God is Red: A Native View of Religion by Vine Deloria Jr.

American Indians and other tribal peoples did not take this path in interpreting revelations and religious experiences. The structure of their religious traditions is taken directly from the world around them, from their relationships with other forms of life. Context is therefore all-important for both practice and the understanding of reality. The places where revelations were experienced and remembered and set aside as locations where, through rituals and ceremonials, the people could one again communicate with the spirits. Thousands of years of occupancy on their lands taught tribal peoples the sacred landscapes for which they were responsible and gradually the structure of ceremonial reality became clear. It was not what people believed to be true that was important but what they experienced as true. Hence revelation was seen as a continuous process of adjustment to the natural surroundings and not as a specific message valid for all times and places.

Vine Deloria's influential comparison of Native American religions and Western Christianity begins by making a really fundamental and thoughtful distinction between religions of space and religions of time. Christianity, in Deloria's description, is a time-obsessed religion, articulated as a historical progress beginning with creation, moving through the fall, the crucifixion, and looking forward to Christ's return. Native American religions, on the other hand, are largely religions of space: they describe a particular relationship between a community and a place, and for their ceremonies to be fully articulated they cannot be severed from the place they describe.

God is Red is perhaps harsher than any book I've ever read toward Christianity. It's Christianity's time-orientation, Deloria says, that has made it the engine of colonialism and imperialism: the forced conversion of indigenous people is part of God's temporal design, and their subjugation a sign of progress toward Christianity's ultimate eschatological goals. Furthermore, that time-orientation has led Christianity to believe that its message is universal, and cut it off from its context as a religion particular to a community in the Ancient Near East.

It's hard to disagree with Deloria's sober assessment of Christianity as a force in the world. Most of the social ills of the past millennium, at least, are tied up with Christianity: imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, you name it. How can you argue with someone who looks at the state of the world and decides Christianity has failed it? The only real response to this, I think, is to note that there is a version of Christianity practiced throughout the Global South that is directly opposed to these forces. Deloria would say, well, where are these Christians in history? But that's the nature of power--it's visible in ways the powerless simply aren't. But you can hardly quibble with Deloria here; if more people in North America, at least, were honest assessors of the state of things, more people would probably see it his way than mine.

What I actually wanted more of from God is Red was a systematic, positive case for Native religions, but to the extent that Deloria does this, it's dwarfed by the criticisms of Western Christianity by at least two to one. That's in the nature of Deloria's argument, perhaps: because the indigenous religions of the Americas are community-oriented, it makes little sense to advocate for them; these religions have no missionaries and admit no converts. Native religion, Deloria says, flies in the face of our Eurocentric notions of what a religion even is: not a system of beliefs but a lived national, tribal, or communitarian experience. It's not enough to put a dreamcatcher in your window, or step into a sweat lodge. While that's certainly correct, Deloria leaves a lot of really pressing questions unaddressed, I think. For example, it seems clear that sacred Native spaces across the Americas need protecting because they are so crucial--and in some cases, equivalent--with Native religions. But how can a religion like that ever survive in an increasingly global world? If Christianity is to be abandoned in favor of religions that are national or ethnic in character, how can White Americans do this without resorting to literal white nationalism?

The weirdest thing about God is Red is that Deloria spends much of the book advocating for pseudoscience. The roots of Middle Eastern religions, he speculates, are probably ancient aliens, and the events of the Old Testament are probably reflections of ancient cosmic disasters. In this he relies on the work of Immanuel Velikovsky, a notorious but popular crackpot, one of those guys whose dismissal by fields of real scientists becomes part of his own legend. But in a weird way, Deloria's need to find Christianity's historical roots seems to me like a desire to make it cohere to the role he's assigned it, and to square his frustration with the ways in which Christianity can actually be ahistorical. Mostly, the attention to bad science undermines what's most captivating and thoughtful about the book: its vigorous defense of a religious outlook that's been ignored, undermined, and systematically oppressed for hundreds of years.