God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Deloria contrasts a narrow, sectarian Christian history with planetary history and shows how this restriction shapes Western attitudes toward death and the afterlife. He argues that centering Hebrew and Christian events as definitive for the species is culturally self-serving. Most believers scarcely interrogate this frame, since what matters to them is the promise that history culminates in eternal life. Christianity has long wavered between two incompatible models of that promise: The Greek doctrine of the soul’s immortality, and the early Christian claim of bodily resurrection. Popular religion mixes them indiscriminately, producing visions of heaven that resemble suburban American life. Near-death reports may suggest a peaceful transition, but they are sometimes not tethered to any particular creed.

Despite proclaiming victory over death, Christians often fear it intensely. Historically, Deloria notes, this fixation around death generated systems to manage its risk, such as confession, deathbed baptism, and the Last Rites. The larger eschatological frame reinforced dread and turned earthly life into a mere testing ground. With the Reformation, predestination and “justification by faith” (155) further confused matters, encouraging a worldly sign of election: Wealth. The notion of a preselected elect sanctified inequality and could be secularized to ratify any social order that delivered prosperity to its chosen peoples.

Separating soul from body also licensed cruelty. If the body is expendable but the soul must be saved, inquisitors could torture heretics, and colonizers could conflate conversion with annihilation. Even secular scholars have projected Western afterlife obsessions onto others, misreading monuments like the pyramids as single-minded bids for immortality. By contrast, Indigenous American traditions show little fear of death and imagine continuity rather than rupture. Deloria cites burial practices and belief in spirits as evidence of this contrast.

Deloria recounts a Cheyenne episode to show how dignity (rather than rewards in the afterlife) governs dying. When two young men were compelled to submit to US punishment, they refused to be hanged. They staged a public ride into rifle fire and “[showed] the whites how a Cheyenne could die” (160). Death songs served a similar purpose. Among the Five Civilized Tribes, condemned people often went home, completed rites, and presented themselves for execution, an index of communal strength rather than fatalism. Ceremonies like the Lakota soul-keeping with the sacred pipe or Iroquois New Year remembrances keep the dead within the community’s cycle.

Deloria discusses how Greek immortality treats the body as the soul’s prison and welcomes death, whereas Christianity originally proclaimed resurrection of the whole person and thus feared death as an enemy overcome only by divine act. Modern Christians, he says, mostly revert to Greek views. Tribal peoples, by contrast, seldom theorize either doctrine. They assume survival and integration with land. Even material culture reflects this, such as the way that Indigenous wooden grave markers return to earth while Christian granite and sealed caskets resist decay.

In contemporary America, people euphemize death and distract themselves with sexual libertinism against mortality’s sting. Deloria concludes that behind these differences lies a creation theology. Tribal religions embed humans in nature’s cycles, so death fulfills belonging. Christian estrangement from nature turns death into punishment. Faced with loss, Indigenous traditions regather the community and continue. Grief is real, but guilt and terror yield to a steady affirmation of life’s continuity.

Deloria contrasts Western Christian assumptions about religion and personality with the communal, land-rooted character of Indigenous tribal religions. In the West, becoming religious is imagined as a radical inner change. Deloria traces this to the early church’s eschatological setting, in which Jesus and John the Baptist called Jews to repent so the Messiah could come, expel Rome, and restore national sovereignty. After Jesus’s death, the earliest Christians proclaimed that he had already been the Messiah, soon to return with angelic forces. Paul then universalized the message, reframing it as cosmic redemption from Adam’s sin through Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, yet still expecting an imminent end.

When the end did not arrive, the church shifted explanations, saying that the gospel must first reach all nations, so speculation about the date of Christ’s return was improper. For Deloria, these time shifts suggest doctrines that accommodate historical disappointments rather than expressing a mature anthropology. From these beginnings grew a comprehensive system with sins meticulously categorized and managed by ecclesiastical offices. Preaching became the decisive religious act, while its secular counterpart, education, has come to be treated as a salvific cure-all in modern society.

Once detached from the original apocalyptic timetable, Christian categories hardened into a theory of the self that was then applied to judge other religions. Deloria argues that Christianity first seeks to dominate culture but invariably bends to it. The result is a religion highly personalized and culturally determined, with believers “shopping” (176) for congenial churches and denominations proliferating over doctrinal disputes. Meanwhile, the historical record undermines claims that Christianity reliably transforms hearts or societies. Appeals that perpetrators were not true Christians merely concede the failure to produce the promised change. Philosophically, evangelical practice isolates a hypothetical individual before an angry deity, demands assent to cosmic claims, and then tasks the will with conforming behavior to obscure divine purposes.

Deloria compares this to tribal religions, where religion is a covenant between a people and a place. The subject of religion is the community; ceremonies are communal and inseparable from politics, economy, history, and social life. Doctrine and heresy have little place because theology is lived, not abstracted, and individuals are judged by their concrete participation, not by an assumption of innate sinfulness. The idea of the isolated religious self is nonsensical in such interdependent settings.

Deloria believes that tribal individuality is recognized and honored through names that encode personal qualities, vision quests that assign distinct vocations, dream interpretation woven into communal practice, and careful selection of keepers and priests for integrity and service. Tribal religion creates the community that then creates room for every person while Christianity, he argues, manufactures solitary individuals who briefly assemble and continually fragment over doctrine.

Deloria closes by noting that the Amish are anchored to land, have tight communal customs, and exhibit low social pathology. For Deloria, the Amish approximate the tribal pattern more than most Christian groups; the Mormons do so in part. His broader claim is that effective religion must be bound to a particular land and community and must structure culture rather than be structured by it. Tribal religions embody this integration whereas Western Christianity, centered on individualized conversion and portable doctrines, does not.

Deloria argues that Christianity’s doctrine of creation, formed very early, undergirds its theology yet is now so taken for granted that few examine its implications or its connection to later Christological expansions. Alongside this neglect, the Western linear view of history has been secularized and militarized. Although Christians still claim that God rules history, Deloria notes a marked reluctance to identify concrete events as divine action. History becomes symbolic and parabolic rather than a field of specific divine interventions.

He shifts to the communal context in which religions arise. Contemporary American Christian practice often treats religion as an individual affair focused on getting right with God, sidelining social conditions. This individualism clashes with an older Christian current that emphasized the church as a community. The Old Testament, he observes, framed religion communally, since the Hebrews understood themselves as a chosen people forged in the crises of Egypt and the desert, with ethical obligations toward neighbors and strangers, yet without a missionary duty to convert outsiders.

Christianity introduced a crisis for the chosen-people idea. If Jesus and John the Baptist fulfilled messianic expectations, judgment should have arrived with or soon after Jesus’s death. It did not. The Jerusalem community persisted in poverty, while Paul reframed the tradition so that Gentiles could be saved. This dislocated the Christian God ethnically and conceptually, Deloria believes, transforming a named nation into an indistinct body of believers. Early Christians, identifiable largely as subversives within the Roman order, developed the notion of the church as the invisible Body of Christ, whose true membership would be revealed only at the end. As Rome weakened, the church repurposed imperial administrative structures, becoming Europe’s central institution. By the close of the first millennium, the hierarchy claimed divinely sanctioned supremacy over rulers.

The Reformation shattered that unity into national churches that still invoked the invisible Body while concentrating on visible organization, discipline, and survival. In the modern era, denominations have merged or fragmented, liberalized liturgies and clergy roles, and embroiled themselves in cultural debates, especially over sexuality. Conservative churches have grown by aligning with patriotic and partisan agendas. Faced with disunity, many Christians retreat to the claim that the true church is invisible, which lets visible denominations act as if they are the church when raising funds and issuing pronouncements, yet deny responsibility when outcomes disappoint.

Deloria doubts the viability of Christian universalism across ethnic lines. Where Christianity takes root, it tends to absorb the cultural and political biases of the host people. He contends that refusing to acknowledge ethnicity produces repeated blunders. In contrast, Indigenous tribal religions begin with a concrete peoplehood linked to a place. There is no imperative for missions or religious wars, since converting others would dissolve the community’s distinctiveness. Secure communities exhibit hospitality toward strangers because their identity is not threatened by difference. Tribal religions’ great strength is their coexistence with political, social, and economic life. US policy broke tribal polities by banning ceremonies. Although the Indian Reorganization Act lifted some prohibitions, corporate-style tribal governments introduced new conflicts. Even so, tribes have shown resilience. Members may be condemned as corrupt or assimilated, but they are not disowned as nonmembers. By contrast, Christians often disclaim responsibility for failures by declaring perpetrators not truly Christian.

Institutionally, Deloria notes, the models diverge sharply. Tribal religions have no salaried professional clergy, no towering buildings, and few fundraising apparatuses. Ceremonies occur at sacred sites or wherever need arises, even in urban apartments. Christianity, in Deloria’s view, is dependent on costly properties and tax exemptions, which raises the question of how much American Christianity would endure without secular privileges.

He closes with a warning from law and politics. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the US Supreme Court upheld the application of drug laws to peyote use in the Native American Church, weakening protections for religious exercise and, by extension, placing all traditions at risk when their practices conflict with general laws. For Deloria, the episode exposes a broader irony. A universal, institution-heavy Christianity that long sought political favor now finds its own religious freedoms contingent, while tribal religions, grounded in distinct peoples and lands, continue to model community-based religious life that does not require universal reach to be authentic or effective.