71 pages • 2-hour read
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion
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Themes
Christian Universalism as a Tool of Empire and Erasure
In God Is Red, Deloria argues that Christian universalism has been a tool of empire and erasure. By claiming a single, timeless truth that transcends place, people, and history, Christian institutions helped to rationalize conquest and the dismantling of Indigenous societies. Deloria contrasts Christianity’s abstract humanity and linear history against religions of particular peoples rooted in specific places. The consequence, he contends, has been centuries of dispossession disguised as piety.
Deloria reconstructs the legal and theological machinery that made Christian universalism actionable. The papal bull Inter Caetera of 1493 licensed Spain and Portugal to seize lands in the Americas, while the Treaty of Tordesillas partitioned continents. The Spanish Requerimiento read to Indigenous nations performed a ritual of universal Christian history that transformed refusal into a “just cause” for war. As empire passed from ecclesiastical to secular hands, the doctrine survived in new forms. The British and later the United States asserted the Doctrine of Discovery in the same exploitative manner. Deloria extends the lens globally, noting Canada’s refusal to recognize aboriginal title, Australia’s denial of standing to the First Peoples, and Brazil’s genocidal clearances in the interior.
For Deloria, the church’s self-description as an invisible body loosens communal ties to land and kin, while missionary campaigns and federal policy attacked the concrete practices that maintained Indigenous worlds. Ceremonies were banned, children punished for speaking their languages, and sacred bundles warehoused in museums. When Congress belatedly passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, courts read it as symbolic rather than substantive. The Supreme Court’s decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery, for example, treated world-renewing rites as personal aesthetic preference and allowed the government to destroy the conditions of ceremonial life. Such rulings, Deloria suggests, are rife with Christian universalism. Religious freedom is defended at the level of opinion but withdrawn from the places, plants, and practices that make a tradition real. Meanwhile, extractive projects from strip mines to telescopes proceed as if land were merely resource and not relation.
Deloria also shows how universalism aids erasure by fusing with the nation’s secular myths. American Christianity often follows (rather than critiques) culture. The rhetoric of saving souls pairs easily with civil religion and corporate ambition, as both rely on the same abstraction from place. Against this pattern, Deloria points to Indigenous religions centered on peoplehood, ceremony, and the sanctity of specific sites. God is Red invites audiences to abandon universal claims that justify domination and to relearn religion as fidelity to places and communities.
The Implications of History Viewed as Space and Time
Deloria argues that Christianity organizes history chiefly as time, a linear sequence that begins with creation in Genesis and moves toward a singular, predicted end of time. In contrast, Indigenous traditions organize history chiefly as space, a dense web of relations among peoples, creatures, and specific places. Throughout God is Red, Deloria thus argues for the implications of history viewed as space and time.
Linear time encourages abstraction, as it tells a universal story that can travel anywhere without feeling the need to change. Sacred space requires particularity and ties people to mountains, rivers, and migration routes. As such, it measures worth by fidelity to ceremonies that renew the world where one stands. Deloria’s account of Indigenous religion shows how space shapes belief. Ceremonies arise from seasonal cycles, from the behavior of the “other peoples” (256) of creation, and from revelations tied to precise locations. He distinguishes kinds of sacred sites to clarify this spatial orientation, while emphasizing how people are commanded to pray not for private comfort, but for the continued flourishing of the earth.
Since Western institutions define religion as belief rather than as location and practice, they struggle to see this spatiality. Deloria cites examples of law in the United States that reveals the cost of that prejudice. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery and the Employment Division v. Smith all presume that religion can thrive anywhere and anytime, so long as thoughts are free. Deloria insists that Indigenous religions require the freedom to be in the right places at the right time. Ignoring this essential aspect of Indigenous spirituality leads to the transformation of living rites into artifacts and the replacement of spatial knowledge with a thin historicism that catalogs the past while disabling it.
Deloria proposes a reorientation that integrates space and time and gives primacy to place. A viable religious life, Christian or otherwise, must root itself in lands and peoples rather than claim a universal vantage that floats above them. Traditions should accept their ethnic and geographic particularity and then shoulder obligations that arise from those particulars.
The book’s closing argument is that history only regains meaning when time bends to space. To live well, peoples must learn to hear what their lands require, to protect holy places, and to preserve the ceremonies that renew the world. Without sacred geography, modern society reduces history to conquest and ends in ecological ruin. With it, time becomes the record of covenant keeping, counted not by milestones of progress but by cycles of gratitude and care.
The Importance of Preserving Indigenous Knowledge and Culture
In God Is Red, Deloria argues that Indigenous knowledge is a living practice, albeit one that has faced constant persecution. Federal agents and missionaries banned dances and funerals, punished children for speaking Indigenous languages, and forced communities to move away from sacred places and pilgrimage routes. Even after legal restrictions softened, new pressures undermined continuity. Against this erosion, Deloria documents a spiritual revival, advocating for the importance of preserving Indigenous knowledge and culture.
Deloria stresses that, even when heavily oppressed, Indigenous communities committed to preserving their traditions. Tribes preserved ceremonies in secret under cover of national holidays. Communities reclaimed sites through political struggle, as in the return of Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo. Many peoples rebuilt naming ceremonies, healing rites, and seasonal dances as young members sought identity in cities and on reservations. Deloria notes that traditional healers continued to cure illnesses that biomedicine could not address and that some Public Health Service units began to recognize these practices as complementary rather than superstitious. He also describes intertribal councils that attempted to teach principles, share experiences, and protect sacred ways, even if some gatherings drifted into nostalgia. Crucially, preservation took the form of practice, as a ceremony survives by being performed.
Deloria is equally alert to subtler threats that mimic preservation while hollowing it out. New Age markets commodify rituals and entice underfunded practitioners to serve tourists rather than their communities. Museums curate sacred bundles as art objects rather than as living covenants. University programs sometimes favor textual analysis over community obligations, while tribal governments, pressured by scarcity and federal frameworks, lease holy landscapes for mines or telescopes, then ask religion to adapt to development timetables. Deloria does not deny the need for economic survival, but he insists that preservation requires a different approach that emphasizes gratitude, humility, and balance.
The practical program that emerges from God Is Red is clear. Deloria encourages people to protect access to sacred places and to restore lands when possible. He argues that Indigenous Americans must reweave ceremonies into everyday life, rather than staging them as spectacles. He advocates for a strengthening of languages and kinship structures across generations, while also suggesting that people should resist universal narratives that treat Indigenous religions as preliminary stages on a ladder of progress. Preservation, in Deloria’s vision, is not a backward-looking effort to conserve quaint customs, but a forward-looking commitment to maintain the ceremonies that renew the world.
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