God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

God is Red: A Native View of Religion (1972) is a religious critique by Vine Deloria Jr. The landmark work contrasts Indigenous, place-based spiritual traditions with Western, history-centered theologies, arguing that sacred relationships to land demand moral responsibility. The work explores Christian Universalism as a Tool of Empire and Erasure, The Implications of History Viewed as Space and Time, and The Importance of Preserving Indigenous Knowledge and Culture.

Standing Rock Lakota scholar-activist Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005) was a leading voice of Red Power-era Indigenous thought, becoming an important intellectual and activist from the 1970s onwards. He was the author of several important works, such as Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and Red Earth, White Lies (1995).

This guide uses the 50th Anniversary edition of God is Red, published in 2023 by Fulcrum Publishing.

Summary

God Is Red unfolds as a sustained comparison between European Christian theology and the land-based religious life of American Indigenous nations. Deloria argues that the Christian doctrine of creation and its linear philosophy of history have been absorbed into a general Western outlook, severing religion from land and community. Deloria argues that Christians maintain, in the abstract, that God rules history, yet hesitate to identify concrete events as divine acts. As the Christian edifice expanded, its link to creation thinned, pushing believers toward symbolic readings of history and private piety. By contrast, Deloria presents tribal religions as communal practices anchored in particular places, where sacred power is experienced, not hypothesized. The contrast of a universal, invisible church with visible, local communities becomes the lens through which the rest of the book proceeds.

The middle chapters track Christianity’s entanglement with modern Western culture, especially in the United States. Deloria surveys 20th-century movements and spectacles, from the Jesus movement to Explo ‘72, from “karate for Christ,” to the business ventures of large ministries. His satirical portraits of celebrity evangelists, theme-park schemes, and sports-saturated revivals point to a civil religion that blesses national power and consumer culture.

At one end stand conservative, revivalist churches that fixate on a simplified Jesus and fuse salvation with patriotism. At the other pole stand liberal denominations that convert every social question into a bureaucratic church program, often drifting from lived religious experience into managerial activism. In both cases, Deloria argues, institutional Christianity struggles to form real communities or to produce spiritual depth, while television evangelism and denominational politics spur fragmentation and cynicism.

Having surveyed the Christian side, Deloria turns to the tribal conception of community. Tribal religions, he argues, are honest about their non-universal scope: They belong to particular peoples in particular homelands, and their ceremonies integrate the social, political, and sacred. Names many nations use for themselves signal a theology of peoplehood rather than an abstraction of humanity. Hospitality to strangers and the refusal to proselytize arise from communal confidence, not exclusivity. Deloria stresses the practical corollary: When community identity is stable, there is no impulse to convert others or to conduct religious wars. In tribal societies, political authority and ceremonial authority mesh, tempering coercion and distributing care.

Deloria then examines the “discovery” of the Americas as a theological event with legal afterlives. The 15th-century papal bull Inter Caetera and the Doctrine of Discovery framed the hemisphere as a papal franchise to be apportioned to Christian kings. Scholastic debates in Spain, from Vitoria through Las Casas and Sepúlveda, quibbled about Indigenous peoples’ status but usually converged on Europe’s right to conquer. As the doctrine secularized, European powers recognized each other’s first-exploration claims while reducing Indigenous titles to a revocable right of occupancy. The new United States stepped into England’s shoes, enshrining discovery and conquest while offering rhetorical promises it did not keep. Deloria extends this critique beyond the United States to Canada, Australia, Brazil, and others, showing how Christian premises licensed seizure, removal, and extermination, often with missionary accompaniment.

Deloria examines reservation history and the suppression and survival of Indigenous religions. In the late 19th century, BIA agents and missionaries criminalized ceremonies, banned languages, and reclassified funerals, dances, and feasts as pagan or seditious. Some communities adapted by holding ceremonies on federal holidays or in remote places, preserving bundles, songs, and shrines in secret. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 eased formal bans, enabling partial recovery as elders taught younger people what they could. Deloria recounts the emergence of cross-tribal movements such as the Native American Church, the long shadow of allotment and blood-quantum rolls, and the political fractures these produced. He reads the protests at Wounded Knee in 1973 as a convergence of traditional authority, legal claims, and youth activism, underscoring that ceremonial legitimacy shaped resistance.

In later chapters, Deloria widens the comparison beyond law to first principles. He argues that Western religion privileges propositions over experiences, often rejecting bodies of knowledge—such as astrology, acupuncture, chakras, or the spirits of places—not because they fail people, but because they contradict imported metaphysics of mind, soul, and will. Monotheism, he suggests, often reflects the political consolidation of empires; the lived shape of religion tends toward pantheons and a layered cosmos. The key is to relocate religion from creeds to relations: Land, peoplehood, and healing power. A religion grows from a land’s spirit, becomes specific to a people, and proves itself in ceremonies that restore balance. This does not foreclose ethics or universals, Deloria says, but roots them in a way of life that can be inhabited.

As he moves toward his conclusion, Deloria examines a hard cultural and theological choice. Western societies cannot piecemeal reject Christian afterlife, creation, and history while retaining the posture of control that produced them. The ecological crisis is not a scientific failure, but a religious one, he writes, because a linear, otherworldly story trained generations to treat the earth as a staging ground rather than a beloved family member. If history is not a script guaranteed by Providence, then humility and repair become the only viable historical method. Stabilizing societies so they cannot be endlessly exploited is the first step, Deloria believes. Returning sacred lands, protecting ceremonies, and rebuilding communal authority are not pleading but prerequisites for any honest pluralism.

In the final chapters, Deloria discusses how religion must be about hearing the land and living within the constraints and gifts of places. Peoples and places can sanctify each other, and some transplanted traditions will take root if they learn to love a land rather than manage it. Christianity could survive, Deloria suggests, if it surrendered its penchant for universality and history and became a religion of place and people, attentive to the specific spirits of the continents it inhabits. The more likely path, he posits, is a chorus of many nations returning to their ceremonies, forming a patchwork of communities that heal their lands and themselves. The question is not whether to keep religion but how to re-inhabit it so that rivers, mountains, animals, and humans can flourish together.