societies”
“The spread of racial science challenged the continued applicability of the older model of blanket heathenness and forced those who used it to explain how and why the model should continue to have explanatory power for a world where…”
“apparent physical differences could seem more salient than supposed spiritual similarities. In this context, White Protestants doubled down on the notion of heathenness as a term that could elide particularities…”
“sweeping all who bore the label under the same heading of misguided and unfortunate souls who shared similar origin stories, landscapes, and bodies beneath any visible differences”
“Nevertheless, the idea of a vast heathen world that shared certain fundamental characteristics also continued to have purchase, helping to create the binaries that underlay colonial governance”
“That those nearer the top of civilizational ladders were seen as especially difficult to convert demonstrates how, for White Protestants viewing the world, the overriding quality of heathenness outweighed any claims to civilization”
“Civilizational heirarchies hit a ‘heathen ceiling’ so to speak, a ceiling that could only be (theoretically) broken through conversion”
“White Protestants held heathenism to be responsible for stagnation of societies stuck below them on the civilizational ladder.”
“Individual converts from those societies could be impressed into missionizing work or paraded as evidence or the possibility that the heathen could be saved, but ultimately, the heathen ceiling served to reinforce White Protestant exceptionalism over the rest of the world”
“The idea of the heathen world in need was especially helpful for a young nation that was figuring out its global status, where European-descended settlers could not claim the land as the original birthright of their ancestors”
“Casting the pall of heathenness over that land and other far-flung regions of the world justified Anglo colonialism and alleviated anxieties stemming from increased awareness of other societies with different religious traditions and ways of life and impressive inventions”
“and architectural feats. For Anglo-American Protestants who sought to shape the nation in their own image, this adamantly included Catholic societies”
"The myth of disenchantment, set forth most famously by Max Weber, allowed the West to imagine itself as 'modern, rational, and secular,' while believing the 'Rest' 'languished in a fantastical world of tradition, superstition, and religion'"
"But the replacement narrative's popularity reveals a story of secularization, where religion wanes in importance, than of secularism, or the management of what counts as acceptable and unacceptable expressions of religion"
"In 'Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Rational Science,' Terence Keel shows how 'the secular acts as a mask for the religions.'"
"Instead of holding that 'modernity naturally entails the erosion of religion influence over the structures of knowledge that govern religious influence over the structures of knowledge that govern social life...'"
"Keel argues that 'a new story can be told... if we think of secularization not in terms of a rupture from the past but instead a transference of religious forms into nonreligious spaces of thought and practice.'"
"Along these lines, just because the word 'heathen' fell into disrepute does not mean that the mental maps through which Americans envisioned the heathen world similarly disappeared."
“For the early Christians, the key characteristics that differentiated pagans from themselves were polytheism, idol worship, and sacrifice… Christians told stories of pagans’ bloody rituals to Zeus… they turned gods into demons”
Travel books written through the medieval period included “highly negative accounts of pagan cannibalism, idol worship, and self-mutilation”
In their colonization of the Americas, Spaniards like Juan Gines de Sepulveda “held that paganism was demonic, and sufficient argument for violent subjugation.”
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