Gandhi was inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, which is a book that I am currently translating from Russian into English. I’m also working to annotate it. In it, Tolstoy says that the Christianity of Christ is different from the Christianity of the empire he was living in–the Russian Empire. I believe in this translation project because I am convinced that the way of nonviolence is essential, if not as a practice, then as a regulative ideal. A regulative ideal is one that determines the rails that contain the realm of the possible–that’s how I’m using the term “regulative ideal.”

While I hope for embodied nonviolence and myself live by nonviolence, I also recognize that armies and guns will never be abolished, and if they were, new means of death and control would manifest.

Gandhi addressed Christianity rationally, seeing Christ and Christianity as separate from Christians, who he didn’t feel lived up to the name. My goal in having this site “Christian Minus Christianity” is to encourage us as Christians to live up to the Christ part of our calling, which often means that we need to distance ourself from Christianity. This is the case because of Christian dominance and supremacy in the US, so this wouldn’t be an imperative that made sense in places where Christianity was in the minority.

There are, further, other Christians who are trying to invigorate the faith from the perspective of antizionism, which is not the same as anti-Jewishness at all. Zionism is a form of racism that insists on Jewish supremacy in Israel just as Trump and others are trying to instantiate Christian supremacy in the United States. This runs counter to the Christianity that Christ envisioned when he made Mary Magdalene the tower of the church (Magdalene is related to “tower”) and Peter the Rock.