Sort of a book review: God is Red

I've been reading God is Red: A Native View of Religion, by Vine Deloria Jr. It's been interesting, a little frustrating in places. My overall experience in reading it is that he has articulated clearly most of the things that have bothered me about Christianity for years, and also given a clear picture of one alternative, the indigenous spiritual view of the world.

With the exception of pages 108-133 and pages 155-163 (which are a bit whacked! pure science fiction, but more on this anon, click here), I find this to be a very cogent critique of Christianity as practiced over history and of the Judeo-Christian (& probably Islamic) worldview. One can easily see how an outsider listening to what public Christian figures have said, watching what they do, reading some theology and noting the international behaviour of predominantly Christian nations would come to his view. One can always look at the misbehaviour of a group of Christians and say, "Well, they weren't really acting in accordance with the religion," but when such not-in-accordance actions are writ large across the history of the world, of course an outsider would think that the religion must not have a lot of power to shape human action: "…while Christianity can describe what is considered as perfect human behaviour, it cannot produce such behaviour."¹

He properly calls into question whether religions can ever truly be divorced from the physical lands on which they arose and thus become applicable to all peoples, in all places, at all times. He argues that religions derive their form from the sacred relationship of a people to a particular geographical place and ecosystem, and contrasts this to the Western view that religion is a universally applicable system of ethics and morality. He questions things I always questioned: views on death and the afterlife, how the emphasis on the "next world" seems to go hand in hand with not taking care of this world, why doctrines and interpretations of salvation have changed over history, so that somehow the saved are always the high-status people in a society, and why early Christians might have been bamboozled into thinking that the stories and legends of a desert people who are not their ancestors would be relevant to them. He also questions why any indigenous person would convert to Christianity, noting several Indian leaders who noted the divergence between the "Good Book" and the practices of the people trying to convert them. Yet some indigenous people do convert to Christianity, something I have always found deeply disturbing.

He shows the deep hypocrisy inherent in the way that missionary work and colonialism go hand in hand: at the same time that Western missionaries were desperately trying to convince indigenous peoples around the world that Christianity is the one true religion which alone provides a correct moral code for behaviour, the governments of the nations in which Christianity was the dominant religion were carrying out the most un-Christian practices of exploitation, forced removal of indigenous people from their lands, literal genocide, and cultural genocide. Cultural genocide is accomplished by policies (carried out in the U.S., Canada, Africa and Australia, at least) of forced adoption so that young indigenous children were not raised in their own culture, residential schools in which physical abuse was rampant, and willful destruction of a people's language by using physical force to punish young people who spoke their indigenous language.² He also points out the hypocrisy involved when Christian theologians and scholars within the same dominant culture that insists that indigenous people must convert to Christianity because it is the only correct religion back off from defending as literally true anything in the Bible. Obviously Christianity is diverse, and often missionaries do not belong to the same sects of Christianity as those scholars who deny the literal truth of anything Biblical. Still, one can understand the frustration of an indigenous person over this apparent contradiction. He does acknowledge that most fundamentalists defend the Bible as literally true, and rightly derides their credulity. (He gets into trouble when he tries to interpret parts of the Old Testament as literally true, but more on that later.)

¹ Vine Deloria, Jr. God is Red: A Native View of Religion. 30th Anniversary Edition, Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 2003, p. 201.
² See page 168 for some particularly chilling examples of missionaries baptizing and thereby "saving" Indians while killing them.