What Is a Heathen? Matthew 6:31-32 and the Gentiles
Short answer: In Scripture the word heathen generally translates the same Greek word behind Gentiles, meaning the nations outside Israel and, in the New Testament, those who do not know God. It is less a racial or national label than a spiritual description. When Jesus says in Matthew 6:32 that the Gentiles seek after these things, He is not mocking foreigners; He is describing a way of life driven by anxiety because it does not know the Father. The heathen, in biblical usage, is the person whose life is shaped by what they lack rather than by trust in God. Christians are called to live differently, not because they are better by nature, but because they have been given a Father who knows what they need.
How the Bible Uses the Word Heathen
The English word heathen is an old translation term. In older versions it regularly renders the Hebrew goyim and the Greek ethne, both of which simply mean the nations or the peoples outside Israel. In the World English Bible, those same words are usually translated Gentiles. This means that when you read heathen in an older Bible and Gentiles in a modern one, you are usually reading the same original word. It is not a separate category of especially wicked people. It is the ordinary way Scripture refers to those who stand outside the covenant community and therefore outside the knowledge of God that Israel was given.
That is important because the word can sound like an insult in modern English. We sometimes use heathen casually to mean an uncivilised or irreligious person, and the tone is dismissive. Scripture is not being dismissive in that way. It is making a theological distinction. Israel was chosen and given God's law, not because they were superior, but because God set His love on them. The nations were not chosen in that same way. So the term marks a real difference in privilege and knowledge, not a difference in basic human worth. Every person, Jew or Gentile, is made in God's image and stands accountable to the same Creator.
By the time of the New Testament, the word Gentiles had become a standard way to speak of the non-Jewish world, and it carried the assumption of ignorance toward the true God. Paul can speak of the Gentiles who don't know God, as in 1 Thessalonians 4:5, and he is not being cruel. He is stating a fact that shapes his whole mission. The gospel goes to the Gentiles precisely because they do not know God and need to. The word describes a condition that the gospel is meant to change. That is very different from using the word as a permanent tribal slur that keeps people out.
So the answer to what is a heathen begins here: it is a biblical way of describing life outside the knowledge of God. It is a condition, not a caste. And because it is a condition, it can be left behind. A person who was a heathen in the biblical sense can become a worshipper of the living God through faith in Christ. The New Testament is full of exactly that transition. The word marks where someone stands, not what they are permanently. That distinction matters for how we read every passage that uses it.
Matthew 6:31-32 and the Anxiety of the Nations
Matthew 6:31-32 says, "Therefore don't be anxious, saying, 'What will we eat?', 'What will we drink?' or, 'With what will we be clothed?'" The next verse gives the reason: the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. Here Jesus uses the very word we are examining. The heathen, in this passage, are not identified by violence or idol feasts or gross immorality. They are identified by anxiety. They are the people who have no Father to trust, so they spend their lives chasing food, drink, and clothing as if everything depended on them.
This is a striking definition. Jesus does not point to the worst sins of the pagan world to make His point. He points to the ordinary scramble of daily survival. The heathen are the people who wake up worried about tomorrow because they have no one above them who has promised to care. That is not a moral slur; it is a description of spiritual orphanhood. And Jesus says His disciples must not live that way. Not because wanting food and clothing is wrong, but because the anxiety that drives the pursuit reveals a heart that does not yet trust the Father.
Notice the logic of the passage. Jesus has just taught His disciples to pray to "our Father in heaven," and He has spoken of treasure in heaven and of the Father who sees in secret. The whole Sermon on the Mount assumes a relationship. So when He contrasts His followers with the Gentiles, He is contrasting two ways of living: one rooted in the knowledge of a providing Father, the other rooted in the fear of scarcity. The heathen way is not primarily about what you do on a Friday night. It is about what you do with your worries on a Monday morning.
This means the passage searches all of us. A Christian can still think like a heathen. You can hold orthodox doctrine and still lie awake calculating whether you will have enough. Jesus does not say the heathen are wicked for wanting food; He says they are anxious because they do not know the Father. The remedy He gives is not to stop needing things. It is to seek first the kingdom and to trust the Father who knows. The dividing line between the heathen and the disciple, in this text, runs through the heart's confidence, not through the pantry.
The Gentiles Who Do Not Know God
Paul picks up the same idea in 1 Thessalonians 4:5, where he warns against acting "not in the passion of lust, even as the Gentiles who don't know God." Again the defining phrase is knowledge of God. The Gentiles are not identified here by their passport but by their ignorance of the living God, and that ignorance shows itself in how they handle their bodies and desires. Paul is writing to a young church in a pagan city, and he is telling them that their new faith must reshape their sexual conduct. The surrounding culture's assumptions are not to be theirs.
This is the pastoral edge of the word. Paul is not telling the Thessalonians to hate their neighbours. He is telling them not to live like people who have never heard of God. The Gentiles in this verse are a pattern, a way of life, and the church is called out of that pattern. The same apostle who wrote these words spent his life preaching to Gentiles and rejoicing when they believed. So the term cannot be a permanent ethnic insult in his mouth. It is a description of the life he is asking believers to leave behind.
Ephesians 4:17-19 expands the picture. Paul urges the church to "no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind." He goes on to describe darkened understanding, alienation from the life of God, ignorance, hardness of heart, and a surrender to sensuality and greed. This is one of the fullest biblical portraits of what heathen life looks like from the inside. It begins in the mind, in futility and darkness, and it works outward into conduct. The problem is not merely bad behaviour; it is a mind cut off from the knowledge of God.
That sequence matters. Paul does not say the Gentiles are alienated because they sinned. He says they are alienated, and therefore they sin. The ignorance comes first, and the behaviour follows. This is why the gospel is preached as light and knowledge, not merely as a list of rules. You cannot reform a darkened mind by willpower alone. The heathen condition is a heart problem before it is a behaviour problem, and it is healed by knowing God in Christ, not by trying harder to be respectable. That is the hope Paul holds out to the very Gentiles he describes.
When Even the Gentiles Are Shocked
First Corinthians 5:1 uses the word in a startling way. Paul writes, as 1 Corinthians 5:1 says, "It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles, that one has his father's wife." The church in Corinth was tolerating a sin so flagrant that even the surrounding pagan society would have recoiled. Paul's point is not to praise the Gentiles' morality. His point is that the church should have been holier than the world, and instead it had fallen below even the world's standards in this case.
This shows that the biblical contrast between the church and the Gentiles is not a claim that Christians are automatically nicer people. It is a claim about what Christians ought to be, given what they know. Corinth had the gospel, the apostles, and the Spirit, and yet tolerated what the pagans would not. Paul is ashamed for them. The word Gentiles functions here as a measure of how far the church had drifted. When the people who know God live worse than those who do not, something has gone deeply wrong.
First Peter 4:3 makes a similar move from the other direction. Peter writes, as 1 Peter 4:3 says, "For we have spent enough of our past time doing the desire of the Gentiles, and having walked in lewdness, lusts, drunken binges, orgies, carousings, and abominable idolatries." He is writing to believers who used to live that way. The past is enough, he says. There is no need to go back and sample it again. The list is vivid and unromantic. This is what heathen life looked like in the first century, and Peter does not dress it up.
Notice that Peter addresses this to people who had already been Gentiles. He is not othering outsiders; he is reminding insiders of where they came from. That is the pastoral use of the word. It is not a weapon against the unconverted; it is a mirror for the converted. The memory of the old life is meant to produce gratitude and resolve, not pride. The heathen past is forgiven and left behind, and the church is called to keep walking forward rather than circling back to the desires it once served.
Treating Someone as a Gentile in Matthew 18:17
Matthew 18:17 contains the hardest use of the term. Jesus says that if a brother refuses to listen to the church, as Matthew 18:17 says, "let him be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector." This is the final step of church discipline. The unrepentant person is to be treated as an outsider, no longer regarded as a member in good standing. On the surface this sounds harsh, and it has been misused to justify cold exclusion and contempt. But the context is a process designed to win the brother back, beginning with a private conversation and moving slowly outward.
The phrase also sits in tension with the rest of Jesus' ministry, which is precisely why it is so interesting. Jesus ate with tax collectors and Gentiles. He commended a Roman centurion's faith and healed a Canaanite woman's daughter. So when He says to treat someone as a Gentile or tax collector, He cannot mean to hate them or write them off forever. In the same Gospel, the Gentile and the tax collector are exactly the people Jesus pursues. To treat someone as a Gentile, then, is to treat them as an outsider who still needs the gospel and may yet be won.
This reading fits the purpose of the whole passage. The goal of discipline is restoration, and even the final step is not a declaration that the person is beyond hope. It is an honest acknowledgement that they are no longer walking with the church. The community stops pretending otherwise. But it keeps the door open. The man in Corinth who was handed over to Satan in 1 Corinthians 5 was handed over so that his spirit might be saved, and the same letter later urges the church to forgive and restore him. Discipline aims at repentance, not destruction.
So the word in Matthew 18 is about boundaries, not hatred. It marks the sad reality that someone who refuses correction places himself outside the fellowship. But it does not license contempt. If anything, it puts the church in the position of the missionary, relating to the disciplined person the way Jesus related to outsiders: with truth, with honesty, and with a readiness to welcome them back the moment they repent. The term describes a relationship, not a verdict on their eternal soul.
The Heathen Heart and the Christian Life
Putting these passages together, a clear pattern emerges. The heathen or Gentile in Scripture is the person who does not know God, and that ignorance shows itself in anxiety, in darkened thinking, in unrestrained desire, and in idolatry. None of these are random. They all flow from a life lived without the Father. When Jesus tells His disciples not to be anxious like the Gentiles, He is not adding a rule to a list. He is describing the natural fruit of knowing God versus not knowing Him. The doctrine produces the behaviour.
This is why the New Testament never treats the church's difference from the world as a matter of superiority. Paul, Peter, and Jesus all assume that believers were once in the same condition. Peter says we have spent enough time in the desires of the Gentiles. Paul says we were all by nature children of wrath. The line between the church and the heathen is a line of grace, not of merit. Every Christian is a former heathen who has been brought near by the blood of Christ. That memory should produce humility, never smugness.
It also gives us a way to read our own hearts. When anxiety about money, food, or clothing begins to dominate, we are drifting toward the heathen pattern Jesus describes in Matthew 6. When our thinking grows futile and dark, when desires go ungoverned, when we begin to look to something other than God for our security, we are living below what we know. The remedy is not to despise ourselves. It is to return to the Father who knows what we need and to seek first His kingdom. That is the whole point of the contrast Jesus draws.
Finally, this shapes how we treat people outside the church. If heathen means someone who does not yet know God, then our posture toward them should be that of a missionary, not a judge. We were once where they are. We have no grounds to sneer. The gospel is the message that the unknown God can be known, that the alienated can be brought near, and that the anxious can find a Father. Everything the Bible says about the heathen is said so that the church will live differently and reach out, not so that it will build a wall and stay behind it.
Biblical fidelity check
These passages establish that the biblical term heathen, or Gentile, describes people outside the knowledge of the true God, and that this condition produces recognizable patterns such as anxiety, futile thinking, and unrestrained desire. They do not establish that Gentiles are inherently worse than Israelites or Christians, nor that the word should be used as an insult or a racial slur. Paul and Peter both insist that believers were once in the same condition and were saved by grace, not by ethnic or moral superiority. The distinction in view is one of revelation and relationship, not of human worth.
A common misreading is to treat heathen as a permanent label for a category of people we may disdain. That is wrong for at least three reasons. First, the New Testament's whole mission is to Gentiles, and it rejoices when they believe. Second, the same writers who use the term apply it to the church's own past. Third, Jesus Himself says to treat a disciplined person as a Gentile or tax collector while, in the very same Gospel, welcoming Gentiles and tax collectors. The term marks where someone stands in relation to God, and that standing can change through repentance and faith. Reading it as a fixed tribal insult turns grace into pride.
Other passages that speak to Matthew 6:31-32
Anxiety is not a minor theme in Scripture, and several passages address it directly. The promise that God will not let His people be tempted beyond what they can bear speaks to the pressure behind anxious striving, as What does 1 Corinthians 10:13 promise about temptation? explains. Peter offers the clearest invitation to hand our worries to God, which What does 1 Peter 5:7 mean about anxiety? examines. Paul's teaching on spiritual warfare shows where the real battle lies when fear presses in, covered in What does Ephesians 6 teach about the armor of God?. And Jesus' own invitation to the weary reframes the whole struggle, as What does Matthew 11:28–30 mean by easy yoke? sets out. Together these passages show that the answer to the heathen heart is not self-effort but trust in the Father.
Frequently asked questions
Does heathen mean the same thing as Gentile in the Bible?
Yes, in most translations it does. The Hebrew and Greek words behind heathen are the same ones commonly rendered Gentiles, meaning the nations outside Israel. Older English versions often used heathen where modern versions use Gentiles. So when Jesus speaks of the Gentiles in Matthew 6:32, an older Bible might say heathen. The underlying word is the same, and it describes people outside the covenant knowledge of God rather than a separate race or class of especially wicked people.
Is it a sin to call someone a heathen?
It depends on the heart and the setting. Using the word as a sneer against a person or group treats a spiritual condition as a tribal insult, which Scripture does not support. Paul and Peter apply the term to the church's own past, and Jesus welcomed the very outsiders the word described. If the term is used to write someone off as beyond hope, it contradicts the gospel. If it is used accurately to describe life apart from God, it can serve the truth, but it should always be spoken with humility and a desire to see people come to know God.
How do I stop thinking like a heathen about money and worry?
Begin where Jesus begins: with the Father who knows what you need. Matthew 6:31-32 does not command you to stop needing food and clothing; it calls you to stop being anxious about them because your Father already knows. Practically, this means bringing specific worries to God in prayer, remembering His past provision, and seeking His kingdom first. It is a slow reorientation of trust, not a single decision. When anxiety rises, treat it as a signal to turn again to the Father rather than as a reason to panic.
