The World Religions Paradigm emerged in the 17th-20th centuries. People were classifying plants, people, and governments, and they also classified religions. They took Christianity as the template and made its structure apply to other faiths when, really, it didn’t fit. Given that this was an artificial structure that every other belief system was made to conform to, it also changed the idea of Christianity and what it signified. Both to others and to believers.

By calling my website Christian Minus Christianity, I am trying to separate this idea of “Christianity” with reference to the World Religions Paradigm. When Christ died, there was no Christianity. When he rose there was no Christianity. There was Christ risen, and the people were called “Christian” but “Christianity” came later. For the first several hundred years it was not associated with any power.

There’s a difference between a humble Palestinian Christian saying “Christ is Lord” and what we say here, in power and, for many of us, relative safety, when we say “Christ is Lord.” Crusaders crying out “Christ is Lord” as they killed Muslims, or Nazis, many of whom professed Christ, working in the concentration camps. “Christ is Lord” has not been good news for Native Americans or enslaved Black people either when proclaimed by their oppressors, though some found the True, Risen Christ, and have shone light for those of us with ears to hear and eyes to see.

If these crusaders or Nazis had followed Christ, truly followed him, then these atrocities may never have happened–or at least they would have fought them.