God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) was a Russian-born Jewish physician, psychoanalyst, and comparative scholar whose controversial books—especially the bestseller Worlds in Collision (1950)—made him a lightning rod in 20th century science-culture debates, with scientists rejecting his theories as pseudo-science. Educated in medicine at Moscow and exposed to psychoanalytic circles in Central Europe, he emigrated to British Mandate Palestine in the 1920s, practiced psychiatry, edited scholarly projects, and cultivated a lifelong habit of reading across disciplines and languages. On the eve of World War II, he moved to the United States, where he assembled a vast archive of ancient texts, mythologies, and chronicles.

Velikovsky’s significance stems as much from his method as from his conclusions: He treated global oral traditions such as Hebrew scriptures, Akkadian tablets, Greek epics, Mesoamerican codices, Polynesian chants, and Indigenous American narratives, as empirical records of remembered events rather than poetic allegory. In Worlds in Collision, he argued that, around the 2nd millennium BCE, Venus was expelled from Jupiter as a comet-like body, then passed near Earth multiple times, producing global cataclysms recorded in myth and scripture. Later, he claimed, close encounters with Mars in the 1st millennium BCE produced additional upheavals before the planets settled into their present orbits. This disruption, he argued, can be read in the mythologies of ancient cultures.

Deloria is fascinated by Velikovsky because the stakes of this debate map neatly onto the central concerns of God Is Red. Deloria’s project is to elevate Indigenous religious knowledge. Velikovsky exemplifies, for Deloria, how Western institutions often police the boundaries of acceptable explanation: The Velikovsky affair looks to Deloria like a dress rehearsal for the routine dismissal of Indigenous testimony about sacred sites, ceremonial requirements, and origin histories. Velikovsky’s catastrophism is, for Deloria, a foil against the complacent linear historicism of Christian teleology and a resource for validating cyclical, eventful time remembered in ceremony and story.

Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. (b. 1929) is an American Baptist minister and longtime Harvard Divinity School theologian whose work on secularization, liturgy, and public faith made him one of the most visible Christian intellectuals of the late 20th century. Ordained in the American Baptist tradition, he combined pastoral ministry with civil-rights and antiwar activism before joining Harvard’s faculty in the mid-1960s.

In The Secular City (1965), his breakthrough book, Cox argued that secularization and urbanization were conditions under which Christian faith must be reimagined as a worldly engagement with politics, economics, and culture. Cox’s subsequent work extended that project. The Feast of Fools (1969) retrieved festivity, play, and carnival as theological categories, proposing that ritual can heal the split between sacred and profane by creating spaces of celebration, embodiment, and critique.

In God Is Red. Deloria refers to Cox as the liberal “guru” (210) of Boston’s theological set. Deloria praises Cox for naming the end of Christendom and for pressing Christianity to confront the social order it blesses. Cox’s readiness to learn from real communities mirrors Deloria’s own demand that religious claims be tested in lived experience, not insulated by dogma. At the same time, Deloria treats some liberal relevance tactics as symptomatic of the problem he critiques throughout God Is Red. When Christianity is detached from land, community, and ceremony, Deloria argues, it drifts into spectacle and fashion.