God is Red

Western Peoples have become accustomed to thinking of religious activity as involving a radical change of human personality. This attitude is ingrained in European peoples and finds its greatest following in the United States, where a substantial number of people believe that becoming a Christian involves a radical change in the human being’s constitution. In contrast to this attitude, the Indian tribal religions do not necessarily involve any significant change in human personality but encompass within the tribal cultural context many of the behavioral patterns spoken about by Christians.

The basis for Christian beliefs must certainly originate in the days of the early church. Arising in the days of turmoil of the Jewish eschatological hopes, the message of the early church was one of impending doom, the arrival of the day of judgment, and the consequent salvation of those people who believed the Christian message. The chief message of Jesus seems to have been a call for repentance by the Jews so that the Messiah could come, throw the Romans out, and reinstall the Jewish state. In this respect, Jesus and John the Baptist stood well within the Zealot tradition of Jewish sects, which looked for a radical intervention by God in history.

In the very early Christian community, the message of Jesus was transformed into a message about Jesus having been the Messiah who had come to earth, been rejected, and would return almost immediately with an angelic army to judge the world. This mes-

sage was further transformed with the conversion of Paul, who

later articulated a theory of cosmic redemption based on the Crucifixion of Jesus, and the subsequent beliefs that he had risen from the

dead and appeared to his disciples and then to Paul on the road to Damascus.

The impending end of the world did not occur within the lifetime of even the longest-lived and immediate disciple of Jesus, and the doctrine changed once again to provide that missing explanation to hold the religious community together. One explanation of the failure of Jesus to return was that he could not come until all nations had heard the message of the Christians about the meaning of Jesus’s death. Another explanation was that Jesus had intended to found a church and had given supernatural powers to the representatives of this church to exercise until his return. An even better explanation was that if people persisted in attempting to discover when the end of the world would occur, they would preempt God’s options. In spite of what the Bible said it was therefore wrong to speculate on the time of the return; people simply had to wait it out and behave themselves in the meantime.

The changing time element in these various theories of the meaning of the life and message of Jesus is extremely important in understanding the nature of the Christian conception of the human personality. It indicates that the various theories were fundamentally accommodations to the incidents in the life of the early Christian community and not intended to reflect a reasoned, mature, or even rational understanding of human beings.

If we refer to the immediate urgency felt by Jesus and John in gaining the confidence of the Jews (they in fact knew that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand), the initial demand for repentance appears as quite similar to recent power movements in American society. These power movements (i.e., the Black Panthers) anticipated a violent revolution in the United States that was to be followed by a prolonged period of peace and justice during which minority groups would control the nation and not make any of the mistakes made up to that point in American history.

In the same manner, Jesus and John called for a general repentance of the Jews so that the Messiah could come and restore the Jewish people to international sovereignty by driving out the Romans. Repentance was thus a short-term shifting of alliances of individual Jews from one religious sect of Judaism to another before the impending arrival of the last days. Their call was not an effort to bring into fruition another manner of viewing life but an attempt to restore to the Jews a sense of national pride and group integrity before the peoples of the world were judged. The Dead Sea Scrolls have made it fairly clear that Palestine at that time seemed to abound with religious communities; many of them looked forward to divine military intervention on behalf of the Jews. In this respect, the ghost dance of the American Indians of the last decade of the last century looked forward to the same type of divine intervention.

The activity of the early church was centered on continuing to call the Jews to repentance. The Jerusalem community headed by Jesus’s brother James the Just thought the arrival of the kingdom so imminent that they were soon destitute of funds because everyone had stopped working in expectation of the world’s end. Paul, in one of his earliest efforts to reconcile the Jerusalem community with his new doctrines, collected money to help the disciples survive. Conversion at that point must have involved simply an acknowledgment that Jesus had been the Messiah and that he was expected to return soon.

It was with the theological speculations of Paul that the Christian religion was expanded far beyond its original intent or scope. Paul viewed Jesus as representing a cosmic Christ standing as an obedient son of the deity and as a sacrificial gift atoning to God for the disobedience of Adam, presumably a historical figure who had originally corrupted human’s relationship with God. Paul believed in the idea of original sin because he had provided the solution to it with his theories of cosmic atonement. Yet even with Paul, the expectation of the imminent end of the world was reflected in his efforts at counseling his new congregations as to their interim behavior.

From this initial series of concepts, additional Christian doctrines evolved; a totally coherent process of repentance, conversion, redemption, salvation, confession, absolution, and eternal life was constructed as the Christian description of the effect of the sect’s religious beliefs on the human personality. Almost every category of human behavior appears to have been set into a system of distinguishing good deeds, sins, and penances through the offices of the organizational church. Sin, for example, could at least be classified into original sin, mortal sins, and venial sins, although in some Christian denominations there may be additional categories.

As Christianity gained political control over the lives of Western peoples, the Western theories of human personality began to develop. While Christianity has recently declined in its importance in the West, many of its original premises continue to exert influence over the way people think of themselves, especially in the field of religious experiences. Preaching and teaching, the fundamental form of religious activity set down by John and Jesus and emphasized by Paul, has dominated Western peoples ever since. As preaching in the Roman world was thought to be the key to one’s salvation, so education, its secularized counterpart in the contemporary world, is thought to be the final answer to social ills.

Once the various Christian doctrines are taken from their original time dimension and used to form a theory of human personality coupled with the identification of sins in anticipation of the final judgment that is apparently still to come, they can be said to form the basic posture of Western peoples toward this world, the world to come, and the world’s institutions. Human personality has been forced into these predetermined categories without regard to the reality of human experience. Other religious systems have been detrimentally explained in terms of the basic Christian categories of explanation. As we read in chapter 10, the Christian concern with death has been used to project a universal fear of death by all men when such fear has not necessarily been the case.

The great variety of Christian denominations that now confronts us in the religious sphere makes it virtually impossible to gain a consensus among Christians as to the meaning of the respective doctrines. Conversion may mean a quasi-miraculous event in which instant salvation is made available to the convert, or it may mean only the beginnings of an intention to live a Christian life as defined by a particular denomination. Baptism may be seen as the almost magical washing away of original and accumulated sins or as a gesture of initiation into the religious community. One can hardly determine what interpretation of any Christian doctrine would receive the support of a majority of Christian believers because it is doctrinal disagreement that creates the Christian denominations.

What we are more interested in, however, is what effect in practical terms the various sequences of the Christian life—from initial conversion to eventual salvation—have on individuals and societies. What distinguishes a Christian from any other person is difficult to deter-mine. The track record of individual Christians and Christian nations is not so spectacular as to warrant anyone seriously considering becoming a Christian. From pope to pauper, Protestant to Catholic, Constantinople to the United States, the record is filled with atrocities, misunderstandings, persecutions, genocides, and oppressions so numerous as to bring fear into the hearts and minds of non-Christian peoples.

One aspect of Christian history that is so appalling is the almost continuous warfare between Christians. Heresy hunters seem to abound in Christian history as a regular part of its religious experience. Persecutions for religious purposes appear to dominate many periods of Christian existence. The first settlements on the shores of North America’s East Coast were apparently made by people fleeing religious persecution, while settlements in the Southwest featured religious persecution of the native inhabitants, especially after their conversion.

The response of many Christians to the reminder that their religion has failed to bring peace on earth, or even a semblance of it, has been that the people who committed the numerous sins filling the pages of Western and world history were not acting in a Christian manner. If we eliminate those perpetrators of criminal activity from the Western world, we are left with a very small percentage of people who were really Christians. Why did these people remain silent while the various abuses were being committed in the name of their religion? There is apparently no answer to that question unless we conclude that there have never really been any outstanding Christians since the early days. If such is the case, then we must only conclude that the purported ability of the Christian religion to change people’s hearts and minds has been a gigantic hoax, perpetrated for an unknown purpose by unknown people.

We are thus confronted with accepting the reality of Christian history and attempting to understand how it conceives its message and impact so as to warrant considering religion in the categories it has chosen to express itself. Probably a great many Christians of recent vintage would demand that Christianity be defined as establishing a personal relationship with God via a belief that Jesus, the Jewish carpenter of the first century, was his son. Certainly the multitudes of contemporary Christians who follow the evangelical and fundamentalist versions of Christianity would make such a demand.

What does this interpretation mean in human terms? Through preaching, a general description of Christian beliefs is presented to the listeners. If they decide to accept the validity of this explanation of humankind’s existence, they apparently affirm their consent and, depending upon the denominational interpretation, are saved or well on their way. They are then expected to follow a Christian life that generally has great affinity to their society’s cultural mores.

In some denominations the initial conversion appears to effect the guarantee of eternal life as partially described in the discussion on death in chapter 10 and featuring denominational variations that have developed over the years. Other denominations relate that the conversion allows the individual perfect freedom. Strangely the perfect freedom is almost immediately circumscribed with rules and regulations of great specificity. In practically every version of Christianity, the conversion experience or decision is followed by the exercise of individual will to act differently with respect to practical problems. One could almost say that the whole of the Christian conversion and salvation doctrines are dependent on the exercise of individual will to achieve certain standards of behavior or to make a record with respect to good and evil deeds.

Aside from the conversion experience and the exercise of individual will to follow behavior standards, the problem with the Christian conception of human behavior is that it apparently depends on the cultural context in which it exists to determine what standard of behavior the will shall follow. With only a preliminary examination of some of the positions understood as Christian over the years, one could conclude that Christianity attempts to dominate cultures and does so initially but eventually falls victim to cultural values. For a long time, for example, Christians, eschewing political involvement, were among the most persecuted peoples in the Roman world. The message emphasized that Christ’s kingdom was “not of this world.” Spotting the weakness in the European political structures, the doctrines suddenly changed to support the theory that Christ had given the pope total power over people’s lives as his vicar on earth. No king could be crowned, no emperor installed without the pope’s approval.

Expecting the momentary return of Jesus, Paul discouraged marriage among his converts but appeared to relent if it meant that they would be living in even greater sin by having intercourse in an unblessed state. From that position, marriage apparently evolved into one of the church’s sacraments. The church held that position for a very long time, and monogamy became a European cultural value. The state of monogamy was held to be a Christian ideal, with marriage considered to be sealed sacramentally and divorce, which banned one from communion, sinful.

In recent years as both American and European societies have come to a greater understanding of the nature and needs of human beings, divorce has taken on a new status in Christendom. It is still frowned upon, but the wrinkles are not nearly as deep. Second, third, and fourth marriages often receive denominational blessings, and annulments for influential members of the Roman Catholic church are not a rare occurrence. We may yet see the day when it becomes a Christian doctrine that no man or woman can have more than one wife or husband at the same time.

Sexual intercourse was once considered sinful; the act was permissible only for purposes of procreation. Today a number of ministers advocate that more sexual freedom and premarital sex for many people is not the mortal sin that it formerly was. Marital sexual activity is now defined by a substantial number of Christians as an activity anticipated by God and encouraged by the clergy. Homosexuality, once the bane of Christianity, is now considered by some clergy as an expression of human needs, and the stigma is gradually fading in those denominations that at present do not advocate its sinlessness. Indeed in recent years the major Protestant denominations have embraced virtually all kinds of sexual activity, the only limits apparently are sincerity and innovation.

Poverty was once considered a Christian virtue for it was meant to indicate a lack of concern for the values of this world and a concentration on the life to come. In the centuries after the Protestant Reformation, poverty was considered indicative of sloth and other sins, and it was seen as proof of the individual’s degeneracy. The expression “poor but honest man” meant that a person was poor because he was dishonest and God had refused to bless his labors. As the white populace of Christian America has become more affluent, the concept of stewardship has been developed to explain the embarrassingly rapid growth of wealth of a substantial number of peoples. The theory goes that we are not really greedy, God has simply blessed us by giving us wealth over which we are to exercise good stewardship (i.e., the organizational church must have its cut for us to be good stewards).

These examples and many others that we can think of illustrate at least two points. One is that once the decision is made to exercise the human will to live a Christian life, the content of that life is rapidly determined by the cultural values of the society in which the convert finds him- or herself. As the cultural values change, the doctrines also change; it becomes impossible to determine exactly how a Christian does behave.

The other point is that as conversion is regarded as an individual concern, so determination of the hallmarks of the Christian life is also regarded as an individual concern. Individuals thus follow that version of the religion that appears to be the most comforting to them. Shopping for prestige churches as an individual climbs the social, political, or economic ladder is not unheard of. In its practical sense, Christianity is a religion almost wholly determined by the culture in which it finds itself. It brings to that culture some of its ideas, including a comforting sense of history. But in practical terms it quickly bends to whatever forces are most dominant in that culture as individual Christians are forced to follow a course that they would imagine to be most religious in a cultural context strange to the world of Roman-dominated Palestine.

Because the Christian religion is conceived as personal, individuals are both victims and victors of the religion. It is to their personal evaluation of events and values that the religion responds. It never allows them to forget the impossibility of ultimate success for they are, after all, sinners, but it allows them to escape the consequences of that sin by making them the sole determining factor of what they shall do and what they shall consider religious activity. Ambrose Bierce once defined a Christian as one who follows Christ’s teachings insofar as they are not incompatible with a life of sin. Bierce was not underestimating the practical side of the Christian religion.

Today we are suffering the impact oftwo thousand years of Christian individualism. Social problems continue to mount with no apparent solution in sight. Yet the United States appears to have a substantial number of devout Christians inhabiting it. We conducted a long war in Asia that was prolonged primarily for political reasons by two presidents, yet both of these men were apparently Christians in good standing. Prominent church leaders such as Dr. Billy Graham did not call them to account as being anti-Christian or non-Christians for the wastage of human life. In the Gulf War some church leaders did make an effort to prevent bloodshed, but their religious objections proved irrelevant to George Bush.

The rising rate of mental illness, especially the alarming rise in multiple murders and police brutality in civil disorders, would indicate that there is something amiss. The continued proliferation of psychologists, psychoanalysts, group therapy, psychodramas, and other phenomena indicative of attempts to heal the spiritual problems of modern people should tell us that at least part of our conception of the nature of religion has been mistaken. If Christianity saves the individual, and the evidence that it does appears to be decreasing, it must certainly be determined a failure when societies or even large numbers of human beings are concerned.

In terms of philosophical analysis, what Christian doctrines do is isolate the individual humans in a vacuum where they are confronted with a deity who is, by definition, angry. Every consideration that could be made, based on normal relationships with the world of daily experience, are not regarded as factors to be considered as part of religious experience. The individuals are then asked to make a theoretical choice whether certain factual happenings on this planet indicate a radical change of cosmic significance to the deity. Upon giving their assent, they must exercise their will to prevent the commission of further disobedience toward the deity when they face the world of daily experience. Then they are once again placed in that world and expected to respond to novel situations in a manner consistent with the concept of obedience to divine commands and purposes that remain obscured if not invisible to her.

Is there such an individual? Does the individual exist apart from his or her nation, language, family, culture,wealth, knowledge of the world, secular beliefs, and immediate situation? Traditionally Protestant theologians could conceive of such an individual. “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” characterized the sermons of this perspective, and today’s evangelists who carefully orchestrate their crusades with hymns, angry sermons, threats of judgment, soothing words of comfort, efforts at healing, and psychological tricks to get the reluctant to the front row kneeling in fear and trembling are their successors. Without the ability to invoke emotion, create fear and anxiety, and promise instantaneous relief from such fear, the evangelists are helpless. It is by artificially creating that solitary individual through deliberate manipulation of his or her emotions that they give credence to their version of the Christian religion. Theologians are notably absent in the solutions of social problems, in the ongoing work of local communities, and in the examination of the nature of human personality and its problems.

When we turn from Christian religious beliefs to Indian tribal beliefs in this area, the contrast is remarkable. Religion is not conceived as a personal relationship between the deity and each individual. It is rather a covenant between a particular god and a particular community. The people of the community are the primary residue of the religion’s legends, practices, and beliefs. Ceremonies of community-wide scope are the chief characteristic feature of religious activity. Religion dominates the tribal culture, and distinctions existing in Western civilization no longer present themselves. Political activity and religious activity are barely distinguishable. History is not divided into categories. It is simultaneously religious, political, economic, social, and intellectual.

There is no salvation in tribal religions apart from the continuance of the tribe itself. Being a tribal religion, there are no deviations of doctrine. Doctrine is not needed and heresies are virtually unknown. Theology is part of communal experiences needing no elaboration, abstraction, or articulation of principles. Every factor of human experience is seen in a religious light as part of the meaning of life. Tribal customs structuring relationships found to be proper for people are continued. Preconceived standards of conduct are unimportant and the assumption of the innate sinfulness of human is impossible, for the individual is judged instantaneously by his or her fellows as useful or useless according to his or her degree of participation in community affairs.

The concept of an individual alone in a tribal religious sense is ridiculous. The very complexity of tribal life and the interdependence of people on one another makes this concept improbable at best, a terrifying loss of identity at worst. It is this tribal religious individual who causes reaction among Christians whenever Indians and whites meet. For example, in The Secular City Cox remarks that “tribal man is hardly a personal ‘self’ in our modern sense of the word. He does not so much live in a tribe; the tribe lives in him. He is the tribe’s subjective expression.”1 Cox concludes that “tribal naïveté must be laid to rest everywhere, and everyone must be made a citizen of the land of broken symbols.”2 In other words, if a religion or a person is different, it or he or she must be destroyed.

Religion as a tribal phenomenon can be found in Indian life in many respects. There is no demand for a personal relationship with a personal savior. Cultural heros are representative of community experience. They may stand as classic figures such as Deganiwidah, Sweet Medicine, Black Elk, Smohalla, and even Wovoka; but they never become the object of individual attention as to the efficacy in either the facts of their existence or their present supratemporal ability to affect events. The revelation that establishes the tribal community or brings to it the sacred pipes, the sacred arrows, the sacred hats, and other sacred objects is a communal affair in which the community participates but in which no individual claims exclusive franchise.

It is virtually impossible to “join” a tribal religion by agreeing to its doctrines. People couldn’t care less whether an outsider believes anything. No separate religious standard of behavior is imposed on followers of the religious tradition outside of the requirements for the ceremonies—who shall do what, who may participate, who is excluded from which parts of the ceremony, who is needed for other parts of the ceremony. The customs of the tribe and the religious responsibilities to the group are practically identical, and the existence of two sets of values side by side is unthinkable. Contrast this state of affairs with Richard Nixon’s stand against abortion based on his Christian reverence for life and his continuation of the Vietnam War in which thousands of lives were taken so that he would not be the first American president “to lose a war.” Look at the present antiabortion advocates who also support the death penalty and refuse to provide for the poor, already born children.

The fears that Cox and others express as to the lack of a personal self among tribal peoples is unwarranted, and they indicate a lack of understanding of tribal religious beliefs and practices. One of the most notable features of Indian tribal cultures is the custom of naming individuals. Indian names stand for certain qualities, for exploits, for unusual abilities, for unique physical characteristics, and for the individual’s unusual religious experiences. Every person has a name given in religious ceremonies in which his uniqueness is recognized. Harvey Cox, as a name, indicates that for an undetermined number of generations the male member of the genetic line has been called Cox and Harvey’s parents happened to like the name Harvey. Such a name hardly indicates a personal self but at least partially denotes a breeding line.

But then consider a famous Sioux name “Man Afraid of His Horses” which properly translated means a warrior so brave and fierce that even his horses invoke fear in the enemy, a name won proudly on the field of battle and indicating a major accomplishment on behalf of the tribe. To be sure, Indian tribal religions have an individual dimension. The vision quest of many of the tribes is primarily an individual responsibility. The person fasting and praying must remain open and keenly aware that he might be chosen by the Great Mystery as a holy person, as a great and heroic warrior, as one cursed with a handicap, or have any number of other vocational responsibilities. Depending on the tribe and its traditions, the vision quest may be a relatively short-term experience. It may indicate nothing at all. Or it may require the most arduous type of life, requiring the greatest of personal sacrifices. There is not the emotional dimension of the evangelistic crusades present in this aspect of Indian individual religious experience, however. No ranting and raving preacher threatens everlasting hellfire and damnation unless an immediate decision is forthcoming. The individual doggedly and determinedly fasts and sings sacred songs with the hope that he or she will be granted a religious vocation to serve the people.

In addition to highly personalized names and religious experiences, the individual is enabled to relate to all phases of his or her life experience through tribal religions. The Iroquois and Cherokee, for example, had sophisticated systems for dream interpretation that were part of their religious beliefs. A great majority of the tribes recognized the religious aspect of dreams and made some provision for understanding them. Western psychoanalysis has only recently come to understand the uncharted field of dream analysis as an indication of personal mental health. The Christian theologians have yet to attempt to understand the reality of dreams in spite of the appearance of dreams in both Old and New Testaments.

Individual worth was also recognized in other ways in the tribal religions. The keepers of the sacred medicine bundles, for example, were people who had been carefully watched for their personal characteristics and were chosen to share some of the tribal mysteries and responsibilities in a religious sense. The priesthoods of some of the tribes were filled with people who had been carefully trained after they had demonstrated their personal integrity. These people were chosen by the men and women responsible for maintaining the tribal religions. Young people and casual participants did not choose a religious office within the tribe as a career because they liked people, which has so often inspired the Christian clergy to become ministers.

In almost every way, tribal religions supported the individual in his or her community context, because they were community religions and not dependent on abstracting a hypothetical individual from his or her community context. One could say that the tribal religions created the tribal community, which in turn made a place for every tribal individual. Christianity, on the other hand, appears to have created solitary individuals who, gathered together every seven days, constitute the church, which then defines the extent to which the religion is to be understood and followed. With the individual as the primary focal point and his or her relationship with the deity as his or her primary concern, the group is never on certain ground as to its existence but must continually change its doctrines and beliefs to attract a maximum number of followers. It is always subject to horrendous fragmentation over doctrinal interpretations, whenever two strong-minded individuals clash.

The anthologies of Indian speeches reflect the basic Indian religious attitudes toward the nature of religion. As we review them, we find a rejection of the concept of religion as found in Western Christian understanding.

Red Cloud, for example, when told that he must become as the white men, remarked,

You must begin anew and put away the wisdom of your fathers. You must lay up food and forget the hungry. When your house is built, your storeroom filled, then look around for a neighbor whom you can take advantage of and seize all he has.3

Sitting Bull, asked in Canada why he did not surrender and return to the United States to live on a reservation, replied,

Because I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for eagles to be crows.4

Chief Joseph once met with a U.S. commission that wanted him to cede the Wallowa valley in Oregon, which the Nez Percé owned. During the negotiations he was asked why the Nez Percé had banned missionaries from their lands. Joseph answered,

They will teach us to quarrel about God, as Catholics and Protestants do on the Nez Percé Reservation (in Idaho) and other places. We do not want to do that. We may quarrel with men sometimes about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit. We do not want to learn that.5

A Delaware chief complained about the Gnadenhutten massacre in 1782 when ninety Christian Indians had been killed by whites because two Indians, not of the group, had injured a white man some miles away from the settlement.

And yet these white men would be always telling us of their great Book which God had given them. They would persuade us that every man was bad who did not believe in it. They told us a great many things which they said were written in the Book; and wanted us to believe it. We would likely have done so, if we had seen them practice what they pretended to believe—and acted according to the good words which they told us. But no! While they held the big Book in one hand, in the other they held murderous weapons—guns and swords —wherewith to kill us poor Indians. Ah! And they did too. They killed those who believed in their Book as well as those who did not. They made no distinctions.6

Old Tassel, the famous eighteenth-century Cherokee leader, remarked on the continuous demand by the whites that the Cherokees accept the white civilization,

Much has been said of the want of what you term “civilization” among the Indians. Many proposals have been made to us to adopt your laws, your religion, your manner and your customs. We do not see the propriety of such a reformation. We should be better pleased with beholding the good effects of these doctrines in your own practices than with hearing you talk about them, or of reading your newspapers on such subjects.7

Red Jacket, the great Seneca orator, encountered a young missionary named Cram, who was sent by the Evangelical Missionary Society of Massachusetts to visit and convert the Iroquois. His reply to Cram’s speech advocating that the Senecas accept Christianity best summarizes the tribal attitude toward the overtures of Christianity.

You say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agree, as you can all read the book?

Brother, we do not understand these things. We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from father to son. We also, have a religion which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us, their children. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all favors we receive; to love each other, and be united. We never quarrel about religion, because it is a matter which concerns each man and the Great Spirit.

Brother, we have been told that you have been preaching to the white people in this place. These people are our neighbors: We are acquainted with them. We will wait a little while and see what effect your preaching has upon them. If we find it does them good, makes them honest and less disposed to cheat Indians, we will consider again of what you have said.8

Ernest Thompson Seton compiled a series of quotations on American Indian religious behavior entitled The Gospel of the Red Man: An Indian Bible. The selection is designed to indicate the spiritual qualities of the various tribes and so naturally presents the best side of Indian life. One selection, however, seems to be so typical and universal an example of the nature of tribal life that is reproduced here to show how the tribal religious system worked with respect to the most modest of tribal members. Seton cites Tom Newcomb, who had been his guide in 1912 and 1914 in his travels in the West:

I tell you I never saw more kindness or real Christianity anywhere. The poor, the sick, the aged, the widows and the orphans were always looked after first. Whenever we moved camp, someone took care that the widow’s lodges were moved first and set up first. After every hunt, a good-sized chunk of meat was dropped at each door where it was most needed. I was treated like a brother; and I tell you I have never seen any community of church people that was as really truly Christians as that band of Indians.9

The question that arises, of course, is how were the tribal religions able to produce behavior that surpassed the actions of the Christians if Christianity was to be considered as the one and true religion? Why does Christianity give rise to perpetual bickering and arguments over God and religion, which became anathema to the Indians who observed it? One cannot say that a fundamental defect is inherent in the genes of Europeans that makes them unable to follow their religious beliefs. One can only conclude that while Christianity can describe what is considered as perfect human behavior, it cannot produce such behavior.

Perhaps the closest approach that any Christian community has made to the type of behavior described by countless observers of Indian religion is that of the Amish communities of the Midwest. By every criteria that measures social integrity, the Amish appear to rank far above other communities and other denominations of Christianity. Hardly a Christian denomination can approach the record of the Amish for lack of delinquency, lack of idleness, lack of alcoholism, lack of divorce, lack of any statistic that would indicate social disintegration. Need it be noted that the Amish have settled on and related to definite lands, that they hold themselves in a tight communal setting, and that they adhere to customs with the tenacity of belief that amazes outsiders and brings them to as many clashes with civil authority as any group in the nation?

That the Amish can make their religion work indicates not so much the validity of their religion but that they have created a specific community that relates land, community, and religion into one integrated whole. To a lesser degree, the Mormons have also accomplished this task. The proper response of human personality to religious experience would seem to involve the factors that Indian tribal religions have traditionally emphasized, which the Amish and Mormons at least partially emphasize or practice, and that has distinguished American Indian people from the rest of America. In a sense then, religion must relate to land, and it must dominate and structure culture. It must not be separated from a particular piece of land and a particular community, and it must not be determined by culture.