God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Deloria describes how Indigenous Americans were largely encountered through stereotypes rather than as contemporary people with immediate political and legal grievances. Popular culture offered two dominant images: The “villainous warlike” (21) Indigenous person who threatens settlers and the noble, wise elder who speaks in uplifting aphorisms. The second image, he suggests, is especially attractive to non-Indigenous seeking spiritual reassurance or “authentication” (21), and it coexists easily with the first because neither requires engaging living Indigenous communities.

As the Civil Rights movement gave way to antiwar politics and broader unease about American morality, many white Americans looked for minorities who could symbolically confirm that the nation still had “good guys” (21). Indigenous Americans became convenient for this role because their early protests were geographically distant, they demanded separation rather than integration, and they seemed associated with a colorful past rather than present-day social conflicts. Publishers capitalized on this climate in the late 1960s, promoting Indigenous-themed books and elevating accounts of activism, but Deloria insists that most available literature still reinforced fantasy. Activists discovered a deep conceptual barrier: Many readers preferred stories from the 19th century to uncomfortable information about treaties, resource conflicts, poverty, or federal policy.

Fiction about Indigenous Americans rarely portrays modern life successfully and often depends on predictable plots in which a white hero, missionary, or gunfighter becomes central, saving or transforming an Indigenous community. Instead of building empathy, such novels tend to offer escapism. Likewise, tribal histories typically narrate a people’s story from pre-contact through conflict and defeat, then fade out around 1890, leaving iconic leaders as symbols of a doomed national fate rather than complex individuals in continuing societies. The reading public is trained to see Indigenous suffering as historic and communal, not as the ongoing experience of neighbors whose rights and conditions demand present action.

Deloria explains that young Indigenous, educated through expanding federal programs, become theorists, organizers, and cultural revivalists rather than quiet bureaucrats, but they face non-Indigenous who cite outdated autobiographies as “enough” knowledge and who even oppose publishing contemporary critiques for fear of stirring racial tension. Activists simplify messages to break through public resistance.

Deloria identifies a significant exception: The emergence of more “serious literature on Indian religions” (30). Works grounded in sustained relationships with tribal communities treat traditions as living, sacred systems. He highlights growing influence from widely read Sioux-centered texts (especially those associated with Black Elk), which begin to function like a shared canon in Indigenous studies programs and among urban Indigenous youth.

Deloria then traces two diverging developments from the early 1970s into the 1990s. First, many tribes experience a genuine internal revival. Over time, Christianity loses ground because it offers less guidance on communal responsibilities and because its religious acts often feel inseparable from Western cultural assumptions. Second, non-Indigenous fascination produces widespread appropriation and exploitation. Symbols are adopted as portable spirituality, then monetized through workshops, fees, and staged ceremonies. He argues that whites frequently prefer Indigenous religion mediated by non-Indigenous persons.

By the 1990s, he concludes, tribal religions become a cultural commodity, often reduced to outward forms and easy principles, even as serious ceremonial life quietly rebuilds in some reservation communities, with the possibility that it will increasingly shape tribal political legitimacy.

Deloria begins with the apparently “incongruous” (40) image of Indigenous activists conducting religious ceremonies inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs building and then leaving behind destruction. He argues that this only looks absurd if it is measured by ordinary standards of law and order, rather than by the deeper history of Indigenous life under US expansion. Activists defended themselves by comparing damage to the BIA headquarters with the seizure of the continent, the dismantling of tribal cultures, and the ongoing denial of rights.

He also frames the BIA takeover and Wounded Knee as events that seem temporally out of place. Major urban uprisings had already occurred in the mid- and late-1960s, so an occupation in Washington in 1972 can look like the late aftershock. However, Deloria insists that the Indigenous movement raises a different kind of issue: One centered on religion and worldview rather than simply equal enforcement of the law.

After 1968, large churches began pouring money into militant social movements and rewarded groups that appeared confrontational. He describes a pattern in which churches accepted accusations of historical guilt, then tried to “purchase” (41) indulgences from that guilt through grants that effectively subsidized escalating confrontations. Deloria qualifies this by emphasizing that many protests were driven by real grievances, not by church money, but he argues that Indigenous issues did not fit comfortably inside the Civil Rights movement’s assumptions. Tribes faced discrimination, but their most immediate hardships came from broken treaties and the distinct political status those treaties implied. Indigenous Americans also occupied a complicated position in federal law which made simple analogies to other minority struggles inadequate.

Deloria interprets the Civil Rights movement as a culminating attempt to realize Christianity’s public ideals, especially the “brotherhood of man” (42), translated into secular language as equality before the law. Court victories and nonviolent protest drew heavily on Christian doctrine and leadership. Deloria places this domestic struggle in a broader Western moral arc, arguing that the Nuremberg Trials represented a peak moment when Western nations judged Nazism in the name of civilization and religious ethics. In doing so, they implicitly claimed moral standing that their own societies could not sustain. The contradictions of racial inequality in American life made a later reckoning inevitable. Eisenhower’s decision to enforce desegregation at Little Rock becomes, for Deloria, a symbolic moment when the logic of law forced the “American Christian gentleman” (44) to confront the nation’s unresolved religious and moral claims.

Distancing themselves from the Civil Rights framework, many Indigenous began rediscovering tribal culture and religious experience, with some ceremonies reemerging openly after decades of suppression. Disillusionment, exhaustion, and sacrifice pushed many toward other routes to “reality” (45), including drug culture and the counterculture.

At the same time, ecological warnings reframed the modern crisis as a consequence of a Christian-influenced view of nature as inert material for exploitation. In the resulting search for authenticity, Indigenous peoples became popular as symbols of a grounded, premodern meaning. Deloria argues that many non-Indigenous wanted only the intangible qualities they imagined Indigenous peoples represented. Indigenous peoples, he says, often misread this fascination as genuine support, leading to recurring proclamations that the next year would finally be “the Year of the Indian” (47) even as public expectations remained sentimental and prescriptive.

Deloria frames the grave-digging wave of 1971 as a frantic search for authenticity that could express itself as the literal disturbance of Indigenous dead. He contrasts two developments. In many Indigenous communities, a religious revival deepens without adopting the harsh intolerance he associates with the white fundamentalist right that helped elect Reagan. Among non-Indigenous, by contrast, religion fractures into New Age consumer spirituality and politically powerful fundamentalism. Deloria ties this to longer European debates about meaning and will, to the rise and frustration of the social gospel tradition, and to modern US politics that redirected religious energy toward personal salvation and partisan power.

Drawing on Camus, Deloria frames the central modern choice as “history or nature, time or space” (52). He argues that Western Christianity emphasized history and domination, weakening a contemplative relationship to nature and enabling exploitation. He proposes that American churches and allied politics represent history, while Indigenous and some ecological or animal-rights movements represent nature, though Indigenous are distinct because they do not carry the same psychological burden of proving belonging. He ends by asking whether Americans will undertake the difficult intellectual and moral work of reconciling history and nature, and whether they will continue exploiting the earth or choose preservation of life.

Deloria argues that the usual American way of describing domestic conflict as a contest between liberals and conservatives masks a deeper and more consequential division. He believes that disagreements between liberals and conservatives are not ultimately fundamental because both sides still rely on the same underlying assumption: History is the main measure of human meaning. Liberals and conservatives both justify their positions by appealing to narratives of progress, decline, or national destiny, all of which treat time as the primary organizing principle.

For Deloria, the more decisive split is between American Indigenous and Western European immigrant orientations. Indigenous, he says, understand reality through land and place, treating particular locations as the highest sources of meaning. Western immigrants interpret their experience through movement and achievement across time, casting their ancestors’ migration across the continent as a largely positive historical progression.

Since one framework is spatial and the other temporal, each side’s statements become distorted when translated into the other’s terms. Deloria claims Western Europeans have been especially resistant to thinking from a spatial perspective because their identity has long depended on a linear view of time in which Western peoples, at some historically privileged point, become guardians and directors of the world. Deloria argues that Americans inherit it as part of their self-understanding.

Deloria describes how the early Cold War doctrine of “containment” (56) attempted to confine an ideological struggle to geographic boundaries, mixing spatial limits with nonspatial ideas and generating outcomes that proved disastrous for colonial powers. Deloria then turns to the postcolonial dilemma confronting Western nations. As formal colonialism becomes publicly disowned, affluent countries lose an older source of wealth and instead rely more on technology and regulatory manipulation, while continuing resource extraction through new forms of pressure, such as sanctions and embargoes. He warns that even if the end of colonialism produces some humanization of formerly exploited peoples, it can also lead to attempts to stabilize global inequality through more sophisticated systems of control. Either path, he argues, fails to address ecological collapse, technological dehumanization, and the erosion of individual and community identity.

Against this background, Deloria claims that the modern world is moving toward the disappearance of time as a practical limit on experience. Technology means that it is no longer time that separates societies so much as spaces and places. This creates a world of nonhomogeneous “pockets of identity” (57) that may clash because they embody different historical and emotional arrangements. If religion remains fundamental to social life, this new environment undermines conventional talk of universal religions and forces a rethinking of “planetary history” (58) since societies do not share a single, homogeneous experience of time. He predicts the emergence of religious movements that seem “out of time” (58), rooted in particular environments and local concentrations of belief.

Deloria critiques the common evolutionary model of religion, which treats religious development as a march from “primitive” belief to refined monotheism and assumes a religion’s value lies mainly in explaining the cosmos through doctrines. Drawing on the idea that monotheism often follows political unification rather than pure revelation, he argues that Western traditions frequently mistake a local revelatory event for a universal truth, and then treat religion as the spread of ethical rules derived from retelling that event. The unsolved question for “world religions” is whether religious experience can be detached from its original cultural setting and turned into abstract principles valid everywhere. The persistence of new movements suggests, in his view, that context, time, and place are central to what revelation actually is, and that attempting to export it often distorts both the message and the receiving society.

In contrast, Deloria argues that American Indigenous and other tribal religions are built directly from relationships with the surrounding world. Context is essential: Revelations occur in specific places that are remembered, protected, and revisited through ceremony so people can renew contact with spiritual powers. Over long occupancy, sacred landscapes become the framework of communal responsibility. What matters is not abstract belief but experienced reality, and revelation is understood as an ongoing adjustment to the land rather than a one-time message for all peoples. Most tribal religions, he says, therefore have a sacred center, a particular river, mountain, valley, or plateau that anchors orientation, history, and obligation. Even displaced tribes can retain these sacred geographies, sometimes traveling quietly back to maintain ceremony.

Deloria acknowledges that other religions have sacred sites but he argues that these sites are too often valued mainly as historical memorials rather than as sources of rootedness comparable to tribal sacred places. Since tribal revelations are intimate, many tribes refuse to disclose sacred locations or the ceremonies connected to them. Deloria describes how temporal religions tend to depend on teaching and preaching, trying to transform individuals through propositions and narratives, yet often failing to produce large-scale moral change.

Spatial religions, by contrast, center communal ceremonial renewal and treat ethics as embedded in customary life rather than as abstract systems oriented toward future “golden ages” (61). Deloria argues that time-based religions struggle to keep giving credible religious interpretations to long stretches of history, and often resolve this problem by secularizing into ideas like manifest destiny or technological progress, both of which treat nature as expendable. The environmental devastation of North America becomes evidence that a temporal framework encourages denial of the earth’s value.

Deloria concludes by proposing that anchoring religion in sacred places avoids many of the distortions produced by time-based systems, while still allowing time to be acknowledged through stories attached to place. Modern American life is being pushed toward spatial thinking through media, ecology, local self-determination, and regional planning efforts, yet religion remains trapped in old theological oscillations. A new theology would require changing the tools by which Westerners judge religions, including judging Christianity through non-temporal categories that emphasize present life and the earth.

Deloria ends by stating his larger purpose: To compare spatial tribal questions and Christian answers, as well as to argue that any genuine resolution of American history requires reconciliation between the land’s “spiritual owner” (69), the American Indigenous, and its political owner, American whites.