2023 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Vine Deloria Jr.’s God is Red: A Native View of Religion, which has recently been published in a fiftieth-anniversary edition. In honor of that anniversary, here I offer some reflections on God is Red by way of exploring its possible implications for questions of liberation as advanced within the context of Black religious thought. (All citations refer to the thirtieth-anniversary edition.)
God Is Red, Space, and History
While I have begun by discussing the text in terms of its anniversary, its contents suggest a seeming paradox in viewing the text in historical terms. At the center of Deloria’s account is a distinction between religions whose orientation is temporal and religions whose orientation is spatial. As a “Native view of religion,” Deloria’s text can be read as articulating many absurdities wrought by Christianity’s temporal orientation, articulated from the standpoint of Native American religions’ fundamentally spatial orientation. Christianity puts forth the notion of an eternal God who creates the universe and humanity, in the process inaugurating time and history, respectively. The scripture gives a blow-by-blow account of linear historical progression. An individual’s life, in turn, is largely defined by the progression of time from conception to death, with the achievement of salvation within this timeframe as dictating the dwelling place of the immortal soul in the afterlife. Doctrinal variations abound, but those variations do not for Deloria alter the essentially temporal orientation of Christianity. In Native American religions per Deloria, temporal concerns are marginal. A life’s purpose is understood in terms of fitting one’s surroundings and fulfilling one’s role in an environment and human community, not in terms of achieving salvation or deliverance. The meaning of the sacred is tied to specific places, not to the eternal or the historical.
Christianity is not anchored in place by a conception of specific spaces as sacred; it can travel anywhere in the world and insist that people there lack salvation simply because they lack Christianity. Religions anchored in specific spaces, reflecting the meaning of those places, their ecologies, and the memory of extraordinary events witnessed there, are regarded simply as lacking Christianity, but Christianity does not view itself as lacking the advantages of spatially oriented religions; it simply avows its standing as a historical universal that renders space religiously moot.
If God Is Red is taken simply to express American Indian religion, it would seem to follow that the text itself should be spatially orientated, reflecting a very particular space and place. Yet Deloria himself locates the text in historical context, namely, the heyday of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the early 1970’s. God is Red is thus also a political text, written to address political questions acutely faced during a particular point in time. Like many political texts, though, it is not significant only for what it says about politics. Hence, God is Red offers a historical intervention against a form of colonization genealogically indebted to Christianity’s temporal orientation.
This suggests its relevance to philosophies of Black religion. I say “Black” here as opposed to “Africana” as a matter of emphasis. Africana philosophy of religion includes questions revolving African views of religion which function meaningfully as “native views of religion,” such that applying Deloria’s framework in many contexts would call for assessing whether his articulation of a contrast between the temporal orientation of Christianity and the spatial orientation of native religions holds up. Consider, for instance, the argument of John Mbiti’s African Religions & Philosophy, which focuses on contrasting African ontologies of time/temporality from Christian/“Western” ones. Mbiti’s account suggests not that indigenous African religions are spatial but that they have a differing conception of temporality, which problematizes the relevance of Deloria’s space vs. time framing to African religions.
However, confining our focus to Afro-diasporic peoples in the Caribbean and Americas, questions of Black religion largely center around creolizations of Christianity (and, to a lesser magnitude, Islam and Judaism). In what follows, I’ll take “Black religion” to denote religions of African-descended peoples in the Caribbean and the Americas that encounter forms of antiblack racism as quotidian features of social and political life. Such insights may by extension be relevant to other Black communities, but with the caveat that such relevance may be complicated by additional factors relating to the character of such communities’ indigenous religions.
History and Liberation
Deloria’s account of Christianity’s temporal orientation interfaces with existing debates in philosophy of Black religion. Consider the question of Christian eschatology in Black liberation theology. Eschatology—an account of “end times” through questions of death, judgment, and afterlife—fits most properly within a temporally-oriented religion; a spatial view such as Deloria’s understands death as an immanent aspect of communal life, rather than a radical point of departure whose looming futurity impels questing for salvation.
James H. Cone offers a classic statement in Black Theology and Black Power. “The black church,” Cone writes, “was born in protest. …Its reality stemmed from the eschatological recognition that freedom and equality are at the essence of humanity, and thus segregation and slavery are diametrically opposed to Christianity” (94). Cone’s view of Christianity is decidedly eschatological; he holds that “God’s righteousness refers… to his activity in human history, in the historical events of the time and effecting his purpose despite those who oppose it” (44). Yet from this it follows that many Christian eschatologies must be rejected: “If eschatology means that one believes that God is totally uninvolved in the suffering of men because he is preparing them for another world, then Black Theology is not eschatological” (123). Rather, “eschatology comes to mean joining the world and making it what it ought to be. It means that the Christian man looks to the future not for a reward or possible punishment of evildoers, but as a means of making him dissatisfied with the present” (126). Cone’s view is liberationist insofar as it values Black liberation at least as high as any other telos. As Christianity for Cone is a religion of freedom struggling against oppression, there need be no choice between liberation and religion, between Black Power and Christianity. But should Christianity be presented as in tension with the end of liberation, the preference for liberation is clear and indisputable.
The classic critique of Cone is found in William R. Jones’s Is God a White Racist? Like Cone, Jones is liberationist; “whatever advances the goal of black liberation, which is to say, the liberation of the oppressed, is suitable for a black theodicy” (99). But Jones charges Cone’s theodicy with inconsistency. Cone regards God as a historical agent whose previous acts on behalf of the oppressed are taken as evidence of divine favor toward the oppressed in general. But Cone also avows that the oppression of Black people is evidence that they are divinely favored. Jones points out that demonstrating the soundness of this argument would require witnessing the divinity intervene to liberate Black people from oppression. Otherwise, the multievidentiality of Black suffering makes the competing interpretation—that God is an antiblack racist who disfavors Black people—at least as compelling as Cone’s. Cone’s eschatology, Jones holds, requires a selective interpretation of history: the triumphs of oppressed people in the past are taken as evidence of God’s eventual liberatory interventions, but ongoing conditions of transgenerational oppression are not taken to be products of divine agency.
Jones suggests two alternatives. The first he initially termed “secular humanism,” though in the text’s second edition, he amends this language to “black religious humanism or black radical humanism” (216n4), which he ultimately advocates. The second he terms “humanocentric theism,” which would be an account of God compatible with Black liberation and thus capable of serving as a legitimate foundation for Black liberation theology. Both alternatives depend on taking seriously history being in humanity’s hands: the reality of Black oppression suggests the insufficiency of any forms of faith depending on eschatological deliverance. Liberation for Jones is a burden for humanity alone to fulfill.
Deloria can be read as reinforcing both Cone and Jones on why Black religion should reject eschatology premised upon the afterlife. He writes of religions that center discourse on the afterlife:
Instead of the world being the arena in which real events and personalities played themselves out to produce a meaningful and irreversible history, the events and actions of this world had a “testing-ground” aspect to them. What counted was the next life, not this one. While this thought was comforting to people caught in the lower reaches of the religious, social, economic, and political pyramids, these religions appear to be simply control measures for manipulating large populations and not a realistic appraisal of cosmic reality. In the last analysis, personal responsibility becomes a responsibility to the set of behaviors that would guarantee eternal life and not an ethic that would enable people to deal justly with their contemporaries. (168–169)
However, Deloria also adds another dimension to the question of whether Christianity functions as impediment to Black liberation. Deloria writes:
The Civil Rights movement was probably the last full-scale effort to realize the avowed goals of the Christian religion. For more than a century, the American political system had proclaimed the brotherhood of man as seen politically in the concepts of equality of opportunity and justice equally administered under the law. Equality under the law, however, was a secularized and generalized interpretation of the Christian brotherhood of man—the universal appeal of individuals standing equally before God now seen as people standing equally before the law and secular institutions. While the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education fund fought for a series of brilliant court battles leading up to the great Supreme Court decisions, in the background certainly lurked the great Christian message of the brotherhood of man. A majority of Americans rejected this secular version of brotherhood and sought to prevent its realization because of long-standing attitudes that people of color were necessarily inferior. (47–48)
On the one hand, the point could be read as indicating simply that integration as a political ideal presupposed a Christian viewpoint, in which the ultimate end of Black protest and struggle was white fraternal recognition. Black nationalism, as Deloria notes, emerged as a competing framework more akin to indigenous struggles for sovereignty which require not recognition but a competing political entity to be reckoned with.
On the other hand, Deloria’s claim takes on even more pointed significance in terms of representation of Civil Rights victories. Such victories can be represented as eschatological fulfillments that are taken to mean both that deliverance from oppression has been largely achieved and that such emancipatory events indicate that all remaining oppression will eventually be overcome. That such victories also rested upon concessions from a white-dominated state apparatus also invites homodicean interpretations (or in Sylvia Wynter’s terms, biodicean ones), since they are taken as evidence of “Man’s” benevolence in taking up the eschatological function of the deity. Though Cone himself would reject this interpretation, a more credulous interpreter of Cone’s eschatology could hold the advances of the Civil Rights movement to be in effect a divine liberation event, concrete demonstration of God’s favor toward Black people.
Assessing Deloria’s account in relation to liberationist philosophy of Black religion thus calls for addressing head-on the relationship of history and liberation. Conceptually, liberation may demand a historical/temporal orientation. Space viewed independent of its history could be conceived as occupied or unoccupied but not as having been liberated. Liberation involves dialectically moving through successive stages of an original freedom, an imposed unfreedom, and achievement of new freedoms through eradicating imposed unfreedoms. This is not to say liberation is only historical—we can think of liberation in other terms, e.g., existential or aesthetic ones. But it is to say that temporality may be inescapable in comprehending liberation.
The question, then, is what role—if any—religion ought to play in giving meaning to historical events. Jones and Cone are here opposed. For Cone, historical events can be evidence of divine agency, and particular historical events are interpreted as such (primarily in scripture). Jones rejects such selectivity: either an omnipotent God is responsible for all historical events or all historical events ought to be understood in terms of human agents. Deloria’s view would suggest that religion does play a role in interpreting historical events, but does so through imbuing particular places and spaces with meaning. A particular community, bound by a religious relation to a particular place, experiences history in this or that way on the basis of the meaningfulness of the place.
In the context of histories of oppression and liberation, the matter of meaning that comes to the fore is that of the oppressed community. Both secular and religious accounts often devolve in Euromodern contexts into individualizing suffering to the point of rendering communal oppression unintelligible. Calls for justice and reparation are impeded by assertions that victims and perpetrators are only meaningful individualistically.
For Deloria, space and community are intertwined in Native American religion. Space as source of highest meanings renders community deeply meaningful, as community is defined in relation to shared inhabitance. Religion thus develops and maintains political solidarity. Attempts to undermine Native American liberation, then, have long rested on efforts to individualize Native Americans to render national sovereignties ineffectual or non-existent, best exemplified by the notorious Dawes Act.
This issue, though, can also be raised at a second level, in terms of the relations between indigenous nations: isolating individual nations so that each relates to the U.S. bilaterally can produce conditions under which the joint power of a plurality of indigenous nations to fight American colonialism together is diminished or foreclosed. Deloria’s historical positioning of God Is Red in terms of AIM, then, relates pan-Native American solidarity to “Native American religion” as such. Deloria’s argument is not made through an in-depth comparison of, for instance, Navajo religion, Lakota religion, and Cherokee religion. It is, rather, an effort to articulate a conception of core philosophical differences between Christianity and Native American religion that reflect Deloria’s knowledge of a variety of American Indian religions gained primarily through his engagement in shared political struggles. On the one hand, Deloria can be essentially correct about the orientation of Native American religions in general. On the other hand, though, the shift from hundreds or thousands of distinctive religions, reflecting hundreds or thousands of distinctive spaces, to a conception of “Native American religion” as such can best be described in historical terms. This raises a critical question, then: could Deloria be said to be creolizing Native American religions through adding to their spatial orientations a liberationist and in some sense historicist conception of the meaning of pan-Native American struggle?
Displacement and Spatio-Communal Orientations
It might initially seem that focus on space and place indicates a disanalogy between Native American religions and Black religion in the African diaspora. Deloria initially frames the distinction between temporal and spatial religious orientation in terms of the difference between native and immigrant concepts. He writes, “Immigrants review the movement of their ancestors across the continent as a steady progression of basically good events and experiences, thereby placing history—time—in the best possible light” (61). But for the African diaspora, “immigration” poorly captures the actual movements of most ancestors, and the progression is not regarded as basically good. This need not negate Deloria’s critique: Black Christians might, for instance, resort to eschatological optimism or indulge in a mythos of racial progress which would have similar effects. But it raises the possibility that Black religion may fit neither category in Deloria’s account.
This is further complicated by an aspect of American Indian experience that God Is Red does not directly address: the spatial displacement of many Native American nations and peoples. The various forms with which the U.S. sought to relocate and/or eradicate such nations mean that many nations practice religions originally birthed in other spaces. AIM, likewise, had its roots in Native American communities displaced in urban centers. If Deloria’s account emphasizes a spatial sense of nativity, it leaves open the question of the meaning of that sense in relation to the historical fact of diasporic American Indian communities. A further complication is the relation between descriptive and normative elements of Deloria’s sense of spatiality. He writes, “Christianity shattered on the shores of this continent, producing hundreds of sects in the same manner that the tribes continually subdivided in an effort to relate to the rhythms of the land. It is probably in the nature of this continent that divisiveness is one of its greatest characteristics, a virtually uncontrollable freedom of the spirit” (143). This fits Deloria’s broader normative case for why religion ought to be spatially-oriented: because Christianity couldn’t deal with the richness of North America’s geographical and ecological diversity, it might be surmised that religions need to address spatiality. But this may also suggest the inevitability of pivots toward spatiality: when religions travel beyond their points of origin, geography will creolize them.
The counterpart of this insight is Deloria’s attention to how Christianity’s temporal orientation has been secularized in Euromodernity. Consider his discussion of how temporally-orientated religions view some historical events as divine intervention but not others. “Western religion seems to have resolved this problem of interpretation,” Deloria writes, “by secularizing itself. Instead of working toward the Kingdom of God on Earth, history becomes the story of a particular race fulfilling its manifest destiny. Thus, Western history is written as if the torch of enlightenment was fated to march from the Mediterranean to the San Francisco Bay” (68). If Christianity splintered on the shores of Turtle Island, it doesn’t follow that the form of historicism peculiar to Christendom did. Indeed, Deloria trenchantly explores just this point in terms of the secularization of Christianity into historicist justifications for conquest: “It is said that one cannot judge Christianity by the actions of secular Western man. But such a contention judges Westerners much too harshly. Where did Westerners get their ideas of divine right to conquest, of manifest destiny, of themselves as the vanguard of true civilization, if not from Christianity?” (111)
One might maintain, then, that secularization of Christianity into Euromodern conceptions of legitimacy, rule, epistemology, aesthetics, etc., involved unified or unifying central tropes—whiteness, Europe, enlightenment, civilization, modernity, etc.—while leaving space for disunity in Christianity as a religious form more attentive to local concerns. This need not imply that the grand historical narrative is impervious to localizations—there can be, to use Walter Mignolo’s phrasing, secularly global designs with local histories. But as a matter of degree, the secularization of Christian temporality into colonial and racial tropes may be far more homogenous than religious practices of Christianity. This leaves room for the hypothesis that the greatest damage done by Christianity’s historical orientation can be found in its secularizations and not in its ramifications within the domain of religion as such. To such a hypothesis could be added the suggestion that if Black religion involves fusions of temporal and historical elements, such syncretism could still be liberationist if it does not proffer a quietist eschatology.
This leaves open the question of distinctively spatial dimensions not only of American Indian religions but of Afro-diasporic ones. In other words, even if it is a leitmotif of Black religion to have a decidedly historical perspective on liberation, it need not follow that Black religion cannot also decisively bear upon questions of space and place. This implicates two primary lines of inquiry.
The first is Black religious locality: how does Black Christianity differ, for instance, between its practice in the south and north of the United States, or perhaps more pointedly, between urban and rural locales? How does it differ in Canada, the U.S., the Caribbean, Colombia, and Brazil? How did the development of Rastafari reflect specific elements of Jamaica as distinct from other locales in the Anglophone Caribbean? How do practices of Obeah, Vodou, Santería, etc. reflect specifically local conditions beyond their reflection of regionally Caribbean conditions? How does the development of the Nation of Islam reflect the specific conditions of African-American communities in industrialized urban centers of the northern U.S. and the influence of successive “Great Migrations” from the southern U.S.?
The second is how Black religion represents and comprehends the space(s) from which Black communities have been displaced. Besides the leitmotif of liberation, there is the leitmotif of Africa in Black religion. Africa’s symbolic significance does not necessarily help make sense of the specific locality faced by a religious community, but it is frequently invoked in order to make sense of the community as a community. It bears noting that this sense of place is arrived at historically: prior to Euromodern domination, there was no basis for representing Africa as Africa. But for communities displaced by the slave trade (or grappling with the colonization of Africa itself), Africa became a meaningful place from which to have been displaced, and in turn, a symbol anchoring religious practice. God Is Red suggests a degree of the same process has occurred in Native American religions: the idea of the continent as a sacred space linked to American Indian struggles for sovereignty.
Conclusion
God Is Red thus brings support to critiques of eschatological optimism in Black liberation theology while offering resources for how to work through its implications for religion as such. Because hope for divine redemption in history may produce quietism, liberationist philosophy of religion may demand secular conceptions of history, in which religion cannot itself explicate the meaning of historical events. Temporally oriented religions thus pose danger to liberation by making conceptions of past, present, and future matters of faith rather than reason. Deloria’s contention prompts consideration that Black religion could develop in service of liberation through attention to shifting from a temporal orientation to a spatial one. This would be compatible not only with Jones’s radical suggestion of “black religious humanism,” but potentially with his more moderate call for a humanocentric theism, since the divine could be understood primarily in spatial rather than historical terms.
Here I am reminded of Paget Henry’s argument in Caliban’s Reason. Henry argues that starting in the nineteenth century Afro-Caribbean philosophy becomes largely divisible into two schools, historicism and poeticism. The historicist wing takes liberation to require understanding the historical development of the Caribbean in terms of a broader global political economy, and generally advances a dialectically materialist analysis of Caribbean past, present, and future. The poeticist wing focuses on practices of self-making and regards impediments to Caribbean freedom as lying in psychological or spiritual conditions, such that forms of ego-collapse are the primary issue for Afro-Caribbean philosophy to analyze and develop methods for overcoming. Henry avers that the best exemplars of Afro-Caribbean philosophy in the twentieth century were those who in some way sought to synthesize poeticist and historicist elements.
Taking seriously Deloria’s argument, a provisional conclusion of its implications for liberatory philosophies of Black religion might be as follows: Black religion may fulfill an essential function in helping communities bind and render their members meaningful to themselves and others. Such function speaks to many of the impediments to liberation identified by poeticists, as well as questions raised by historicists about how colonialism/coloniality erect barriers to political solidarity. A spatial orientation might be necessary to achieve this, since the character of spaces transcends human agency and is irreducible to the historical. Since history is contingent on human acts, where religion can make meaningful the transcendental in terms of space and place, it can facilitate the poeticist elements of communal liberation without impeding the rigor of historicist analyses and secular forms of liberatory solidarity which transcend the religious. Whether Black religion is ultimately humanistic or theistic, if it is humanocentric in its account of history as suggested by Jones then there is room for it to work out conceptions of space and place that render quotidian life and communal bonds meaningful, and thus sustain the health of communities who have a historical role to play in transforming the world toward liberatory ends.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
