God is Red

The

Group

The Christian religion’s doctrine of creation was developed very early and is fundamental to the articulation of the basic Christian theology. It has since been absorbed into the general set of assumptions about the nature of the world so that few people concern themselves with the implications. The subsequent expansion of the Christological doctrines has been so extensive that their relationship to the doctrine of creation has been largely ignored or forgotten.

It may be unnecessary also to place much expectation on a renewal of the examination of history by adherents of the Christian religion. The linear conception of history as an exclusively European franchise has been so secularized and in recent years so militarized that it is no longer a wholly Christian phenomenon. While Christians abstractly maintain that God rules history, as we have seen there is no great tendency to identify exact events in which this control of history is exercised. Instead, the more Christians appear to confront the problems involved with historical interpretations the more they shy away from maintaining that any specific event has been the scene of divine activity. History, at least in its most concrete sense, has become largely a symbolic and parabolic matter.

Of more concern for the present situation with which we are confronted may be the community context in which religions arise. The present trend in Christian religion is to interpret religion and religious experience as a wholly individual phenomenon. The right wing of Christianity has embarked on a Jesus movement in which the major focus is “getting right with God” on a personal basis and an almost total neglect of the social conditions of the various nations and communities in which these believers live. In large measure, this tendency is opposed to another tradition of the Christian religion that has always placed a heavy emphasis on the existence of the church as a community of the saved and the quasi saved. The final spasm of individualism may be the logical conclusion of Christian ideas but cannot by any means be said to represent fairly the historical roots and experiences of Christianity.

The Old Testament laid down the definitions of the existence of a religious community in a number of related and rather significant doctrines. From the experience in Egypt and the ensuing trauma of the desert came the conception of the Hebrews as the Chosen People of God. In a historical sense, we can well understand that having survived a disastrous natural holocaust fairly intact would tend to make people believe that they had been particularly chosen by a deity to represent his interests here on Earth. The development of an ethical system requiring the people to act responsibly toward one another and toward the strangers in their midst may be an added feature of the conception of the Chosen People. However, the idea that religion was conceived as initially designed for a particular people relating to a specific god falls well within the experiences of the rest of humankind and may conceivably be considered a basic factor in the existence of religion.

Even within the ethical systems of the later prophets of the Hebrew religion, however, the chosen-people concept did not spill out from its ethnic boundaries. Isaiah and Jeremiah are more concerned with Israel’s example as a people to the nations of the world than with a universal ethical humanism into which secular Judaism has lapsed. The absence of missionaries indicates that while the conception of God, particularly the God of Israel, may have narrowed in the centuries before the advent of Christianity, there is no impelling reason within the Hebrew religion to convert non-Hebrews to the religion of the nation.

The crisis that ensued in the doctrine of the Chosen People with the advent of Christianity was profound. If Jesus were really the Messiah and John the Baptist were Elijah, then Judgment Day should have come with the death of Jesus or shortly thereafter. Such was not the case. The community of Jesus’s followers lingered on in Jerusalem for many years after his death, and it was apparently on the edge of starvation when Paul discovered their plight and sought contributions for them in Asia Minor. Inherent in the Jerusalem community’s state was the problem of the salvation of a few of the Jews who had followed Jesus, and the subsequent damnation of the remainder of the Jews who had not heeded His preaching. It was essential to hold the Jerusalem community intact to maintain that the Jews had rejected their status as Chosen People and that the real meaning of Jesus’ life and death had been to open the gates of salvation to non-Jews.

This struggle began as Paul developed his theology and the subsequent doctrines of creation, history, and atonement. Without these doctrines, preaching to the Gentiles would have been futile, as they could not have been saved at any cost. The Christian God thus became dislocated not only in time and space but also ethnically. In opening the religion to Gentiles, the whole conception of the Chosen People was radically changed from an identifiable group or nation to a mysterious conglomerate of people who could not be identified with any degree of accuracy.

Granted that during the first few centuries of Christian existence, the followers of the religion could be readily identified. It was not as religious people that they received identity, however, but as subversives, political malcontents, and enemies of the Roman Empire. The long-haired peace protesters of today and the Christians of the early Christian era share at least that peculiar feature. They both spoke of concepts totally foreign to the political structures of the society in which they lived, and both were persecuted for their beliefs. Fortunately for our day, the peace protesters did not have the exclusive concept of the invisible community that the early Christians maintained.

The existence of fellow travelers as well as identifiable Christians thrown into the arena made it necessary to develop the conception of the community of saints as a body of believers that could not be readily identified—the church. Perhaps the most standard definition of the church that has been advanced by Christian theologians is the body of Christ. That is to say, the historical aspects of Jesus as an identifiable human being were early consumed by the development of the idea of the church as the invisible body of the Christ. No one knew or could know who belonged to it until the final judgment, when everything would be revealed. As a community, then, and as a community to be identified as the Jews had once identified themselves nationally, the Christian church was virtually invisible during its ascendency to political equality in the Roman Empire.

As the empire began to disintegrate, the only institution to which people could cling was the Christian church. It had adopted the basic political structure of the old Roman administrative apparatus and transformed it into an ecclesiastical hierarchy; the transition from a social milieu primarily political to one that emphasized religious certitude was fairly smooth. In the absence of strong political leaders, Christian bishops and clergy often handled problems of local importance and concern.

By the end of the first Christian millennium, the church hierarchy had established itself as the supreme ruler of Europe.

By cleverly combining a claim to divine sanction with the ambitions

of rising European political leaders and the need of these leaders

for divine sanctions to their authority, the professional clergy was

able to solidify itself as a favored group within the continent’s dominant feudal system. As the trend toward strong national govern-

ments increased, the church was able to protect itself by expanding

its functions to account for the changing conditions. Ecclesias-

tical courts were thus set up to maintain a favored position for

church officials in the face of the development of the kingdoms’ secular courts.

The high point in church influence was probably the insistence that God had specifically given the governments of the world to the pope. Whom the pope recognized, therefore, was rightful ruler of the nation. The clash over this doctrine invokes familiar pictures of Henry of Germany kneeling in the snows, begging the pope’s pardon for his arrogance in attempting to claim heir presumptive of the Roman Empire without the blessing of the Holy Father. For Europe, the Christian church had become the first overt conspiracy.

With the Protestant Reformation, the Christian church was shattered into a number of national organizations, each claiming a direct relationship with the essential teachings of the Christian religion to the others’ detriment and degradation. Again the conception of the church as the Body of Christ was emphasized as the symbol of the community of believers, but again the most important aspect of the church was the visible organization assuming command of people’s religious lives. To the degree that each church claimed primacy in delivering divine commands, it also placed less emphasis on religious experience itself and concentrated on the discipline needed to maintain itself politically and economically.

Today we inherit nearly five hundred years of church growth and organizational control over the religious lives of people. The multitude of Christian churches in America testifies to the misplaced energy that has gone into maintaining special doctrinal divergencies by disciplined organizational groups. The Lutherans in America, for example, trace themselves back to national origins in Europe rather than to any profound doctrinal differences, although doctrinal differences do occur. Among the Presbyterians, the American Civil War resulted in the creation of two churches that took opposing sides in the conflict. If, as each ecclesiastical structure would maintain, the church is the Body of Christ, Christianity is indeed in sad shape—if it is in any shape at all.

The last two decades have seen two developments in church organization that are, to say the least, baffling. The Lutherans have overcome more than a century of ethnic separatism and have been busy merging the various denominations together. The Presbyterians have resolved the Civil War division and come together again. Discussions have been held to form a “superchurch” by some of the major mainstream Protestant denominations. But the leaders of the various mainstream churches have devoted considerable time and study in preparing a calculated surrender to secular values and practices. Most ministries have given way from their male supremacy and now accept women as priests and pastors, and there is great debate on accepting and blessing homosexuality. The Episcopalians literally forced many long-time followers out of their church by insisting that everyone adopt a new form of service. Some church members, discontented with the radical changes in familiar services and doctrines, have fled to more conservative churches, and many have simply become nominal members of their denomination. Meanwhile radical evangelical churches have added new members rapidly and their message is one of total submission to whatever interpretation of the Bible the local pastor feels is appropriate. Consequently, conservative churches have found Bible verses that support American militarism, the death penalty, anti-abortion, and capitalism. Conservative Christianity today resembles nothing less than a religious auxiliary of the Republican Party.

The Christian religion’s traditional claim to validity in regard to its obvious disunity is to return to the days of the early Christian church and maintain that the church is in fact invisible and made up of those who truly believe in Jesus as the Christ. It therefore becomes virtually impossible to discuss the conception of a religious community in terms of Christianity because no visible community can or does exist. Any efforts to identify failures with any of the organized denominations brings the response that the particular denomination under consideration is not really the church. Yet that denomination collects money in the name of God, it issues pronouncements in His name, it protects its tax exemption because it is a religious group, and it plays an active part in the political decisions of the country be they the Vietnam issue, abortion, capital punishment, welfare, or whatever happens to arouse citizens’ emotional involvement.

The tendency among Christian theologians is also to speak as if the denomination were in fact the church that exists invisibly and sinlessly off stage. After carefully defining the church as the Body of Christ containing true believers, true followers, and the saved or the baptized, theologians then promptly launch into exhaustive analyses of social conditions, the state of sin, the nature of the life to come, and other exotic topics with countless suggestions as to what each particular denomination can or should do about them. The abstraction that existed momentarily when conceptualizing the church generally fades in favor of budgets, fund-raising efforts, new programs of social relevancy, and new theologies of program and mission that the denomination’s corporate organization must undertake if it is to carry out its ancient task of dictating to the world the conditions by which the world must exist.

The unhappy result of this practice is to make the career employees of each denomination believe that they are the Church and that where they appear, what they believe, how they act, and what they do constitutes the Christian religion. The recent trend of church leaders has been to become embroiled in sexuality almost to the exclusion of other concerns. Study groups of the various major Protestant denominations have advocated almost every kind of sexual activity as permissible “if it is done with love.” It is not uncommon to see church pronouncements stating that even the clergy have a right to unrestricted sexual practices that would have been prohibited by both church and secular law a generation ago. Hugh Hefner should unquestionably be named as the Protestant saint of this century. One need scarcely comment on the egotism that this behavior indicates.

One cannot fault the premise of social involvement of corporate Christianity, yet one must take deep exception to both the procedures used to accomplish this end and the priorities such a path indicates. Without a continuing self-examination and reflection by the people of the respective denominations as to the nature of their involvement in social movement, the members of the churches have become increasingly alienated from their own organizations. The result of church staff and career employees delegating to themselves the power and authority to act for the whole membership has been to reduce some major denominations to a shadow of their former strength. Thus, even the most tangible indication of the existence of the Christian church, the denomination, may be disappearing in our day.

One might conclude that the departure of Christianity from its Jewish ethnicity to a universal religion maintaining that its existence is invisible and unknown while constructing elaborate organiza-

tions capable of manipulating political and economic power at a significant level has been one of the major reasons for its decline in recent years. Formal organizations seem to have an inevitable direction downward in their development as they become incapable of maintaining the original emotional commitments present at their creation. The history of Christianity would seem to indicate that attempts to form a religious community capable of maintaining an arena for religious experiences are doomed to become involved in everything but religious experiences.

The breakup of Christianity during the Reformation into national churches and the proliferation of denominations today would seem to indicate that a religious universality cannot be successfully maintained across racial and ethnic lines. The types of Christianity enjoying success in the southern United States today are hardly within the traditional experiences of two millenia of Christians. Rather they tend to reflect the cultural and political biases of the people of the region, indicating that instead of the message of universal salvation and/or fellowship, ethnicity will almost always triumph. Until contemporary Christian denominations recognize the human reality of ethnicity, they will continue to blunder into and out of contemporary situations and emerge worse for the experience.

It is in the conception of the community that Indian tribal religions have an edge on Christianity. Most tribal religions make no pretense as to their universality or exclusiveness. They came to the Indian community in the distant past and have always been in the community as a distinct social and cultural force. They integrate the respective communities as particular people chosen for particular religious knowledge and experiences. A substantial number of tribal names indicate the fundamental belief that the tribe is a chosen people distinct from the other peoples of mankind. Dine, the Navajo word for themselves, means the people. The Biloxi called themselves taneks aya, first people; Kiowas noted that they were the principal people. Washoes relate that washui means person, and Klamaths called themselves maklaks, the people or the community. The concern in almost every instance is to identify the community and distinguish its uniqueness from the rest of the creation and to emphasize “peoplehood” or personality.

Once having made this identification, the other aspects of life are then determined as a function of the community identity. For example, death in the Cheyenne sense is a demonstration of a belief in the community’s continuity. No imperative to conduct religious warfare or missionary activity exists because it would mean altering the identity of the community by diluting its cultural, political, and social loyalties with the introduction of foreign elements. In the history of the early Hebrew people, we find the same concern for the maintenance of national identity as a religious function. And in both groups we find the same concern to show hospitality to a stranger as taking on an aspect of religious duty.

It is with respect to the attitude displayed toward strangers that a community’s psychic identity can be determined. A community that is uncertain about itself must act in self-defense against any outsider to prevent any conceivable threat to its existence, whereas a community that has a stable identity accords to other communities the dignity of the distinct existence that it wishes to receive itself. The admonition of the early Hebrews to honor the stranger in their midst because they were once strangers in Egypt indicates the degree of community security enjoyed by the people. Their faith in the continuity of their nation precluded the destruction of others simply because they had different customs and beliefs. Logan, the Mingo chief, appealed to the Virginians for justice at the peace council following the back-country war of 1774: “I appeal to any white man to say if he ever entered Logan’s cabin hungry and he gave him not meat; if he ever came cold and naked and he clothed him not.’’1 Such hospitality characterized the tribal religious communities precisely because they were communities limited to specific groups, identifiable to the world in which they lived, and responsible for maintaining a minimum standard of hospitality and integrity.

The obvious benefit of a tribal religion is its coextensiveness with other functions of the community. Instead of a struggle between church and state, the two become complementary aspects of community life. The necessity of expanding the political functions of government into the social welfare field is avoided because religious duties cover the informal aspects of community concern. The coercive side of community life as we have traditionally seen it in Western democracies is blunted within tribal communities by its correspondence with religious understandings of life. Yet religious wars are avoided because of the recognition that other peoples have special powers and medicines given to them, thus precluding an exclusive franchise being issued to any one group of people.

In the closing decades of the last century, the Indian tribes could not be broken politically until they had been destroyed religiously, as the two functions supported each other to an amazing degree. Some Indians agents were able to keep control of reservations because of their use of Indian police. The tribal members would not kill their own people, and those Indians still resisting the Army refused to kill the tribal policemen. When religious ceremonies were banned and the reservations turned over to missionaries and political patronage appointees, the decline of both the traditional political leaders and the religious solidarity of the people was accomplished in a very short time.

The Indian Reorganization Act made some restoration of tribal religion possible by abolishing the rules and regulations that forbade the practice of tribal religions on the reservations. By creating corporate forms of government for political and economic ends, however, the federal government created the same problems of religious confusion in the Indian tribes that existed in America at large. A good deal of the political turmoil on the reservations today is between traditional people and more assimilated people over the use of land and resources. Traditional people generally want to use land in the same way as did their ancestors while the more assimilated people want to use it as an economic resource. The question that emerges is whether land is a “thing” to be used to generate income or a homeland on which people are supposed to live in a sacred manner.

Today with tribal governments severed from the tribal religious life, the integrity of the governments is dependent only on the ability of outside forces to punish wrongdoers. If the people of the reservation see no wrong in the actions of their tribal government in a political sense, they generally keep them in office in spite of constant failures of that government or council to act on behalf of the reservation community.

Even with large defections of the tribal members to Christianity and Mormonism and with the political structure of the respective tribes frozen into quasi-corporate forms of activity, Indian tribes have shown amazing resilience in meeting catastrophes visited on them by government policies and outside interference. The primary identity of the group remains and in many cases has been perpetuated by the government with its incessant concern for administration and distribution of individual and tribal trust property. The major difference between Christianity and tribal religions thus remains active. Tribal members know who they are, and for better or for worse the whole tribe is involved in its relations with the rest of the world.

The opposite is true for Christianity. Mention the failures of either the religion or Western culture as influenced by Christian thinking, and the average Christian will tell you that Christians were not really responsible. Question any outstanding evangelist, theologian, or church leader today as to the orthodoxy of his theology or practice, and people will deny that he is remotely related to Christianity. The self-critical mechanism for analyzing behavior is thus missing from Christianity, whereas it is consumed within the tribal communities. No one will reject a tribal member as not belonging to the tribe. He may be viciously attacked as corrupt, as having assimilated, or as being a stupid traditional. He is never disclaimed as a tribal member. (This, of course, refers to tribal members and not to those, such as Chief Red Fox, who make claims on Indian ancestry without any Indian being aware of either the person or the person’s claim. )

Another phenomenon existing in tribal religions that does not exist in Christianity is the absence of a paid professional religious staff. Tribal religions do not have the massive institutions that Christianity requires to perpetuate itself. While the Indian religious leaders may receive gifts for their work in conducting ceremonies, there are no pension plans, regular working hours, vacations, and the other benefits the professional Christian clergy enjoys. The Indian religious leader views his religious powers partly as a blessing and partly a curse because of added burdens of social responsibility. The Christian clergyman looks up the church hierarchical scale and begins plotting from the time of his ordination how quickly he can reach the apex of the pyramid. The scramble for rich parishes, seats on seminary faculties, appointments to church national staff positions, and boards of directors is quite irreligious and could only take place in direct opposition to the concept of religion, not as a part of it.

Indian religions consequently do not need the massive buildings, expensive pipe organs, fund-raising drives, publications, and other activities that the Christian denominations need to perpetuate themselves. The religious ceremonies of the tribal religions are carried out with a minimum of distracting activities. Many take place in sacred locations where the people can be in contact with the spiritual powers that have always guided the tribe. Other ceremonies can be performed as the occasion arises and wherever the need is shown. Many Indian religious ceremonies have been held in apartments within the large urban areas far from the sacred lands of the tribe.

Take away the large buildings and other secular achievements of Christianity, and it would vanish within a decade. Unless the Christian God is confined within a quasi-Gothic stone structure, He cannot operate. Needless to say, He does not do very well even with His real estate.

The two concepts of community are carried over into secular life. Today the land is dotted with towns, cities, suburbs, and the like. Yet very few of these political subdivisions are in fact communities. They are rather transitory locations for the temporary existence of wage earners. People come and go as the economics of the situation demand. They join churches and change churches as their business and economic successes dictate. Lawyers and doctors climbing the ladders of affluence will eventually become Episcopalians and Presbyterians. Businessmen will gravitate to those churches in which their level of secular concern is best manifested.

Within each town and city exist many denominational branches of Christianity; each competes with the others for financial and political control over an extensive portion of community affairs. People may live side by side for years having in common only their property boundaries and their status as property taxpayers. At no point do the various denominations serve to integrate cities, suburbs, or even neighborhoods. The most recent development, sharing church facilities by a number of weak denominations, and community churches too often reflect what would otherwise be regarded as community secular concerns and the perpetuation of secular ethical values.

Outside of ethnicity (i.e., the Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholic churches and the Scandinavian Lutheran churches), no unique thing distinguishes one group of Christians from another in the same manner as tribal groups are distinguishable. In the first place, the tribes have a discernible history, both religious and political. The various Indian languages have in the past acted to bind each tribe even closer. In this respect they have been paralleled by the Roman Catholic use of Latin and the ethnic use of the vernacular as liturgical languages. Latin became artificial, but the use of German, Swedish, and other languages in services meant solidification of the religious community to a real degree. In this respect some denominations of Christianity were closer to Indian tribes than they would have cared to elaborate.

Only with the use of Hebrew by the Jewish community, which in so many ways perpetuates the Indian tribal religious conceptions of community, do we find contemporary similarities. Again the conception of group identity is very strong among the Jews, and the phenomenon of having been born into a complete cultural and religious tradition is present, though many Jews, like many Indians, refuse to acknowledge their membership in an exclusive community.

Today many of the Indian tribes are undergoing profound changes with respect to their traditional solidarity. Employment opportunities away from the reservations have caused nearly half of the members of Indian communities to remove themselves from the reservations for work and educational programs leading to work. Massive economic development programs on the reservations have caused population shifts that have tended to break down traditional living groups and to cause severe strains in the old clan structure. And the tragedy of the Indian power movement is that it avoids looking realistically at this obvious change in living conditions. While Indian tribes have been able to maintain themselves in the face of sweeping technological changes, the day may be fast approaching when they too will fall before the complexity of modern life.

For that reason the future may be already a threat to Indian tribal and religious existence as it has never before appeared to be. New social, political, and religious forms must be found to enable the tribal religions to exist in a religious sense in spite of the inroads being made by the conditions of modern life. In a few selected communities, this transition is being made. In Christian perspective the Amish and perhaps the Mormons show how successfully communities can be established and maintained when they are restricted to ethnic communities residing in specific locations and preserving specific religious doctrines and ceremonial forms. The rest of Christendom and Indian religious and political leadership would do well to look at these groups as having made a realistic decision to perpetuate themselves as a community.

Surveying the past and looking for the future, the question of religion and its relationship to the social structures of humankind becomes more important. The universal and hardly identifiable conception of a religion for everyone as articulated by Christianity no longer appears to have validity. Where Christianity has most successfully entrenched itself into the lives of people, it has been on an ethnic or racial basis and has had to adopt the cultural and political outlook of the people of the land in which it has chosen to exist. In America it has become virtually impossible for Christianity to have positive effects on our society’s movements. Lacking a specific people to which it could relate, Christianity has simply become a captive of the novelty of American life. To protect itself it has had to support the political structure of secular America, for without that structure the whole content of American Christianity would be meaningless.

The conflict over tax exemption of Christian churches and church property is a point in question. Would American Christianity be able to continue without its tax exemption? If there were no deductions allowed for contributions to church programs, what would be the effect on church income and programs? How would individual Christians respond to annual taxes on their massive churches, cathedrals, and investments? The fact that the churches are not willing to risk such a tax is indication enough that without a favored position in the secular world and its political and economic structures, most of what we now know as American Christianity would not and could not exist.2

The fundamental question of the nature of religion, therefore, must certainly involve a rejection of the structures Christianity has traditionally used to perpetuate itself and promulgate its message. For without the alliance with political structures that lend it credence and protection, Christianity would have vanished long since. It lives today because it has become so intimate a part of Western culture that its existence or reason for existence is rarely questioned. Is this condition necessarily a feature of religion as it has been experienced by humankind at various times and in various places? Is institutionalism necessary to religion in any sense? American society must honestly face and answer that question before it can understand the nature of the problems it faces.

A recent Supreme Court decision marks the irony of religion in America. Over the past two decades the Republicans have packed the Supreme Court with mediocre justices who were charged with the duty of reversing the gains made by minorities under the Earl Warren Court. In Employment Division v. Smith (1990) the Supreme Court ruled that the state laws covering drugs were sufficient to preclude use of peyote by members of the Native American Church.3 In order to reach this conclusion the court had to destroy the traditional barrier between church and state that decreed that the state must prove that its laws are necessary to perform its function and that no exception can be made for religious activities. Following Smith, two cases involving the right of churches to control their own property in spite of city restoration and preservation ordinances were sent back to state courts with instructions to decide the cases in light of the Smith reasoning. There is sufficient group identity between existing Christian denominations and American Indian religious practitioners so that any effort to attack traditional tribal religions must be accomplished using principles that in fact place all religious expressions in jeopardy. Justice Antonin Scalia, in writing his opinion, stated that the Constitution of the United States would protect making golden idols and worshipping the Golden Calf—practices prohibited in the Hebrew-Christian religion for almost 3,500 years—but the Constitution would not protect anything else.4