God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

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.