6 ideas
Religions can be sorted by whether they locate the holy in particular places or in a sequence of historical events. Space-based traditions tie revelation and obligation to specific lands, so the religion cannot be carried off or separated from where it happened. Time-based traditions like Christianity locate meaning in a linear history moving toward fulfillment, which makes any given place interchangeable and expendable.
A religion that claims one truth valid for all people everywhere has no built-in reason to respect local, place-bound ways of life. It treats them as errors to be corrected. The missionary impulse and the colonial land grab are therefore not accidental partners: exporting a placeless universal truth supplies the moral cover for displacing people whose religion is inseparable from their land.
When a theology treats nature as a temporary stage for a human salvation drama and gives humans dominion over creation, land becomes raw material rather than a relative. Deloria links this anthropocentric orthodoxy to American economic philosophies of extraction and to environmental degradation. A people's ecological behavior follows from where their religion locates the sacred.
Tribal religions are practiced by a community bound to a place, and their ceremonies sustain the relationship between that people, their land, and the living world. They are not a personal creed an individual adopts to secure their own afterlife. Seen this way, Christian emphasis on individual conversion and personal salvation looks like the cause of social fragmentation, not a religious universal.
Specific locations such as mountains, springs, and burial grounds are where the sacred revealed itself to a people and where it keeps being encountered. Because revelation is anchored there, these sites cannot be swapped for others or moved. Destroying one, or denying a people access to it, severs a living religious relationship instead of merely damaging property.
A religion that stakes its truth on history must answer for what it has done in history: conquest, forced conversion, broken treaties, and cultural destruction carried out in its name. Deloria turns the time-based religion's own standard against it. By that measure, its record undermines its claim to moral superiority over the tribal religions it tried to replace.