Video: The Impact of God is Red on Theology

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

JOSEPH GONE: God is Red, 50th Anniversary Symposium, The Impact of God is Red on Theology, October 7, 2022. Good morning, everyone. I'm really pleased to call us to order this morning as we kick off this second and full day of the God is Red 50th Anniversary Symposium. My name is Joseph Gone. And I'm a professor of anthropology and of global health and social medicine here at Harvard University.

I'm also the faculty director of the Harvard University Native American Program. And we are so delighted to have collaborated very closely with Professor Ann Braude here at Harvard Divinity School to sponsor this event. And also pleased to have the support of the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs here at Harvard.

We have a long and fruitful day ahead with four fascinating panels. Each one is separated by a break or lunch so you have time to stretch your legs, get up. So we'll try to end on time, start on time but with those breaks in between scheduled. And we'll try to keep things moving along here throughout the day. It's my pleasure to convene this morning the panel on the impact of God is Red on theology.

And the structure of these panels is that we've asked our speakers to talk to us for about 30 minutes on the topic at hand. And then, we have a discussant who will offer perhaps 10 minutes of reflections on what the speaker has said. And so our speaker this morning is Dr. Robert Warrior.

Robert Warrior is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas and a member citizen of the Osage Nation. He's the author of Tribal Secrets, Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions and The People in the Word, Reading Native Nonfiction, and co-author of Like a Hurricane, Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, American Indian Literary Nationalism, and Reasoning Together, The Native Critics Collective.

He's past president of the American Studies Association, and in 2010, was elected the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's founding president, and is now with Jean O'Brien serving as founding co-editor of NAIS's scholarly journal. He holds degrees from Union Theological Seminary, Yale University, and Pepperdine University.

He's also served as an appointed official in the Osage Nation Government and is a member of the committee responsible for maintaining the Osage Ceremonial In-Lon-Schka Dance in the Grayhorse District. Along with his scholarly work, he has worked on numerous film projects. His academic and journalistic writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications. And he's won numerous awards, too many to mention here.

I should say that I recall first meeting Robert when I was a graduate student the University of Illinois, where we were organized to try to retire the Chief Illiniwek mascot. And that was not an easy task to undertake and demoralizing at times. And one of our most demoralizing moments, Robert came for a visit and charged us up a bit with some inspiration. So Robert, it's a pleasure to welcome you today. And we're eager to hear what you have to say. The floor is yours. Thank you.

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ROBERT WARRIOR: Good morning, everybody. It's really wonderful to be here. I want to thank everybody who played a part in planning this and inviting me. So I wanted to say at the start I'm leaving out a bunch of things, which I think everybody will have to do. It was really a marvelous experience going back into this particular archive that I had around the book, which I wrote about when I was in graduate school 30 years ago.

And going back into some of those files to see the things that I had found-- what I did at the time was-- God is Red was a really central text to understanding Deloria's theological thought. But there was so much more there. And I went into the Burke Library at Union Seminary, which like the Divinity Library here at Harvard is one of the just rare resources in the world to be able to find everything.

And that was really necessary in Vine's work because he wrote in some pretty obscure places. At the time, I was just happy to be able to get those things. And nobody had written-- not nobody but about four people had written serious articles about Vine's work. And he's cited a bunch of places.

But delving into the work and trying to understand what was there, I was just grabbing things out of the library-- including some of the things I'll talk about today-- and drinking them in, and not necessarily saying, why was it there? And I didn't have access to an archive that would help me see why they were there. I didn't have Vine's correspondence, except what he wrote to me.

I guess I did probably ask him at various times. But he was very reticent to talk about, why did you write for that Methodist mission magazine, right? He said, I did it because I was doing a favor for a friend. And if I would ever bring up what I saw as differences or even inconsistencies between some of the things that he wrote, he didn't like that. I mean, he didn't really like the fact that I was writing about his work, to be honest.

And it wasn't just because he didn't like what I had to say about it. But I think he just didn't like the idea that somebody is rooting around in his stuff, and in his ideas. I mean, they were his ideas. And it wasn't as though he thought they were unassailable. He just didn't like it for various reasons. And along with that, I mean, he's published that opinion-- that he doesn't like some of my ideas.

But so it was really wonderful to get back into these things and to see some of them. And I found about 25 rabbit holes I could have gone down. And I chose pretty much one. But there are various paths to it. So I'm going to go ahead and start this. And I have to leave out some things even that I wrote to get there.

So close to the same time God is Red came out in hardcover in 1973, Vine Deloria Junior stated in an essay titled, Nonviolence in American Society-- which some of you, I think, saw ahead of time that I sent-- quote, "Societies and religions are built at least partially on the supposition that no significant number of people will be stirred from their inertia to accomplish anything. They will not think. They will not question. And most important, they will not object to whatever happens until it directly affects the manner in which they view their own personal survival," end quote.

This dim, pessimistic representation of human agency is similar to how Deloria figured human moral weakness across his many books, essays, interviews, and articles. As I was working to contextualize God is Red 50 years after its publication, this essay recaptured my attention as representing a thread in Deloria's work I had not considered before. Nonviolence in American society is one of several theological essays Deloria published in the few years before and after God is Red came out.

And I want to discuss what insights these contemporaneous theological essays might give us into the book we're reconsidering at this gathering. In the introduction to the nonviolence essay, Deloria writes, quote, "The bitterness of reflection, these days, dwells not on what was accomplished but on what could have been accomplished had men been reasonable, just, or even consistent with themselves," end quote. This and the other section of Nonviolence in American Society I've quoted from speak to some of the themes Deloria refers to in the opening chapters of God is Red, in which he summarizes Native politics of the previous decade.

In the essay, however, Deloria makes one brief mention of the Native world, if you looked at it ahead of time. And I don't know if you noticed that or not. But there's one brief allusion to the Native world, making it a rare instance of Deloria not foregrounding Native issues. I think it's fine that Vine didn't write about Native issues in this essay, alluded to them once.

But it's a real rarity in his work that he ever departed from that script of saying, while I'm here, I'm going to tell you about the thing I'm working on right now about repatriation, about a political situation. He almost never missed the opportunity to do that. I think it was part of his intellectual DNA to say, I'm on the platform. And I'm going to tell you something right now that I'm working on that you need to think about.

You need to write your senator. You need to join us in working on this. So the fact that he doesn't do this in this essay I thought was significant and interesting. At least as intriguing as that is what I see as a significant difference in tone between God is Red and these contemporary theological essays. From the first time I immersed myself in the breadth of Deloria's writing, I marveled at his versatility, addressing radically different audiences ad seriatim, all the while maintaining an immense body of correspondence.

Nearly the entirety of his body of work being composed sheet by sheet on manual and later electric typewriters. In rereading Nonviolence in American Society, however, I saw something I'd missed, not just there but in other corners of Deloria's writing as well, which was a beautiful lyrical prose style. Here's an example.

So "we cannot conceive of non-violence today without remembering the grandeur of former days,"-- this is 1974-- "without remembering the grandeur of former days when our motives were pure, our cause just, and our movement charging with single-minded determination toward a not-so-distant goal. As we recall former days, we should not despair at our lost innocence or degrade our memories of times of crisis and danger. Regardless of how far we appear to be from our original goal, the fact remains that we have changed the world in an irreversible manner, and in participating in what has been essentially an act of creation, we have broadened the boundaries of a possible minimum definition of decency, which now needs to find the time to incarnate itself and grow old, familiar, and wear thin until we can rediscover, at an even greater depth, the absence of a commonly shared realization of our humanity," end quote.

What really struck when I was rereading this to see, who wrote that, right? I mean this isn't really the Vine Deloria that most of us are familiar with. And I was really fascinated in seeing how I missed it the first time through. I was looking for a certain kind of point that Deloria was making.

And then I really found this entire essay is built around this really not just deep ideas, which Vine was always writing about, but also writing about them in a really beautifully crafted way, I thought, taking a big risk. And I think that was maybe why he didn't do it as often is that it's risky to write something like this when you have a reputation as a tough, sharp, at times blunt writer. So in contrast to this and similarly to Custer Died for Your Sins, We Talk, You Listen, God is Red has an accessible, sometimes jocular style.

The humor in all these books reflects what I remember of Deloria's face-to-face expansive sense of humor, which I think was his own version of a very familiar Native brand of humor, featuring teasing, needling, insult, the lampooning of rivals, and laughing in the face of tragedy. In the accessible style of these books, the humor provided a veneer, covering what, at times, seemed to me also intentionally flippant. And I would suggest sometimes that flippancy goes to the point of seeming cynical.

For instance, his comment toward the beginning of God is Red that quote, "Indian activists chose sometimes cleverly and sometimes stupidly symbols that they believed would convey the importance of their lands and religions to the rest of America," end quote. While certainly a valid way of describing some of the activism that took place at the time, comes across to me as overweening. I don't want to pick on this one statement, although it's going to seem like that after another whole paragraph of it.

I don't want to pick on it too much and want to acknowledge that Deloria were full witness to virtually every foolish move Native activists and elected officials made in those years. He earned the right to say that, in other words. Further, he knew nearly everyone who made these foolish moves. And no doubt, in plenty of cases, tried to dissuade people from their folly on the phone, sitting in a restaurant, someplace saying, please don't do this, right? So when he says this, again, he's earned the right to do it.

It does though exemplify what I'm trying to get at, which is the way it's easy to read this and statements like it as enabling dismissiveness on the part, not just of himself but also of his readers, who might be better served by analysis that's just as sharp and accurate, which he often does, without giving people such an easy way out of thinking about where American Indian discontent is coming from. And this was one of the big themes of the time-- is where is this discontent coming from? How do we respond to it? What can we do to get rid of it?

And I think that this comment is one that allows people to say, yeah, it was kind of stupid. Why don't we just kind of say respond to it as if it's stupid? And here, again, I'm not trying to just zero in on one moment and say that this is what's wrong with Deloria's thought. It's an interesting thing to think about as we think about the rest of what's going on though. Because that doesn't seem to be the intention.

But it rather derives from the vein of cynicism that I'm suggesting runs through much of Deloria's writing. And as you can see from the quote about nonviolence, this is not the sort of cynicism that sneers at the idea that change can happen and is worth fighting for. But it seems rather to be a case of Deloria having a sense that he's suffering foolish readers, gladly or otherwise, and that he's throwing pearls before swine. And I think this is the kind of cynicism I'm talking about.

I'm spending my time throwing pearls before swine-- to use a biblical allusion-- a sense of frustration that his target audience will almost certainly miss the point, coupled with the sense of duty that obliges him to keep trying. And again, this is a well-earned right that Deloria has to do this, to think I'm going to write this. And people will not get it. Because most often, people would read him and not get it, right?

So I think that there's a way in which this is a well-earned sort of writerly cynicism. I don't think it's a broader sense of cynicism that there's nothing worth trying to do, in this particular situation. It's more towards his readers. Let me be clear in saying I don't see what I'm calling cynicism on every page, but rather as a recurrent theme. As such, it's present on one side analysis that gains its bite from its fresh truthfulness and what is clearly a genuine concern for the entire planet.

My first book Tribal Secrets, which had been my doctoral dissertation, made extensive use these forms of analysis in God is Red, including the incredible section in which he imagines how different the Civil Rights Movement would have been if every book addressing the contemporary conditions of African-American people was outsold by a factor of 10 by books focused on the past. This, as Deloria points out, is what had happened to efforts to bring attention to contemporary conditions of American Indian people.

As in his own Custer Died for Your Sins-- it would get a lot of attention. And people would say, wow, look at all the books Vine is selling, and sell Tens of thousands of copies, which is no mean feat, only to have Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which ends in 1890, come along in its wake and sell hundreds of thousands of copies. That sharp analysis comes from Deloria's engagement with the wild right of protest politics that was rocking the Native world in the early 1970s.

Conditions and events on the ground and in the streets would have been difficult to downplay, which is why I think he has to write about them in the beginning of the book. The murder of Raymond Yellow Thunder in the border town of Gordon, Nebraska and the riots that ensued there in the winter of 1972, the killing of Richard Oaks, who'd been the most visible leader of the Alcatraz occupation that summer in 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan that made its way to D.C. in the fall of 1972 in the election week, occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building.

These, in some ways, hijack the putative focus of the book. I want to write a theological book. But first, I have to tell you all about these things that are going on. And he does this amazing job of tying these things in. But there's the sense in which you've got to take this opportunity to tell people what's going on.

I'll say more about the ongoing legacy of this particular style and how to understand this in relation to God is Red. But first, we'll look briefly at the theological milieu in which Deloria wrote this book, which, I think, is an important part of understanding why God is Red comes to us in the form that it does, why it would have the cover that I had on the previous slide as opposed to some other cover.

So regarding that milieu, I will start by saying that the title is more than a pun on Friedrich Nietzsche's 19th century claim that God is dead, which is a comment itself on the status of religious belief under the conditions of post-enlightenment modernity. And it's worth quoting just two more bits of what Nietzsche says after God is dead, which is, quote, "God remains dead. And we have killed him." That's the condition of God being dead that Deloria pens on in the title God is Red.

In taking up these ideas, Deloria addresses a widely discussed crisis of faith that reached a critical point in the 1960s and 1970s, in which societies and first world locations like the United States found themselves reaping the whirlwind of Nietzsche's claim. Late modernity having further undermined the conditions of faith and causing religious people to scramble to find relevance-- and relevance is the big word here for this particular theological moment-- to find relevance for their beliefs.

Part of what makes God is Red remarkable, in fact, is the way Deloria so comfortably and astutely addresses what was a global crisis. There's an audacity to this, in other words. I think that this is part of the intellectual imagination that brings us God is Red is Deloria not only seeing himself as being able to address this crisis, but also then saying, and I'm going to write a book about it. Because people weren't looking for a book by Vine Deloria about this topic, which is, in itself, I think frustrating.

People weren't thinking, we need to hear from him now. Because if we hear from Vine, what we need to hear about is those first couple of chapters. He needs to tell us how to think about the Native world. He doesn't need to tell us how to think differently about the whole world. So one moment that demonstrates just how much this anxiety over the future of religious faith resonated in the US is the Time Magazine cover from Good Friday in 1966 that asks, is God dead?

This may seem like clickbait now, right? This is the sort of thing you click on to say, I don't know. Is God dead? I didn't hear. I hadn't heard. When's the funeral? But in a less crowded media escape, it was a harbinger of a crisis that had not just arrived but had taken hold. Gabriel Vahanian's, in 1961, The Death of God, The Culture of our Post-Christian Era was one of the earliest books that sought to engage these issues in a way intended to reach beyond the coterie of theologians and clergy.

Harvard Divinity School's own Harvey Cox was perhaps the most successful person in the US at addressing a non-clerical, non-academic audience in the US with his 1965 book, The Secular City, Secularization, and Urbanization, and Theological Perspective, which sold over 400,000 copies, and which Deloria refers to throughout God is Red, both appreciating its insight while also lampooning what he saw as its excesses. In fact, in many ways, Harvey Cox is the foil in this book for looking for relevance for your theology, for your religious faith at the expense of your religious faith is the problem here. The anxiety Cox addressed in his early work book was not confined to the US and Canada.

Pierre Berton, a journalist, sold 150,000 copies of his book, The Comfortable Pew, A Critical Look at the Church in the New Age in 1965, the same year, The Secular City came out. Berton's book was commissioned by the Anglican Church of Canada in response to concerns that the church was slipping from its prophetic role.

Anglican Bishop and theologian J. A.T Robinson's 1963 book, Honest to God, critiques what Robinson saw as outdated concepts of God and the need for the secularization of theological ideas. Robinson's book sold 300,000 copies in the UK and 120,000 copies here in the US, a year, or two years before The Secular City came out. The Christian church, including its various denominations, confessions, and organizational bodies was not-- it's important to say-- collapsing in the face of this crisis

Deloria was right, however, in arguing that unresolved tensions from the social gospel era related to the relationship between work to make societies more just and equitable on the one side-- the work that churches were doing to make the world a better place and more just-- on the other side of that, there's the anxiety about what happens then in that configuration to spirituality, devotion, and faith. And I think this is a moment where that question caught up with Christianity in a very broad way around the world.

The fact that many theologians and other thinkers were gaining the attention of so many of Christendom thinking people, however, certainly seems to have had a significant impact. So I think that this is an anxiety of people looking at churches that are by and large still operating fine. But they're just kind of going along and kind of heading towards what people think of as a precipice. The people in the pews are actually feeling too comfortable, as Berton's book would say it.

Another example, the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church, which took place from 1962 through 1965, addressed many of these same themes. And what was perhaps the most important of the four major documents that came out of that was Gadium et Spes, the title of the council's pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world, which was written entirely not away from the Council, and then brought to the Council as the other documents, and debated and approved.

It was actually written at the Council itself. It was formulated. This is where we get a lot of the responses to, how are we asking Catholic people in the pews to now live their lives in the midst of everything going on in the world? So God is dead and the death of God then were shorthand expressions of what many religious leaders and thinkers saw as the unresolved issues of what Christianity could and should be in a tumultuous world.

The reforms of Vatican II, including wholesale changes in liturgy, opening the ecumenical door to non-Catholic forms of Christianity rapprochement with other faiths were part of this broad movement to make Christianity relevant in an increasingly secular world.

Hugh McLeod argues that theological ideas from Paul Tillich and Kierkegaard provided a basis for much of this work. And then in an especially influential concept quote, was Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity," which relates in many ways to what Suzanne was saying yesterday about the critique of the idea of religion. It's not tell me about your religion. The question is, why are you calling what I'm talking about religion in the first place, right? It's a deeper critique than that.

So to continue the quote, "as popularly understood, this included three main points, an overriding stress on the Christian obligation to build a better world here and now, a non-legalistic approach to ethics, and a critical attitude to institutions and formal dogmas." So God is Red was not just a general idea that people felt like God was dead in their lives. How do I make God come alive in my life? The deeper analysis was, where's that coming from?

We have these institutions that have become bureaucracies where we have people doing good works in the world without seeing them as coming out of their strong sense of they're doing it because they're trying to express God's love through their good actions. Instead, they're saying, I'm demonstrating my love for God by doing good for other people, which are really different things. Let's get through some things we can get to some other things.

So this is different tone and style. I think that Deloria's God is Red is in the vein of Berton, Robinson, Cox. And it's interestingly not in the vein of things like James Cone and Black liberation theology. This is not the Native American version of that. This is not the Native American response to Gustavo Gutierrez in a book like, We Drink From Our Own Wells, trying to position Native Christianity in a particular place. And there are real specific reasons for that, of course.

So Deloria makes a statement that Western men-- it's a quote-- that "Western men cannot find his way in society either by de-mythologizing his condition, as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the social gospel people have attempted it, or mythologized it as Billy Graham and the fundamentalists have tried to do." And that's an important part of this too-- is seeing that there is this other clarion call being made for people to come to a stadium and listen to Billy Graham, right?

And oftentimes, in these stadiums where, for instance, the same year as God is Red came out, 100,000 people in South Africa came to hear Billy Graham. And typically, in these situations, a quarter of the audience would go forward in these altar calls. 25,000 people going forward to say, I need to do something. I need to find a new way to pray, right?

These things these things eventually become-- and this is part of the precedence, I think, of God is Red-- these things become what we now have inherited as the rise of the Christian right. This is something that it seemed different back then, I think. But we see how things unfold there. This statement and the analysis that follows a sharp, astute, and both carefully and deeply considered.

But I think it's important to say that we can't measure its impact by looking at it alongside the work of Tillich or Camus. That said, I would also argue that God is Red is less of a period piece than the books by Cox, Alvin Toffler-- Future Shock, Vance Packard, Charles Reich-- The Greening of America, that Deloria discusses and, I think, relishes being able to talk about in this public forum. He read these things carefully. He knew what people were reading because he was interested.

Yet, while Deloria, in adopting this style, participates in the inherent limits of addressing so many emergent and immediate issues of its day, I think it's worth pointing out that the first copy of the book that I bought and read was the second printing of a mass trade paperback edition that came out in 1983. So I think that this is part of why. I mean, I want to see the book as being part of this moment in 1973, people are kind of doing a sort of pop theology, and doing pop psychology on the world around them.

And yet, in 1983, the book was in its second printing. It looks like a novel you'd buy at-- not a big one-- but it's the paperback. And that I also own a copy, which is the one that, I guess, is in my bag-- Michael and I both had it out last night-- of the first paperback edition. And that was in its sixth printing in 1980. So it wasn't as though people didn't notice this book-- I kept kind of going around with it-- that it was working.

It wasn't selling stacks of copies at Costco or at Target, right? But it went through six printings. How many of us here went through six printings? Maybe some but mostly not. And that's unprecedented for a Native author at that moment. So there's a lot of things that are happening that hadn't happened before in the book.

And I think it's one of the things I'm trying to reconsider it, to think about, as you look back on it, when I say that I have a problem with him calling activists stupid, I mean, I do that in the context of saying that happens in the midst of this thing that's really an amazing achievement. Just because you can't, as the author of it, say, well, this will happen next, even though he'd written Custer and had sold tons of copies of it as well, not 100,000 at that moment.

It's probably sold at least 100,000 by now I would think. All right. So I wanted to talk a little bit about Native theology. And that's the impact where I actually think so interestingly that the impact is really important and crucial. In 1989, 16 years after the publication of God is Red, Deloria wrote an essay that would later appear in one of the volumes that came out of the meetings of EATWOT, the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

EATWOT began in the 1970s as an organizing point for theologians from Latin America-- and that's how they called themselves. I usually don't use the term Latin America. But people from what became Latin American liberation theology, Africa, and Asia. And in that initial meeting, there was one person from the United States. And it was James Cone, who was representing not just African-Americans but the entire panoply of minoritized people within the United States.

Cone and Deloria became really close friends sometime in here, in Denver, I think, is where it actually happened. Vine skewerd Cone-- this is how I heard it from both of them-- skewered Cone at a thing, needling him from the audience. Cone didn't know him at all. And he starts asking him questions about how any of this about Black theology would relate to Native American people. And if you've never been on the other side of that sort of questioning that Vine could do, it must have been a thing.

And then, of course, Vine did exactly what he would do. He invited him back to his house. And they ate catfish out of Vine's freezer, apparently. And that friendship was important to both of them. And Cone was my advisor. And this is part of how I got to know Vine, was through James Cone. And it meant a great deal to both of them.

It wasn't just a friendship that went on for a long time. It actually meant something to both of them. They talked to each other. They were friend, friends as opposed to academic friends. And in 1989, 16 years after God is Red, we see Deloria writing in a letter to Native clergy and other people who might be seminarians, like me at that point. Theologically inclined Natives is the category I'm trying to maybe use on that.

And he's inviting them to come be part of EATWOT because he's still a part of it. He's a dues-paying member of this organization. He's not a Christian. He's not a minister. He's not attached to a church. And he says, I'm not really the person to do this work. That's why I'm looking for somebody else to do it. Quote, "As most of you know, I don't have much real sympathy or enthusiasm for helping to spread Christianity any further."

And he says it's kind of ironically but also unironically. I'm doing this for you as Native clergy, right? But I think this speaks to this moment. 16 years later, there's still not a cadre of-- there are Native ministers galore. But there's not a group of people who step into now the post God is Red or the post 1970s breach and start articulating this Native theology that Deloria saw. And this is 16 years later.

So I want to highlight two things really quickly. And this is almost done. So he writes an essay for EATWOT called Coming of the Spirit. And I just had the draft version that he sent out with his letter to seminarians and others. And so it shows up in one of EATWOT's publications that came out of Orbis press, which was the press in the US that published a lot of liberation theology books, including Cone's early work as well.

And Deloria has a perspective on liberation theology that comes out in this and addressing liberation theologians. Quote, "Liberation,"-- he says at the end-- "ultimately must come to mean a condition in which we understand our limitations and act with some cosmically-oriented humility," end quote. So what I find especially intriguing here 16 years after God is Red is the implicit critique of a basic category, liberation.

And his contention that liberation requires an understanding of our limits. It's not actually going to free us. It might free us. But it's also going to make us confront our limits. While at the same time he advocates for humility, which he doesn't say. But I think it's important to him. But I think it's important to other readers for seeing that that's an important virtue both within Christian thought and in various plains traditions as well, including the Lakota, Dakota traditions, the sense of a virtue of humility.

Theo sages have this too, with a sense of real humility as opposed to fake humility is really important. Humility is a necessity, as if liberation is as much of anything, for Deloria, a process of freeing ourselves from our inflated view of ourselves as humans. He ends the essay with a warning, writing if liberation, quote, "means instead of becoming humble about our own position as humans, we lift one set of oppressive structures and continue to believe that we are the one main show in the rest of the cosmos is the sideshow, we will only fall back into the abyss and subject ourselves to another kind of poverty and oppression."

So secondly, it's worth noting that 16 years after God is Red, Native theology was nowhere near meeting the challenge that Deloria put in front of it. George Tinker, whose niece is here, Lena-- who's a student here at Harvard-- was the first Native theologian to be legitimized within seminaries on having an actual appointment in a seminary doing Native theology. He was still four years away at this point in 1989 from publishing Missionary Conquests, the first of his many important books that reflect a Native Christian theological perspective.

Homer Noley beautifully rendered history of Native Methodism, which not that many people have read but just really beautifully done, called First White Frost came out in 1991. And Noley worked for John Adams, not the president but the person in the National Council of Churches, back in the '70s, who was the emissary to Wounded Knee. He's the one who showed up at the border of Rosebud and Pine Ridge and helped broker the deal that ended Wounded Knee, working with Hank Adams and others to achieve that.

There are also essays by a range of Native clergy around that time, including Reeves [INAUDIBLE] Comanche, and his wife Claudia-- who wasn't a theologian but Reeves was an ordained Baptist minister-- Rosemary Maxey, Creek woman, and Tweety Sombrero, Navajo woman. These were still in the future-- James Tree, a seminary trained scholar of Native Christianity, including Deloria's body of work. And he would pull some of these things together in an anthology, of course. He was still several years from doing that work in 1989, 16 years. All this is 20 years or more after.

So as I conclude, I want to return to Deloria's Nonviolence in American Society, this essay in [INAUDIBLE] to say, what kind of clues do we get about where it's coming from? Where do we get this beautiful prose? And I think a lot of that comes from [INAUDIBLE] not just being a small publication but a very specific publication. [INAUDIBLE] actually means be reconciled. That's why I put reconciled in the title of my presentation today.

There's a long history here with a fellowship of Southern churchmen-- and then it becomes the Association of Southern Churchmen-- where there's a sense of a line in the sand that gets drawn by a certain set of people from this perspective who say, whatever else we're doing, we're doing it out of a sense of faith and faithfulness towards the God we say we believe in. If you read God is Red, this is actually something that Deloria would approve of, to say instead of running away from your own faith and still trying to maintain it at the same time, like you get in certain ways of reading The Secular City or the Robinson book, that instead of that, when do you get around to actually saying what your faith actually means to you.

And so this idea then of being reconciled actually comes from scripture, that is, be reconciled to God. It's the only time this Greek word, by the way, shows up in the New Testament, this particular use of it. I mean, reconciled shows up all over the place. But this particular form of being reconciled, of this imperative sense of you need to be reconciled. It says, you're the representative of God on Earth. And that's who you're saying you are.

If you're doing that, you need to be reconciled to God. You need to reconcile yourself to the fact that your doing the work that you're doing, that you're occupying the place in the world that you're occupying. And I think that has something to do with why Deloria was attracted to the forum. I mean, we can ask ourselves, what Vine is doing with his acerbic criticisms of Christianity, doing writing for this journal from the South, which starts in the South, reconciling God and Southern clergy people.

I think it has something to do with the other people who are in it, not so much that Vine saw himself is wanting to impress them but that he had an opportunity to actually have an audience, that he didn't have to think that these were pearls going before swine. Here's a long list of some of that people wrote in [INAUDIBLE] Walker Percy, Walter Lippmann, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Jacob Lowell, Christopher Lasch, Walter Wink, Vincent Harding, Thomas Merton, Dick Gregory, Garry Wills, and Wendell Berry, Harvey Cox.

And then a couple of younger voices who came on towards the end of the journal in the 1990-- Christopher Morris-- who went on to become a theologian at Union, some of you know-- Stanley Hauerwas, who had this really important influence on ethics, especially theological ethics. So I'm not suggesting that Deloria focused on the fame and reputation of these writers so much as he wrote in the way he did in his nonviolence essay. Because he knew he was writing for an audience that was smart enough and sufficiently theologically astute to understand what he's trying to do.

When I was first reading across the breadth of Deloria's writing, I wondered if he might at times be arguing in one essay against himself in another essay. That was my working theory at the time. And it might be true, if only to provide himself with a worthy rhetorical opponent, right? I now think something more subtle is happening, something similar to this comment about Reinhold Niebuhr's strategy of writing essays as a way of staking out positions that would show him the contours of what he was articulating in his book.

This is a recent analysis of Niebuhr's work and how he worked together with John Bennett, who became the editor of Christianity and Crisis. Bennett said and then this article about Bennett's work about Niebuhr extends that further. This includes some quotes from Bennett and from the other article it comes from. And I don't want to tease them all apart. So I'm just telling you ahead of time I'm going to quote the article about the Bennett work.

It says, that in order to understand Niebuhr's thought, we, quote, "must move back and forth between his books, which provide the theological frame for his thought, and his articles and editorials, which show his response to contemporary events. This is true because his writing often leaves us with a delicate balance between opposite positions. And it is only in the light of his concrete decisions for action that we can be sure where his emphasis finally lies. These decisions for action involved dialogues with implied audiences and situations. Moreover, to extend Bennett's insight--" this is still the newer analysis of Bennett's things about Niebuhr-- "such dialogues are crucial for interpreting not only Niebuhr's writing but also those of other C and C writers. And they require relating C and C's ideas to its sociopolitical and institutional context."

And this is about the last paragraph here. "It strikes me that when we see Deloria reveling as a thinker and writer in the pages of [INAUDIBLE]," which is what I choose to believe he was doing when he wrote this essay. And there are two more that I'm not talking about, two more of these essays-- "that we're seeing a writer and thinker of unique capacity exploring his own limits, without the intellectual infrastructure that Niebuhr and others had."

And I think that's an important part of this. "I want to believe that Vine's gift to us in his theological writings from God is Red to [INAUDIBLE] is the knowledge and wisdom that comes from moving ahead and building your own infrastructure where and when you can. You might have to wait a long time to see someone else use what you've built. But I suspect for Vine, as for all the great intellectuals, the most satisfying, most liberating moments came not from someone else's discovery of that infrastructure but from his own." All right. So I'm going to end there and we can talk more.

[APPLAUSE]

[INAUDIBLE]

JOSEPH GONE: Thank you for those stimulating remarks. And we have now the privilege of hearing some reflections from Dr. Michelle Sanchez, who's joining us by Zoom. So you can see her there. Michelle Sanchez is associate Professor of Theology at Harvard Divinity School. She received her doctorate in the study of religion in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. Her first book, Calvin and the Resignification of the World-- Creation Incarnation and the Problem of Political Theology, was released by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

It closely reads Calvin's 1559 institutes with attention to how its genre and pedagogical strategy shape its doctrinal arguments in a material context and with an eye to embodied activity. It also places the text in conversation with contemporary theorists of religion, ritual, secularization, and political theology. Her next book examines how Christianity became pedagogically reconfigured as a worldview in the 20th century, with special attention to the role of 19th century Calvinist theologians.

Her research interests include the Christian movements of reform and complicated legacies of Protestantism. In 2017, she co-hosted a conference at the Divinity School on Christianity Race and Mass Incarceration. In 2019, she co-hosted another conference as part of a larger academic project on historicizing secular studies across the disciplines. So for now, I will give the floor to Professor Sanchez, please.

MICHELLE SANCHEZ: Thank you. Thank you very much. Everyone can hear me OK? All good? OK. I'm not hearing anything negative, so I assume so. Yeah. Thank you for allowing me to appear on Zoom. It was a choice of mask or not mask, which I feel like I often, these days, have to make this choice between my body or my face. So you're getting my face. I hope it's worth something.

Thank you so much, Professor Warrior, for those learned and wide-ranging remarks. And thanks to everybody and [INAUDIBLE], in particular, for inviting me here. I am a relative outsider to these conversations on Native studies and Native theology, as you just heard from my bio. I've spent much more time with the mainstream, recognizable, academic theological figures.

But I do feel very strongly that theology is a discipline, broadly speaking, in the Christian church, or the Christian milieu and in the academy-- cannot continue without submitting itself to critique of Indigenous studies, Native studies, colonial critique, and so forth. So I come as somebody who really thinks this stuff is important, but somebody who does not have background in it. So I say that to contextualize what I'm able to offer today. And

I always enjoy hearing people who are new to somebody like Calvin give an impression of Calvin. So I hope there's something in my outsiderness that is worthwhile. So I've encountered God is Red at various times over my career, but never in a formal way. It was never assigned to me in a course. I never found it as a discussion topic or even a reference book in panels or conferences that I've been a part of, even when the topics were on Indigenous critique or liberationist thought, which is really unfortunate.

But what that means is I had not spent quality time with God is Red until recently. So I'm kind of at the opposite end of the pole here. I did not read this book a long time ago. I read it closely, every single page, for the first time a few weeks ago in preparation for this event. So I don't know why. Maybe it's because I hadn't spent quality time with God as Red. Maybe I just had some kind of mental block. But it was not until I saw the preview of Professor Warrior's remarks yesterday that I saw the connection or I guess heard the connection between God is Red and God is dead.

I asked my husband about this last night. I said, what do you hear when you hear the title God is Red? He's like, God is dead. And I was like, OK. So it's just me. For me, the reference was much more like having not spent time with the book, I assumed that it was in the genre and the context of James Cone, God is Black, liberationist theology. So when I read the book, I was surprised to see, as Professor Warrior notes, it's not the Native version of Black liberation theology.

Partly because this was new to me, I was really taken by the God as dead connection, as has been noted famously attributed to Nietzsche and taken up by another strand of theology in the 1970s, really trying to take stock of the impact of modernity on Christianity. Yeah. This was a real aha moment for me because what struck me on my recent close read was precisely what Professor Warrior notes, that God is Red engages a mode of discourse in which writing is important and not just argument. It's about tone and tonal shifts.

Across God is Red, Deloria takes on the predominant register of 19th and 20th century Christian theology that really conformed itself to modern system building. And I think you see the outcome of this as what Warrior notes, that there's a kind of attempt to continue to fit Christian theology into some sort of framework of modern thinking and modern rationalization. So he takes dogmatic formulations again and again-- right across this book.

He takes dogmatic formulations and treats them with unsparing clarity, showing us again and again how these claims about God, and Jesus, and the world of Christianity-- the world that's sort of re-performed in the refining and the rationalization of these dogmatic claims-- fails to respond to the history, experiences, demands, of Native life, and even more, the life of the land, the life of the planet, planet dwellers living in the wake of industrialization, colonization, and technologization. So I love that Professor Warrior pays attention to the writing, to Deloria's glorious lyrical capacity, which shows up, especially, I think, in the final chapter of God is Red but also in the essay on nonviolence, which I really enjoyed reading.

But also, this point about the cynicism and even the merciless sarcasm, and at times a kind of bold iconoclasm-- I think this asks us to consider the question of impact in a much more profound way. One that refuses the rhetoric of modern theology while also recognizing something very deep in the long and broad history of theology, the fact that to the extent that theology has survived and reappeared as a mode of speaking and writing. It's because it some forms of it are fundamentally responsive to the connection between life and language and, particularly, to the ways that language fails to be accountable to life and needs to be re-inhabited. Impoverished language reveals impoverished life.

Yet, when impoverished language is so tightly embedded in the material workings of power, of world organization, sometimes the only tactic that creates perspective can be sarcasm, irony, and dark humor, even simply restating words and phrases in a way that has the potential of displaying their absurdity, as he does so expertly with so many theological formulations. And, of course, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a more capable virtuoso of this technique than Friedrich Nietzsche, who also famously saw himself as suffering fools in his writing. As Warrior rightly notes in one of the famous places where Nietzsche refers to the death of God, he follows that by saying we have killed God.

And the we here seems to refer to the subjects of Western modernity for whom rationalization has suffocated the creativeness, capriciousness, and even the violence of the ancient gods as well as the biblical God. But, of course, God is dead takes on several other meanings in Nietzsche's work. God is dead is also a theological statement, one that finds its place right at the center of Christianity's story, the belief that with the death of Jesus Christ, God, in some way, experiences death.

One of my professors pointed out to me some years ago that as the son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche would probably have sung the German hymn, "O Darkest Woe," written in 1637, in which the second verse reads, "O sorrow dread. Our God is dead. He paid our great redemption. Jesus' death upon the cross gained for us salvation." The death of God in Christianity signals a moment of salvation that emerges precisely at the height of human guilt, that when God appeared on Earth, humans banded together to kill him.

This points to a third motif in Nietzsche's writing on the death of God-- I think is seen most clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra-- that God died from being overwhelmed by the fullness of human suffering. God literally could not survive an unblinking encounter with the fullness of human pain and the suffering that we inflict on each other through our resentments. We could not maintain a God who could survive what we've done. Something more is needed to make this impossible act of affirmation of the world.

Professor Warrior notes not just Deloria's attention to writing and the multiple registers through which he writes. He also notes his lifelong conversation with theology and perhaps Lutheran theology in particular, though he was clearly widely-read and deeply conversant across the major trends of the '60s and '70s, as we've heard. But one question we may want to ask is, why?

What's the takeaway? Was it a matter of circumstance that Deloria never quite shook off the discourse that he encountered through seminary and these other contacts and friendships? One might well ask the same of Nietzsche, who many might think of as Christianity's fiercest critic but who never seemed to be able to let the topic go. It's different in Deloria's case, of course, in many ways.

But I suspect his investment in some kind of theology actually points to something more profound. And for me, this really came out in the final chapter of the book where Deloria shifts to talking about Christianity's failings in the context of Native life, and speaks in clear terms of the calling of that life, and especially of the land in which that life is formed and to which it is connected.

Theology, I think, can take hold because at its best, at its most powerful-- and I'm speaking in broad terms here, beyond merely the Christian version of theology-- but theological language, theological discourse is powerful because it's a form of language that answers a call, a divine or sacred call that must be fundamentally understood as the call of life, and land, and existence that exceeds the confines that ordinary conventional language and dominant rational forms can fight to put in place. But as long as the call can be heard, there's a possibility of a response, of a mode of enlivened language through which beauty accompanies critical force.

If there is a clear impact if God is Red on theology or in answer to Deloria's continued engagement with theology, it can be encapsulated in this fundamental posture of answering a call with the disobedient use of language, reaching around the ossified forms of discourse and refusing the ossified language that goes under the name of theology. And thus, doing the painstaking work of earning its final positive claim that God is Red. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

JOSEPH GONE: Thank you for that, Professor Sanchez. And now, we have about a half an hour to engage in some exchange with Professors Warrior and Sanchez. And maybe while you're thinking of questions and we get some Zoom queries queued up, Robert, do you want to respond to anything?

ROBERT WARRIOR: Sure. Yeah. I really appreciate your response, Michelle, if I may. Sorry, I was really looking forward to meeting you. There was actually a comparison between an essay that Deloria wrote for The Christian Century on the theological dimensions of the Indian protest movement in 1974 and 1975 around the same time. And I read your piece from a few years ago on Calvinism and on Calvin at the time, which was really wonderfully done, in that same forum, in The Christian Century, where you're trying to take these theological ideas to the audience that reads The Christian Century, which is mostly clergy but also thinking Christians, right?

After I read that, I thought, I should bring this in because Michelle would be able to speak to this act, which is one of the different things about theology, right? Theology has a non-academic audience built in. It's a profession which thinks of itself as vocational. And so it becomes different, right? So that the divinity school is a professional school, teaching people how to be professional ministers. That's the classic definition of it. Plenty of people don't go on to ministry out of divinity schools.

So that was an interesting part of this to me, was to think that there is, in fact, this audience. And I think that there was a craving maybe for a lot of us who study theology. There's an audience out there that actually already should be caring about these ideas. One of the things you brought up-- that the Episcopal Church, I think, and Anglicanism is so thoroughly-- and I agree about the part about Lutheranism, that it certainly doesn't have the systematic nature that you would find in the reform tradition and in Calvinism.

I kept thinking of this thing that Ella, Vine's aunt, [INAUDIBLE] great aunt said when she was writing about what the Episcopal Church was to her when she grew up and to the people around her. It becomes a parallel location in which to live a Lakota, Dakota life, taking the ways of being Lakota, Dakota, importing them into the church or transforming them by being in the church. She says at this one point in speaking of Indians and talking about Sioux Episcopalian-- she says, it was their very life, the people in the church, right? It was their very life.

So when you're criticizing-- I'm thinking this is part of the pain for Vine, is that he's criticizing this thing that had been so central to not just who he was but who his grandfather, and great grandfather, and his father had been. And so I think that's an important part of all of this. I think too, your first comments about doctrine and the various ways we can read that into the discourse that Deloria is using.

I think that you're exactly right and put it much better than I was trying to. And I was thinking through it of there being this sense of this Schleiermachian thing of somehow this particular theological voice has to be addressed to its culture despisers, right? That this is part of this impulse that Deloria is participating in that goes back to the father of systematic theology, of taking these things and systematizing them in a certain way.

There's this impulse that almost seems like it's necessary to be addressing yourself. That's part of how you get through this thing is by doing that, addressing your culture despisers as Schleiermacher did in his lectures, right? Yeah. But thanks for your comments. The last thing I was going to say, too, is I wondered-- theologically, I was thinking. Christianity is a religion about a killed God, as you said, which was really astute.

But did Christianity kill God by making God the word, by making God the logos, by making the notion of God to be this rational thing? That this is the logos. That this is actually how you kill God from the start.

MICHELLE SANCHEZ: Yeah. Continue to disembodied God.

ROBERT WARRIOR: Exactly. Right? Yeah.

MICHELLE SANCHEZ: I was trying to keep my remarks to [INAUDIBLE]. I'll just say real quick in response that I think in the last 20 years, increasingly, theology has really focused on land, and contextualization, and place. And I don't know enough about who's sighting who to know if this was a direct impact of this book. But I certainly think that it's an indirect impact in the fact that somebody was making this point so acutely in 1973 and showing that Christianity, as constituted publicly, the way that most people understand it, and most churches preach it, has severed itself from land and location.

And there's so many theologians now who are working on like recovering that, even though it's rooting itself in connectivity to materiality and material conditions, necessarily, gives up a border like protection that the Christian theology, through its disembodiedness had maintained. It's hard for me not to see that as part of the impact of this book on theology.

ROBERT WARRIOR: I agree.

JOSEPH GONE: Fantastic. Well, we'd love to hear questions or comments from those of you in the audience, including our Zoom audience. And I also want to note that Professor Anne Braude, of course, was originally slotted to convene this. And I assume that Ann is on Zoom. So, Ann, if you had a particular comment or question, I'd invite you to have a chance to share that on Zoom as well. So hands? Please.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Thank you both, just marvelous presentation, really informative. So my question has to do with, I think part of what makes Again, Dan Wildcat here, Haskell Indian Nations University. Thank you for a marvelous presentations, very informative. And I really appreciated from both of you the God is dead connection to God as Red.

And I think we've been talking, you both have raised this issue-- and I want to put it out there-- very explicitly and simplistically. I mean, in a sense, what's challenging about God is Red-- he's clearly using a Western discourse to talk about Indigenous religions. It's very deeply situated in this Western discourse. And yet, his message is, forget the Word, folks. The Word is the problem, that really it's experience. Religions are experience.

And, I think, in there is something I'd like to hear you both respond to. Because at so many points throughout his career-- in this book, Metaphysics of Modern Existence, articles he wrote, he points out the problem with Christianity is all of their miraculous events happened a long time ago. No one has those anymore, you know? And so they've got a dead religion.

The Native religions are not dead. They are living. And we have very unusual experiences. Now, he didn't like the word miraculous. That's a whole different kinds of discussion. Because miraculous would indicate it stood outside nature, supernatural. No. These weren't supernatural events. These were natural events.

So I'd like you to kind of comment about that. You've both spoken about it. No one appreciates the word as carefully as Deloria. His writing is just so meticulous about the words he chooses and how he phrases things. And yet, the message he's trying to say is, words are always going to fall short. Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ROBERT WARRIOR: [INAUDIBLE] things in there, Dan. And I appreciate the comment. So I think to your last point first. There's something that I just want to say is confounding to me in Deloria as an intellectual. And to get to the point about experience-- I think what I call Deloria's cynicism, which is not necessarily the best word for it. But the idea that somehow what the task of someone who is an intellectual, who is a writer-- that it's to a certain extent transactional, and a certain sense functional.

Writing is a function that we engage in. Intellectual work is a function that we engage in order to achieve something else. And I think that there's a way to read a lot of Vine's-- especially his attitudes towards taking up issues of intellectuality or intellectualism in the Native world-- which is to say, gosh, what he said about my work. You're tilting at windmills. Why are you doing this? It's not worth thinking about, right?

There's a world in pain. And you're further pushing yourself into the basement of the ivory tower where you can't even see anything, right? And, of course, that can be true, right? But I think that what's so interesting about the way that you brought all that up is to say, I think that the intellectual is an experience.

And I think that his call in God is Red to say, we need to confront seriously this idea that somehow mediating-- which is, I think, what it comes down to with the critique is that your religious tradition mediates your experience of the Holy, of the spirit. And that this is the major difference here between what people do within traditional Native ceremonies. As is to say I can have an experience of that.

I'm not actually having it through the Word. I'm not having it through the experience of somebody else doing it for me or it having happened in the past, and I experience it vicariously. This is a non-vicarious experience I'm having. And I think that's a major challenge within God is Red, of the idea that you can have this experience.

But this is, I guess, one of the things I hadn't thought of before. That this is part of, I think, being able to embrace the idea of the intellectual task as being part and parcel of that. There's an experience of experiencing your own intellectuality, experiencing your own intellect as something that's, in fact, not just this function of your brain but is something that, in fact, needs to be worked on, and worked through, that should be seen as being precious.

It's a precious gift along with the rest of what human life is, right? My friend Kate Shanley's notion from the northern plains of being able to say, the center of reason is the heart. That's where rationality belongs is in the heart and the blood that's pumping through, not in your brain that can be lopped off, right? But I think the overall point about experience is really crucial within this.

And, I think, it goes back to, Michelle, your point about how do you talk about land? Or how do you talk about the whole of life, right? That somehow, I think, one of the things that can be problematic about how we use land as a category is that land isn't the only thing out there. There are the things out there. I mean, there's the sea. There's the ocean.

And so land has become our way of saying we're going to now recast how we think about this, through land. It's actually bigger than that. The climate it's not the land. And that's one of the things that maybe this is the next step in all of this thinking, right? Is to take all the things we've said about how do we relate to the land. To say maybe it's we're relating to just everything, including us.

And that's the important realization, that we're part of all of this. That my form of life can sit here in this artificial environment, but it doesn't take away from the fact that I am this pile of atoms, and bones, and blood, and that sort of thing. But I agree. And I think that the hard thing within that then-- and this is what I think that Deloria was pointing towards in the work-- this is, I think, part of the reason why he's still going around hanging out with these theologians-- is that this sense of devotion to the church.

I think he was good at it. But I do think he did have that sense that he knew that world. I think he liked being in it when people were smart. He hated being in that world when it acted in some of the ways that it did. It was really painful at the end of his father's life. The Episcopal Church acted like nothing had happened essentially. And that was the only time I ever talked to Vine about anything that was where he talked to me about something that was painful.

He called me, which would be really unusual for him to do because I wasn't on his A list of people to call about anything. I think maybe it's because I was in New York right by 475 Riverside Drive, what they call the God Box. Maybe I'd walk over there and do something. But to really hear the pain in his voice.

His family had spent generations dedicated to the Episcopal Church. His dad, who was really important in that-- they just kind of didn't act like anything had happened. But that sense of experience, I think, is exactly-- I guess I agree with you. I don't know. Michelle, if you had other things to say on that.

MICHELLE SANCHEZ: Thank you for that. I mean, I agree with everything. And that was really great to hear. I'll add that, I think-- building off of the point that Robert made-- that the experience is really important here. And part of what I think he's getting at is not like words-- bad, experience-- good. It's how are words responding to experience? And how do words, therefore, take on a kind of life?

And I think the techniques that we've both been talking about-- the writing techniques that are theologically recognizable but not recognizable in the standard form of 20th century, mostly Protestant or Christian theology is something to do with the apophatic tradition, which would say that you can't make positive statements about God and expect them to be true or capable of actually pointing to what God is.

So you have to say negative things about God. And that makes sense. But then a lot of students will think that you can only say negative things about God and there's no place for positive language. And part of the lesson here is that it's back and forth. You have to say positive things in order to get some kind of content. And then, you have to negate the content. And then, you have to make new positive statements.

I mean, there's two points that I think this helps us at least appreciate some of the texture of God as Red. One is that there's different ways of saying things or negating things. You can literally put a no or a negation by a statement. Or you can use something like sarcasm or irony, which uses language in a different way that doesn't presume to be like presenting being itself or experience itself through words.

But it's literally like undercutting that connection. And then after all this work in the book, I just found it really profound to see him end the last sentence with a positive theological statement. God is Red. It's like it took all of this deconstructing, and critical, and sarcastic kind of work to say something positive in the end, which is something that invites a lot more on saying after that.

JOSEPH GONE: I see we have a comment here. While we get the microphone to you, do we have anything from Zoom back there, a question? Nothing coming in. Great. Please, floor is yours.

AUDIENCE: First of all, I'm Charles Stang. I'm from the Center for the Study of World Religions. I'm sorry I wasn't here last night, but I'm happy to be here today. Appreciated the first comment and the responses to it. Like Michelle. I'm new to God is Red. And I was really struck by the connection that's been drawn out in the comments so far with Nietzsche.

And like Michelle, it wasn't obvious to me at first, that connection. So I'm with you, Michelle. So far, these comments have made me think differently about Nietzsche. And a question about Deloria. So the question I now have about Nietzsche is, how important was land to Nietzsche? Because, in fact, the visitation of Zarathustra came at Lake Silverplana.

And his works were forged on a kind of nomadic period of his life where he was traveling along the Mediterranean. So where were seas and mountains in sort of the forge for Nietzsche's own thought. But I'll leave that aside and ask this question about how the pairing of Nietzsche and Deloria bears on Deloria. Because in God as Red, as I recall, the only place where Nietzsche's invoked is as a precursor to the 1960s or '70s God is dead theology.

But then, Deloria says that this led Nietzsche down a kind of sinister path of philosophy of the will and the superman. And that this was taken up by the National Socialists. And I just looked at the passage again basically saying, if you pursue such a path on the individual level, it will always lead to some kind of sinister, racial, superiority.

And I suppose the question I have for those of you who know Deloria well is, does he ever explore the possibility of something like-- [INAUDIBLE] the name of the overman or the superman-- but the pursuit of possibilities of the human that go well beyond what we are accustomed to understand the human to be but not on some sort of individualized level that would fall prey to what he thinks in Nietzsche fell prey to? So is there some kind of dream of what Nietzsche will say like the philosopher of the day after tomorrow, the human that's coming, that he thinks is actually consonant with a Native view of religion?

ROBERT WARRIOR: So the way I think about responding to the question-- the part you bring up about his discussion of Nietzsche, which seems to me fairly quick. I mean, I think that I wanted to hear in that a recognition especially that this was a difference actually between the US and Europe where I think that the experience of World War I that brings us then to, I think, what the theology of Karl Barth that becomes so influential everywhere.

It's not really until this moment and especially around Vietnam but also around all of these issues that creates so much upheaval in American society that you get the same sort of really deep and fundamental questioning that happened in Europe, that isn't accounted for in that quick thing. Nietzsche leads us to National Socialism. Kind of yes but also not. I mean, there's also this history that unfolds, that opens people's eyes in a certain way. It made me want to be able to look at what was being taught at Augustinian Seminary when he went there.

And I do think that even though the title comes from Nietzsche, I think that a lot of the impulses come from Kierkegaard, I mean, I think a different sort of way of grappling in a deeply existential mode. And this is one of the things I always wanted to be able to say about Deloria's thought was that I see him grasping philosophically towards articulating a different kind of existentialism that can become a communal existentialism. To say that existentialism isn't, in fact, as in the Western European sense this thing where we focus in on the single person in The Dark Night of the Soul in this existential crisis.

But, in fact, that the existential crisis is shared out among people and that this is allowed through ceremonies and things like this. I would never make these same sort of generalizations that Deloria was comfortable with. I mean, I'd always be kind of running away from those things. But he was comfortable doing that. And I think that's part of what made him like theology. Theology does some of those things, making these broad claims, right?

And you do certainly see-- I think, much more even than the 19th century figures-- I think you do see clearly he'd spent a lot of time reading Camus and reading the French existentialists of that time, right? You see that in the way that he felt confronted by the world around him. And how do we produce meaning in a world that makes things seem meaningless? And so I'm not exactly answering your question. I don't think that he ever does.

But I do think that you can see-- the thing I was going to say about this and I promised in my outline to talk about-- Velikovsky and the ancient astronauts that come up into the second edition. And I mean, I'm not comfortable in saying this is just a rhetorical strategy, that he wants to bring these things into discussion and sort of for the shock value of them. I mean, I think that there's a lot of proof that Vine really did entertain a lot of these ideas and think about them as being serious ways of thinking about the world.

And I think there is the part of bringing them in as opposed to leaving them off to the side as sort of these embarrassing things I maybe think might be true. I think he brings them in because he wants to say, do you have a stronger basis for believing what you say about history than I do about what Velikovsky says about it? And I never see him in the way of saying he's not doctrinaire about wanting to hold on to Velikovsky. You don't see it show up later.

I mean, I talked to a co-writer in my second book, Like a Hurricane, I wrote with Paul Chaat Smith. And we were talking about God is Red. And he said, but you know Velikovsky says Venus wasn't here 5,000 years ago, right? And we're pretty sure it was. But still, I mean, Velikovsky had a way of thinking about that. And there's this whole way of unpacking why this is really hard in the end to believe in, the same thing with the chariots of the gods sort of hypothesis of the ancient astronauts, right? And I think that one's more far-fetched.

And I remember that from the '70s, the movies-- the Chariots of the Gods movies and things like this. But I do think that they do play this role in saying what is it that makes those things as unbelievable as you say they are. Is it a predisposition just to think that things that we haven't thought about can't be true. Because I think that he does turn around.

And this is part of this larger thing about maybe your religious faith should be allowing you to realize that if it's actually a real faith, and you actually do believe in the things you believe in, that some of these things might actually happen. There might have been really tall people that we would think of as giants. I mean, I can remember people in the Osage-- you would never know it from me-- being 6'5 in 1730 was not unusual. So if that's an average height, is 6'4.

I wish that was me. I always wanted to be taller. Maybe that's ancestral memory coming out, right? Why aren't I taller? But then again I'm now engaging in this sort of rationalization. Where could that have come from, right? Could animals communicate? Did we did we previously the language of birds and of the animals? Could we talk to them? I mean, I talk to my dog all the time, right?

Maybe this is, in fact, the evidence that we've killed God, is that we automatically so often go to say, well, here's why animals can talk. Because I can talk to my dog. But what if there was something different? And isn't that part of how billions of people in the world experience their life every day, is believing that those things happen?

I mean, the point Suzanne brought up last night about the latest work that Deloria did, and saying, OK, what about this, right? And here's more evidence for this. Here's more. Here's some things that say these things happened. Even if you aren't able to embrace it in the same way that Vine does, I think that we see even in our own lifetimes the way that people have to think differently about extraterrestrial life being a possibility that people in 1973-- you're crazy. Of course there's no extraterrestrial life. That's a weather balloon.

But maybe it's not. And even if that is a weather balloon, it doesn't mean that something 400 years from now coming to visit the Earth that's now despoiled and nobody can live on it anymore to do archaeology on what happened on this planet that destroyed itself. That these people coming from somewhere else would say, why didn't these people really believe more about how the universe could be bigger than them? And I think that that's part of what I see going on in those things.

As I was thinking about these parts of the work, I mean, I was thinking of this moment when right after Vine passed away. I mean, it wasn't the day of the funeral-- I'm sorry to bring up these painful memories-- but the Rocky Mountain News kind of makes us part of what they say about Vine's legacy is believing in crazy theories, as if that's the day to say that, right? And to say that somehow you're going to discount somebody's life by making this very uninformed statement about it. This guy was just a kook, you know?

And the capacity for that sort of cruelty, I guess, that happens in our society is I think part of what Vine was fighting against. And I can tell you, I mean, he really did entertain these ideas. I mean, I thought that those things were in there as sort of a way of saying, I'm just using this for rhetorical shock value. But he'd say in letters to me things about he was thinking-- about crop circles and cattle mutilations.

And say, OK, maybe they can be explained by something else. But your theory of what actually happened is harder to believe than the idea that somehow it happened because somebody came from space and did it. Yeah. Things actually do all link together.

And I think that this is part of what I was hoping 30 years ago when I was reading all of this that we would have really specific looks, not just at the Deloria but at all of these intellectual figures, this thing that Deloria himself seemed to resist, taking his thought and thinking about it in the way we would look at Camus or Nietzsche. And by and large, I mean, people will cite Deloria. But they don't sit down and do the sort of systematic look at, what does it all mean together? How does it hang together?

I'm Really thankful for this opportunity to see people doing that and to put the challenge in front of us. It's what we do and you have a major intellectual figure, thinker-- is think about what that work means. How does it hang together? No. Not just because they deserve our praise and deserve our admiration, but because there might be something we haven't seen yet about that work, some place they were headed that's important for us to consider.

JOSEPH GONE: We have come to the end of our time. And we'll break in a moment to stretch your legs, get some food. And then, we'll return at 11:00 AM to begin this next panel. Before we do that, let's offer our gratitude to Professors Warrior and Sanchez. Thank you for stimulating [INAUDIBLE].

ROBERT WARRIOR: Thank you, Michelle.

JOSEPH GONE: Sponsors-- Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University Native American Program, Center for the Study of World Religions, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.