I asked a sociologist about what I am talking about with my Christian Minus Christianity website, if there is a word, and he said the word is trope–by saying Christian minus Christianity I am not saying Christian without Christ but rather without imperialism. That Christianity would imply imperialism is because of how tropes function.

I was just talking to my brother who went to a funeral. My brother is an agnostic. He went to the funeral at an Episcopal church. The sermon was fine as sermons go, but then the priest made a comment about the sin of addiction (apparently the young woman had overdosed). My brother said, “f— the church, f— him.” 

From that one sermon, my brother drew an assessment of the entire church. This is what non-Christians do when they see Trump holding a Bible upside down outside of a church, or when they see people praying for Israel or telling Palestinians they should turn the other cheek. No, these people are not historians of religion making an appraisal of the diversity of faith on the globe or the diversity of Christianities in the United States, let alone abroad…these are people who go to a funeral and hear something cliché that triggers their larger web of negative associations with Christianity, putting one more nail in the Christian coffin. 

So anyway, I asked a sociologist about this. I said, what is this called? It’s not hegemony. And he said it’s tropes. It’s not the collective unconscious, it’s not the social consciousness, it’s tropes. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tropes/

So my Christian Minus Christianity helps cut through the tropes so we can find Christ again.