God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Deloria examines how tribal religions once shaped Indigenous cultures and how reviving them in the modern United States requires negotiating pressures that are spiritual, legal, political, and economic. He contrasts a Western Christian frame that historically turned land into a commodity and separated religion from public life with a tribal frame in which land is sacred, religion structures culture, and community identity anchors ethics.

That clash, he argues, lies beneath what US history misrepresents as mere “land transactions” (220). Deloria describes how, at some pueblos, electricity is rejected on religious grounds, yet children return from public schools expecting cold milk. Elders must choose between ceremonial integrity and everyday needs. Elsewhere, sacred bundles that were once removed to museums are suddenly needed to repair religious continuity before a final knowledge-holder dies. These dilemmas typify a broader recovery effort in a world profoundly unlike the one in which the ceremonies arose.

Christian encounters with Indigenous peoples ranged from bridge-building to brutality. Between these poles lay an inconsistent record that cannot be neatly categorized. More consequential were state-backed church campaigns on reservations, such as mission stations, school regimes that punished Indigenous languages, and outright bans on ceremonies. Indigenous Americans responded with subterfuge, staging ceremonies on  July 4th or other white holidays, disguising their ceremonies as tributes to their oppressors.

The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act lifted the bans, enabling partial revival while elders still lived. Some intertribal movements emerged, notably the Native American Church’s sacramental peyote, which helped combat alcoholism yet ran into drug laws because it was culturally alien to American norms. Over recent decades, many tribes have rebuilt ceremonial life, Deloria says. Revivals also stirred conflicts on reservations, as at St. Regis (Akwesasne), where traditionalists challenged long-dominant church-aligned leaders and, later, opposed casino plans that governments favored as “development” (246).

Deloria describes structural obstacles to revival. Historic bands were small and flexible, he says, while modern tribes are large, legally fixed entities defined by federal rolls, property rights, and blood quantum. The Navajo, for example, were once disparate bands of some 4,000. They were consolidated after the Long Walk and today the nation numbers around 200,000, without commensurate time to evolve scalable religious and political forms.

The core religious value of land now collides with cash-strapped councils and development pressures. Black Mesa’s strip mining pitted traditional Navajo and Hopi against leases sought for revenue and jobs. Vision quests and secluded rites are harder due to highways, jets, parks, ranches, and mines. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Lyng (1988) further weakened protection for sacred sites on federal lands, equating place-based worship with transient sentiment and signaling that law would not shield the conditions ceremonies require.

Education and urban life intensify the strain. Schooling habituates youth to technical, secular frameworks and many then reject mystery-centered practice. Leadership once rested on generosity and moral prestige, but constitutions and elections now reward vote-getting, often breeding corruption and public mistrust that stymies genuine self-determination. A “collective amnesia” (231) obscures legal and historical changes, pushing some revivals to treat ceremonies as social emblems rather than living religious acts.

As tribes document their histories to sustain practice, Deloria warns against reproducing Christianity’s linear historicizing that strips away sacred mystery. Two traditional functions remain powerful: Healing and divination. Indigenous healing persists and even garners public-health collaboration. Knowledge is fragile, as elders die, plants are drowned by postwar dams or displaced by agriculture, and urban distance limits transmission. Divinatory guidance is resurging, often speaking to collective futures and ecological peril rather than individual fortunes. A major hazard, however, is New Age commodification.

Still, Deloria sees resilience. Many Indigenous clergy quietly practice traditional ceremonies; urban churches sometimes host healings; and a broad national Indigenous religious milieu is coalescing that orients people back toward specific tribal ways rather than melding them with Christianity. No true synthesis is likely, he concludes. Instead, the depth and coherence of tribal religions give them a path to outlast cultural intrusions, provided communities safeguard their places, remember their histories without surrendering mystery, and keep religious knowledge anchored in the people rather than the marketplace.

Deloria argues that the European Christian conception of history collapsed under the realities of global discovery and conquest. As exploration revealed new lands and peoples, Christian theologians faced questions about the status of millions outside their narrative. Rather than rethinking first principles, European crowns and churches fused greed and theology to justify domination. Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 bull Inter Caetera offered religious sanction to seize the Americas, issuing what functioned as a franchise to rule “barbarous nations” (238). The ensuing Treaty of Tordesillas partitioned South America between Spain and Portugal before either had subdued it, revealing that papal blessing operated as a hunting license for plunder rather than a moral charter. Aristotle’s hierarchy of men and enslaved persons was repurposed to validate enslavement, while even sympathetic theologians like Francisco de Vitoria grounded conquest in alleged universal trade rights in spite of minor debates.

As imperial competition spread, the church’s claims secularized into a European right of discovery. Indigenous peoples were reduced to a conditional right of occupancy, extinguishable by purchase or conquest whenever Europeans deemed it necessary. England’s victories over rival powers concentrated title claims that the new United States promptly assumed after independence. The Northwest Ordinance proclaimed that lands would not be taken except in just wars, a pledge belied by a century of dispossession. Deloria broadens the indictment beyond North America: Canadian independence dissolved Crown fiduciary duties to First Nations; Australia denied Aboriginal standing to defend ancestral lands; Brazil pursued genocidal campaigns in its interior; Sweden erased Sámi rights; and the United States converted Pacific islands into permanent trust territories managed as tourist zones.

To the familiar defense that perpetrators were “not really Christians” (244), Deloria answers that contemporaries celebrated them as heroes of the faith and that modern Christians rarely mount prophetic resistance to ongoing abuses. He urges abandoning the unexamined Christian claim that God directs history toward a redemptive plan, calling such assertions insulting. Signs of the nation-state’s fragility and the resurgence of ethnic peoples in Europe show that both the sacred and secular expansions of Christian history are unraveling. The task is not sentimental confession about past wrongs but concrete support for aboriginal rights.

Deloria links theological critique to contemporary moral controversies. Ecological limits invalidate literal obedience to Genesis’s mandate to multiply. The backlash against Roe v. Wade and the politicized restoration of the death penalty reveal a Christianity that cherishes the unborn while neglecting the living and that cites Scripture to preserve punitive power. More broadly, piecemeal doctrinal retreat suggests the faith was misdirected from the start, oriented toward control of populations rather than cultivation of authentic religious experience.

Deloria believes that the Vietnam War should have ended illusions of controlling historical processes. Societies must be stabilized against further exploitation by states and supranational corporations, whose current reach is the logical, not necessary, result of Western history. Christianity might survive if it relinquishes its narrow historical teleology and seeks the real meaning of human life on Earth. Even surrendering belief in a deity who micromanages events becomes possible if doing so opens a deeper grasp of religious experience. A true divinity, if one exists, cannot be confined by doctrines or fixed sequences of intervention.

Deloria’s closing insistence is that modern humanity must locate a more profound account of itself and the planet, one that refuses ecclesiastical conquest narratives and aligns moral community with the protection of peoples and places.

Deloria traces how US law, public land policy, and cultural misunderstanding have imperiled Indigenous sacred places and constrained tribal religious practice. After tribes were removed to reservations in the 19th century, many ceremonies were outlawed by Indian agents animated by Christian zeal. Communities responded with subterfuge, shifting ritual calendars to national holidays and traveling discreetly to distant spiritual places.

That fragile accommodation collapsed after World War II as population growth, corporate agriculture, mining, timber extraction, and recreation intensified pressures on public lands. Informal access agreements with agencies eroded as new bureaucrats prioritized developers and recreationists, tightening rules that restricted Indigenous visits to holy sites.

Congress appeared to offer relief in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which declared a federal policy to protect traditional belief and practice and ordered agencies to review barriers. Courts, however, treated the resolution as purely symbolic. The 1988 Supreme Court decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association crystallized the problem: Despite a new wilderness designation that mooted a planned logging road, the Court still held that the Free Exercise Clause does not restrict how the government uses its own land. The majority, Deloria argues, forced tribal religions into a Western framework that reduces religion to private preference, ignoring communal obligations and “world renewal” (253) ceremonies performed for the earth and all living beings. Justice Brennan’s dissent emphasized those communal dimensions, but it did not prevail. The upshot was to deny Indigenous Americans the right to pray for the planet in the manner their religions require.

He contrasts two recurring non-Indigenous reactions: Demands that Indigenous healers publicize teachings like clergy in institutional churches, and dismissals of ceremonies as “primitive.” Both, he says, miss that tribal communities are organized by kinship and shared, lived knowledge; authority to conduct rituals comes from higher powers, not from certificates.

Deloria describes four overlapping kinds of sacred lands. First are sites made sacred by human acts, often tied to sacrifice or memory, such as Gettysburg or, for many Indigenous, Wounded Knee. These places foster social cohesion and are sanctified anew whenever ceremonies are held. Second are sites where the sacred entered human affairs, such as Buffalo Gap at the edge of the Black Hills and mountains in the Southwest linked to Pueblo, Hopi, and Navajo migrations. Since these relationships are reciprocal and delicate, details are guarded, and rituals are not publicly explained. Deloria suggests non-Indigenous, lacking deep ties to place and having often devastated wildlife and landscapes, rarely recognize such experiences.

Third are places of inherent holiness where higher powers revealed themselves on their own initiative. Outsiders sometimes test these places by deliberate profanation, expecting instant retribution, Deloria counters that damage accrues cumulatively through sustained secularity. Prophecies of ecological catastrophe now resonate amid global warming, acid rain, and species loss. Ceremonies tied to such holy places have endured most strongly because of their planetary importance.

A fourth category follows from the reality of continuing revelation: New sacred places must be able to appear. Federal courts often suppress this dimension by insisting on proof of historical use, protecting what looks museum-like while impeding living religions. Deloria argues that recognizing sacred lands is essential to social order, because they orient individuals and communities to responsibilities larger than personal desire. However, US religious freedom has mainly safeguarded beliefs, not land-based practice.

He lists urgent cases where return or protection is needed. Restitution alone is not sufficient. Communities must reconsecrate places like Pipestone and resist commercial uses. Another threat comes from non-Indigenous seeking entry into ceremonies or building careers around appropriated symbols and prayers. Without extended families and communal life, such efforts reduce religion to rhetoric.

The constructive path, Deloria concludes, is for Indigenous people to demonstrate the coherence and sophistication of their worldview. They should defend sacred places as the foundation of belief and practice. These sites teach humility before nature and obligations to other life. Industrial society drives the opposite lesson and time is short. Even if broad public understanding lags, meaningful protection for sacred lands must be secured before a wholly secular world destroys them.

Deloria closes his argument by contrasting core Christian assumptions with tribal religious concepts and showing how these differences shape perception, ethics, and responses to crisis. He stresses that opposing frameworks do not automatically vindicate tribal beliefs because Christianity is wrong. Rather, when Christian doctrine cannot address pressing problems without undermining itself, it is sensible to look to alternatives, including Indigenous religions.

However, those traditions arose for communities living in settings unlike the contemporary world, so their endurance under modern conditions is not guaranteed. The immediate dilemma is meaning. Ecologists forecast severe ecological breakdown, while religious mythologies promise an ending that saves the chosen and reconstitutes the world. To avert collapse, humanity must shift from treating earth as a moral testing ground to seeing a living web of interdependent forms.

Deloria argues Western minds are poorly equipped for this turn. Interpretation of religion in the West is monopolized by categories derived from Christian doctrine, which reduces religion to ethics and aesthetics. It blinds people to disruptive, experiential encounters with the sacred. Western thought has also dismissed other peoples’ knowledge systems as unscientific or superstitious. He cites astrology, acupuncture, and teachings about chakras as examples of non-Western frameworks long rejected because they breach European philosophical premises.

Likewise, traditions that cultivate relationships with place, animals, and plants, or that center religious healing, were discounted not because they failed the communities that practiced them, but because they deviated from Christian norms. Western theology then credited other religions only to the degree they resembled Christianity.

Against this, Deloria calls for attending to lived religious experience. Monotheism often mirrors political organization, rather than organic spiritual life. Experience-based religions commonly display pantheons or multiple spiritual agencies. It is possible the universe is discontinuous even in divinity; the continuing vitality of figures and revelations across cultures suggests a plural, active sacred.

He then reframes religion’s social character. While moments of encounter may be individual, religion takes shape in specific peoples. Universal ethics and abstract soteriology tend to appear later and often coincide with the loss of healing and divinatory power that once bound communities to place and to one another. Western Christians frequently insist that place is theologically irrelevant because God transcends time and space, but that claim functionally moved real human problems to another world and banished the divine from concrete settings. The necessary corrective is to see religion in places. Economics cannot be the sole determinant of land use. Discovering, protecting, and using sacred places is a precondition for collective psychological stability.

Deloria extends this to a geography of spirits. The shared eschatologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam may reflect desert origins, while revived European Druidism may indicate an enduring spiritual profile of those landscapes. Religions can also take root in foreign lands by consecration, producing a powerful union of people and place. Christianity’s best hope, he suggests, is to relinquish doctrines that block ecological responsibility and to grow roots in the lands it occupies, acknowledging that places will generate divergent beliefs and practices.

Religions rarely cross ethnic boundaries without losing force. The ideal is many peoples with distinct religions, each oriented to internal well-being rather than universal conquest or otherworldly reward. In such settings, healing is central. Tribal healing differs from sensational revivalism as it employs specific songs and rites for specific ailments, recognizes limits, and arises from visionary gifts shaped by community and place. In the modern West, medicine and psychology were severed from religion, producing alienation even among clergy. The health of a religion can thus be read in its capacity to heal and in the integrity of its land and people.

Finally, Deloria criticizes modernity’s insistence on verification and explanation at the expense of participation and experience. Society stands at crossroads, yet clings to a mythic 19th century. He urges listening to Indigenous traditions for guidance toward stability rooted in land, community, and lived sacred practice. The planet calls for redemption as sanity, not a late supernatural rescue. Religion must leave pulpits and rejoin the land, integrating peoples with the rhythms of place. Those who accept responsibility to all living things will find peace with the land. As Indigenous peoples reclaim their heritages, others will learn that on this continent the sacred is bound to the earth itself and, for this land, “God is red” (274).