Should the site be re-named "Christian Doctrine" (not the url)?

Question

A recent post about this topic has illustrated clearly the need for good, solid guidelines. It has shown that we cannot reasonably expect to field all questions about Christianity. The correct response to this was that we don't try to field all questions about Christianity, rather we try to field questions about Christian Doctrine.

This was the effort of our recently implemented standards for questions and answers. What those standards boil down to is this: Questions must be about, or in regards to, in within the framework of Christian doctrine.

If a question is about doctrine, but doesn't specify a doctrine, it's Not Constructive because it turns into a voting war. If a question is about biblical interpretation but it doesn't specify a doctrine, it's actually a question about doctrine masquerading as a "Bible" question. Therefore, it has to be within a doctrinal framework or else it turns into a voting contest.

There was a special class of questions ("fact-based") that are allowed dealing with historical Christianity (ie historical doctrine), or factual questions about the Bible in general (source criticism, authorship, etc.). However these have proven to be a very minor percentage of our site and I doubt that this percentage will grow.

Proposal

We now have these standards in place--standards that garnered strong initial support and have proven themselves unavoidable in order to remain a valid fact-based SE site. These standards are essentially re-forming our site to be a site about Christian Doctrine, rather than a broad, open-ended site about Christianity in general.

Should we rename our site to Christian Doctrine?

Keep in mind, I'm not referring to changing the name of the url. Christianity.stackexchange.com is, I believe, a great name. However, rebranding our site as Christian Doctrine would make every page of our site ring with the standards that we have in place.

Ultimately, the only change I'm proposing is in all the graphics that are sprinkled through our site and the SE Network.

Answer 1

I disagree with that interpretation of the guidelines. Certainly there are a lot of theological questions on here, which do indeed need to be focussed on doctrine. But equally there are other questions that are currently on-topic that would be excluded if we were to restrict the site to just Christian doctrine. These aren't necessarily questions that have been asked (yet) but include matters such as:

• church history
• Biblical geography/politics
• church organisational structures and customs
• styles of worship, church layouts, etc

Probably not an exhaustive list. In a nutshell, this is the "A few questions about Christianity will not involve doctrine but must be answerable using referenced facts" part of the questions guidance and the "Answers may claim factual support by making references to respectable outside sources" part of the answers guidance. Yes, these questions may be in the minority, but there are some pretty high quality questions and answers on the site that fall into this group, and personally I find these more interesting than many of the doctrinal questions, so would hate to see them go.

I accept that the proposal is to rename the site not to change the guidance to exclude the "factual" bits, but if the name of the site implies doctrine-only then (a) it's only a matter of time before the guidelines are changed to match the new title and (b) people looking for answers to "factual" questions and experts in these matters will not be attracted to the site. I don't find that acceptable.

Answer 2

I am not finding myself in disagreement with this idea. but FWIW, I'd hope we could also keep the big for our favicon.

I guess I'll make this the "In favor of" post. I am in favor of this idea mainly because a majority of the questions are about they "why's" and "how's" of Christianity, I'd call that Christian Doctrine. It's actually pretty interesting to me as a Catholic to read about non-Catholic Christian doctrine - at least as it relates to spirituality.

I don't personally separate anything that Mr. Waggers mentioned in his majority opinion (history, liturgy, etc..) from Christian doctrine. For a few decades or maybe more, and almost no one knows why, we've called our religious education classes "CCD" which means (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine). I'm pretty sure the Confraternity is really just the folks who were responsible for early 20th century English bible translations and pre-Catechism Catechisms. But if we can accept calling something CCD, wherein the Catechism, Religious History, the Saints, the Sacraments, the Commandments, Our Lady, and most importantly the Blessed Trinity are discussed, I think we can call this site Christian Doctrine without excluding people who area really interested in the estuaries of the Sea of Galilee.

Answer 3

Yes. I support this name change absolutely. The SE model is completely incompatible with matters of faith. Call it what you will, but naming this site Christianity is doing a huge disservice to those who identify as Christians. To some, it may even be harmful.

Caleb tells me this proposal has been rejected. By whom? What was the process? This particular Q&A and a handful of votes?

You see, so much here is dismissed and discouraged out of hand in accordance with the SE model. That's fine. But some of these things are integral to the Christian faith: doubt, mystery, opinion, belief, service, love, forgiveness. (And before I am pointed to a tedious screed about what this site is or is not, understand that I wish for none of this to change. It won't and I get that.)

I also get that this is not a Christian site. But the name needs to be changed. It’s inaccurate and reinforces the dogmatic perspective that turns so many away from Christ.

Answer 4

Yes.

(And my personal comment is a comment... just adding this because I need 30 characters :P)