Shug's ideas about God are quite different from Celie's. Because Shug views life and the world as beautiful, she thinks that God wants all of his children to participate in life as a joyous celebration. "To please God," Shug says, "I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time." Shug thinks that it's a sin not to be happy and appreciate beauty — and, furthermore, she thinks that a person should look for beauty. Shug believes that it "pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."
Celie's idea of God is wholly different from Shug's. Celie has suffered misery from men, and she has believed that she had to accept it. To her, God was just another man, up in the sky, a white man who was patiently listening to her. Now Celie believes that God allowed her to suffer and paid no attention to her prayers. She is furious. Therefore, Shug patiently has to explain, in essence, that God is not a man and certainly not a white man. God, to Shug, is everything. God is so much everything that he — or more correctly, it — cannot be visualized or expressed completely. God is not white, or black, or male. God is God. He gave Celie, Shug emphasizes, life, good health, and "a good woman [Shug] that love you to death."
It is absolutely believable that Celie would believe that God was a trifling man. As an oppressed black American, she has been taught that white men are the superior source of authority. Likewise, God is omnipotent. For that reason, Nettie's observation that Jesus had lamb's wool-like hair (kinky) was a puzzling idea to her; that kind of hair allows for the possibility that God is black. When Celie says, "If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place," she is saying that God is white, male, and rich. Celie read Nettie's letter about Jesus' hair being kinky, but clearly, she did not believe it. Shug reinforces Celie's notion: "The last thing niggers want to think about they God is that his hair kinky," she says.
