Kathryn Gin Lum is a historian of religion and race in America and the author of Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Christian Century. She is associate professor of religious studies at Stanford University.
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If an eighteenth-century parson told you that the difference between 'civilization and heathenism is sky-high and star-far,' the words would hardly come as a shock. But that statement was written by an American missionary in 1971. In a sweeping historical... SEE MORE