Is the scope of SE Christianity too narrow?

Question

The FAQ of SE Christianity states that one should ask questions about -

"Understanding the Bible from the perspective of a specific viewpoint."

FAQ of SE Hermeneutics -

"Interpretation of a specific Bible passage"

I usually understand the Bible by understanding a Biblical passage. Hence to me these two look quite the same? They may have a fine line of separation but I wonder if it justifies having two different sites.

In my thinking SE Christianity would be more useful if it loosened up its rules a little bit to allow more general questions.

1. It would create a point of difference between the two sites. Hermeneutics for strictly Biblical discussions and SE Christianity for all viewpoints related to Christianity. e.g. Christian Philosophy, Christian Life, Apologetics, Intelligent Design(where am I supposed to ask ID questions?) etc etc.
2. It would be less intimidating to new users. A narrow limit on scope of questions might be the reason why we see so less traffic on SE Christianity than other SE sites. (I myself was a member for two months before I asked a question)

What do you folks think?

Edit: Another point I'd like to make is that Christians want to ask all sort of questions but we can't have an individual site for all possible categories. Example - Broaden scope to include Church management? We can't have a separate site for Christian Worship Leading and Service Design. So obviously we need a generic one that can contain such topics.

Long story short - Isn't it high time that we balanced the perfectionism for quality with quantity of content?

Answer 1

Too narrow? How about too broad?

We are trying to capture every single group that claims to be a Christian the diversity of opinions is incredible. We could have an individual (and potentially thriving) SE just to discuss specific doctrine and issues of several major churches, but instead we are attempting to jam them all into a single SE.

As far as the difference between BH.SE and here? Let me list them (yeah bullets!)

• BH is a position neutral site, you will get answers there from Christian, Jewish and secular perspectives. We are position specific, not only do we try to answer from a Christian perspective, but we also try to tailor answers to the doctrinal perspective of the reader.
• BH is more factual and we are more conceptual. BH deals with what the Bible says, and some interpretation. We have the ability to do application in addition to interpretation.

BH exists to provide a neutral voice, we provide a biased one. Merging the sites would be not only incorrect, but dishonest.

I'm not sure why you think the things you listed as being in your theoretical site are off topic here. All of those things (with the possible exception of intelligent design) are on topic here and have been discussed at length.

The reason we see less traffic here is because we are new site. Only 3 sites that started after us have higher traffic than we do (bitcoin which started about the same time (and differs by <10 visits/day), Movies and TV which has the advantage of continuous huge new releases, and Mathematica which has a large professional audience that overlaps well with SEI's primary userbase).

Yes our stats are not as good as when we started, but I chalk that mostly up to growing pains. We are a new beta and still finding ourselves. Discussions like this help, but they should be constructive and mindful of both the history and the purpose of this site.

I'd be open to discussion how to integrate church management. Honestly I'm not sure what a good question there looks like and I'd like to see a few tried to see if we could handle them instead of us just supposing they are off topic. If you've got a question in this vain ask it and let's see how it does. Then we can talk on meta about how to make these questions good.

Answer 2

I agree in all points, except your assertion that those are off topic.

I've asked tons of Catholicism questions on the site most of which only tangentially have anything to do with the bible.

One think I don't think any one wants is for this site to be merely Biblical Basis StackExchange. I am fully in favor of philosophical questions being asked here, where you're at least likely to get a Christian perspective on the matter.

It astounds me that on Philosophy.SE they don't even have a Natural Law tag! Makes you wonder who's teaching philosophy nowadays in colleges. Probably a bunch of Neitzsches nieces.