God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Deloria argues that a central difference between tribal religions and Christianity is the degree to which each depends on history. Western culture treats reality as something best explained through chronological sequence, but most Indigenous traditions do not foreground linear time or systematic recordkeeping. Many tribal accounts of the past signal that what matters is the meaning of the story, not its precise placement on a timeline.

Deloria uses Plains winter counts to illustrate this difference. A winter count records one memorable event per year on a hide, creating a visual chain of communal memories that can be read only as long as someone remembers what each symbol signifies. Deloria stresses that these records reflect the psychic or emotional life of the community rather than continuous political or military narrative. He notes that some winter counts omit major treaties and even the battle with Custer, which shows how distant Western expectations of recordkeeping are from Indigenous priorities.

Deloria suggests that, because most tribal traditions are not anchored to rigid chronology, they do not require belief in a single past event that divides time into a decisive before and after. Tribal stories can be ancient or relatively recent, but the religious weight does not rest on proving historical exactness. Cultural heroes exist in abundance, but they do not become singular objects of devotion in the way Deloria associates with Western religions. Deloria believes that this understanding means that tribal communities historically had little internal religious controversy of the kind familiar in Christianity, because religion was not sustained through assent to abstract propositions, but through shared stories, shared practices, and communal memory. Different tribal accounts were not treated as rivals competing for universal truth. Respecting another people’s stories was part of civility, not an occasion for conquest.

Deloria acknowledges that in the intensified treaty and negotiation era with the United States, Indigenous speech sometimes used chronological references, but he interprets this as practical argumentation rather than an adopted fascination with history for its own sake. Chief Seattle’s 1854 reflection at Medicine Creek becomes Deloria’s model of an Indigenous “theory of history” (90), in which Seattle describes tribally and nationally patterned growth and decay, implying a cyclical, natural order rather than a linear march toward a final fulfillment.

Deloria contrasts this sensibility with Western visions of permanent triumph or an ultimate terrestrial destiny. Deloria notes that some tribes have flood, fire, and catastrophe stories that frame time as recurring renewal, yet these approaches remain distant from Western history as continuous documentation of political sequences. What survives most consistently is knowledge of conditions and locations. Exact dates remain largely irrelevant, which is why scholars struggle to reconstruct pre-contact maps and migrations from tribal memories.

Deloria suggests that one could, in principle, build a chronology by mapping sacred places and attaching stories to them. He mentions efforts like a White Mountain Apache historical atlas and says The Book of the Hopi partly functions this way. Still, he maintains, for most tribes, religion does not depend on historical verification. If ceremonies work now, that present efficacy is enough.

In contrast, Deloria presents Christianity as a religion structurally dependent on linear history. Christianity links the crucifixion to a long sequence beginning with creation. He returns to Paul’s argument that Adam’s disobedience and Jesus’s obedience form a historical mechanism explaining universal sin and redemption. The Gospels reinforce this by attaching genealogies meant to connect Jesus to Adam, and by reading Old Testament passages as predictions of Jesus’s life. Deloria characterizes this as a strained effort to turn prior texts into proof, producing a mixture of narrative, teaching, and “tortured” (94) interpretation.

He then emphasizes Christianity’s early, urgent expectation that Jesus would return quickly to end history. When that return did not happen, the religion adjusted by changing immediacy into symbol while continuing to generate periodic waves of apocalyptic certainty. Deloria argues that Christianity can always claim the world is ending and then retreat to distinctions between divine and human time when predictions fail, keeping history central but flexible in ways that protect doctrine.

Finally, Deloria extends his critique beyond theology to Western historical consciousness. He argues that Western history inherited Christian assumptions and became a story of Western expansion, treating other civilizations as significant mainly when they intersect with Europe. He claims Western interpretations also strain credibility when explaining monumental ruins and ancient accomplishments by projecting modern assumptions of uniformity onto the past.

Deloria ends by insisting that Christianity and Western history are mutually reinforcing. Since Christianity tied itself to the claim that its God directs history, it cannot evade responsibility for doctrines that rationalized conquest and manifest destiny. If tribal religions can be faulted for lacking historical emphasis, Christianity’s overinvestment in historic reality has produced destructive consequences that deserve a harsher judgment.

Deloria argues that “the Christian idea of history” (103) encloses only a narrow slice of human experience. As that scheme excludes most societies and religions, he asks whether the portion it includes even warrants the confidence Christians place in it. Deloria notes that Christianity has not produced peace or lasting moral transformation on a large scale. The last 2,000 years are marked by repeated war, conquest, and exploitation, often with Christians killing other Christians, which undermines the claim that the faith reliably changes societies for the better.

Deloria notes a shift between biblical and modern sensibilities. In the Old Testament, divine intervention is depicted as direct and frequent. Earlier believers treated those narratives as plain historical fact, but this began to change. Deloria surveys later historical moments that earlier Christians might have read as divine signs, yet which produced no enduring theological interpretation. He describes the limited theological effect of various historical events.

Deloria then examines how 20th-century theology attempted to rescue the Christian idea of history. He describes “demythologizing” (105), associated with C. H. Dodd and especially Rudolf Bultmann, as a project to reinterpret the New Testament by stripping away embarrassing apocalyptic expectations and treating biblical events as symbolic rather than literal. He also mentions the brief “death of God” (105) theology linked to Thomas J. J. Altizer, which flared during the turmoil of the 1960s and then receded. Deloria implies that, given Western history’s violence, Altizer’s bleak conclusion may fit the evidence better than more optimistic accounts, though most theologians refused to go that far.

Other Christians have located God’s action in social movements such as civil rights, ecology, peace activism, hunger relief, and antiabortion campaigns. However, religious presence does not automatically produce a renewed doctrine of providence, since nonclerical participants are also central and the theological payoff remains unclear. Deloria turns to the Exodus, crucial not only to Judaism but also, indirectly, to Christianity and Islam. He emphasizes that many significant scholars refuse to treat the biblical Exodus as straightforward history. He cites Theodor H. Gaster’s view that the Exodus narrative reads as romantic saga or legend rather than accurate record, shaped by folklore and written down long after the alleged events. He then cites Johannes Pedersen who interprets the story as “cultic” (107) and mythic in character, meant to glorify Israel and its God rather than real history. Deloria’s point is that even prominent theologians and historians treat foundational episodes as stylized tradition.

For Deloria, such evasions become emblematic of modern Christian thought: Theologians speak of God acting in history while declining to affirm that the key events actually happened. Christians may accept biblical stories expansively, but Deloria argues that the religion’s central premise requires at least a few decisive historical claims. If those too recede into legend, Christianity’s claim to be the “true story” (109) of humankind becomes difficult to defend. Deloria then identifies what he sees as the circular logic underlying Christian historical theology. Deloria believes that Christianity asks people to accept a universal history because of a central event and to accept the central event because there is a universal history. When pressed on the event’s factuality, scholars retreat to symbolism and folklore. The result, he argues, is a religion increasingly detached from both time and space, reduced to moral lessons abstracted from “glorified legends” (111) and prone to a harmful division between a religious world governed by special rules and a secular world governed by another.

Deloria introduces his alternative measure: Religions with credible historical claims should be able to identify specific places where formative events occurred and should stand by the events’ reality. He contrasts Christianity with tribal religions, which bind story to landscape with high precision. Tribes develop sacred geographies in which places carry layered narratives of migration, revelation, and communal formation.

Deloria introduces Immanuel Velikovsky as a disruptive figure who challenged scholarly “uniformitarian” (111) assumptions by insisting that catastrophic events could have occurred in historical times and might explain biblical narratives like the Exodus. Deloria summarizes Velikovsky’s thesis from Worlds in Collision and related work. Velikovsky believed that cosmic disturbances involving Venus, Mars, and Earth produced worldwide catastrophes that generated parallel memories across cultures, later preserved as myth.

Deloria is less concerned with endorsing every detail than with the implications of the controversy. Velikovsky was attacked, silenced, and marginalized by academic institutions even before publication, Deloria says, through boycotts and a “conspiracy of silence” (116). Deloria believes that some later findings vindicated many of Velikovsky’s predictions, while critics appropriated ideas without acknowledgment. Deloria reads this saga as proof that modern science can behave dogmatically and that scholars too quickly dismiss ancient traditions as superstition.

For Deloria, the religious stakes are high. If extraordinary natural events can generate religions and leave worldwide traces in folklore, then theologians cannot safely reduce sacred narratives to moral allegory. Verifying the Exodus as a physical event would also validate nonbiblical traditions, such as a Makah story of the sea withdrawing and returning as a devastating wave, and Deloria argues that such cross-cultural corroboration should be seen as useful knowledge rather than a threat. He concludes that the Old Testament may be historically accurate in many respects precisely where it records events that altered human understandings of the world. Thus, modern humanity’s task is to sift many traditions for plausible historical sequences that illuminate the planet’s past and help humankind understand the earth it inhabits.

Deloria considers the consequences if, as Immanuel Velikovsky suggests, the Exodus is preserved memories of real natural cataclysms rather than poetic allegory. If so, religious writings may often be records of observed events. Interpreters would need to revisit symbols and doctrines with an eye to historical and physical verification.

Deloria argues that Western theology assumes a uniform, homogeneous time in which nothing occurs that cannot be seen today, an inheritance of Greek commitments to the constancy of nature. That assumption turns the Exodus into a mere political revolt and makes creation traditions into timeless myths. Such uniformity has often hidden reality from observers. Deloria points to the supernova of 1054, depicted in rock art in the American Southwest as a bright object near a crescent moon. European records, despite a developed historical sense, are sparse because many believed the heavens unchanging and failed to trust their eyes.

From this, Deloria urges a reexamination of how society understands religious traditions. Tribal memories may actually be more accurate and longer in scope than Western narratives, yet Westerners habitually impose linear time and reduce Indigenous accounts of beginnings to primitive cosmogonies. North American peoples were not primarily concerned with time as sequence. When their legends describe other worlds or catastrophic conditions, the focus may be on life conditions and landscape rather than chronology. What Christians have called creation stories may be collective memories of destructive events through which communities came to understand themselves and their world.

Deloria cites the Hopi as an example. Their tradition recounts four worlds. The first, a world of endless space and harmony, was destroyed by a rain of fire, and survivors sheltered underground with ants. Afterward, land and water traded places. The second world separated humans and animals, developed trade and greed, and ended when the earth’s axis shifted, the planet spun violently, and a great freeze stabilized it. People again survived underground until rotation and orbit normalized. The third world, active and technological, included flying shields and devastating wars that brought a flood. The Hopi survived in reed cylinders, sent out birds to seek land, and emerged into the fourth and present world. Deloria highlights an embedded physical claim. In the first two worlds, the sun appears to rise in the west and set in the east; in the last two, it rises in the east and sets in the west. The pattern implies a reversal of rotation, which matches Velikovsky’s catastrophic framework.

Deloria uses a thought experiment to show how a community with memories of only one world could treat others’ accounts as pagan fables and enforce its own story as universal truth. That, he argues, is the position Christians often take toward other traditions. Multiworld memories may point to older memories. He then reads Near Eastern accounts spatially rather than as a single primeval event. Both the Babylonian Enuma Elish and Genesis begin with waters and deep darkness. If understood as descriptions of post-catastrophe conditions in a specific region, these sequences become plausible.

Genesis places light before the appearance of sun, moon, and stars, which would fit a world where light is diffused through cloud cover and only later clears to reveal distinct sources. Plant life precedes light in the text, which is conceivable if plants survive intermittent light during recovery rather than originate without light. Deloria does not choose between literary dependence and parallel description. He insists scholars should allow that these are memories of a particular historical episode rather than abstract cosmogony.

Deloria widens the comparison with North American emergence traditions. Navajo, Pawnee, Arikara, Pueblo, and Mandan narratives describe movement from underground into a lighted world. Such widespread motifs suggest a shared memory of sheltering beneath the earth or beginning communal life after catastrophe. The larger lesson, Deloria says, is that human history is not a single linear thread. Different societies safeguard distinctive geographical histories of the planet.

For Deloria, land is the neglected dimension that anchors origin stories, peoples, and religious life. In the Old Testament, the promised land fuses peoplehood and territory. Early Christian interpretation translated Jewish hopes for restored land into expectations of heaven, stripping place from theology and abstracting creation into a timeless event. Origins of peoples and religions must therefore be sought together and always in relation to specific homelands. American Indigenous understood that losing land dissolves community and identity. Western societies retain a transformed attachment through patriotism and religious nationalism, while Christian history maps onto places like Rome and later national churches. In North America, the faith fragmented into hundreds of sects, reflecting the continent’s powerful and diverse rhythms.

Deloria concludes that land carries spiritual energy that shapes symbols, myths, and politics. He cites European examples of reemerging ancient motifs, shrines layered on older sacred sites, and regional phenomena, and contrasts them with the American Indigenous affirmation that the earth is alive and consecrates human action. Chief Curley’s insistence that the soil is the dust of ancestors captures this fusion of person, people, and place. Any credible account of religious origins, Deloria argues, must restore that spatial and catastrophic dimension and take Indigenous memories seriously as records of what the earth has done and what peoples have witnessed.