Terminology

Constitution 1.0.2 retires "Christianity" as a name for the movement. This page explains why, what replaces it, and how the choice is enforced rather than merely recommended.

Why the label is retired

The word frames the Gospel as one religion among religions — a system of belief competing on a shelf with other systems, each with its own founder, texts, and adherents. That framing is the exact thing relational theology rejects: God is not offering a religion to compare, He is announcing a reign and calling people into belonging.

The label is retired for that reason. It is not retired because it is inaccurate as history, or because it is offensive. Historical descriptions of the phenomenon still need a name — that name is Christendom.

What to say instead

Say	When
the Kingdom of God	Default. God's reign and rule — announced by Jesus, inaugurated in Him, consummated at His return. Use wherever the subject is God's action and authority.
belonging to Christ	Where the subject is people and identity — "those who belong to Christ". Names relationship, not membership.
Christendom	Where the subject is the cultural, historical, or institutional phenomenon across centuries. Descriptive only — never a compliment, never a synonym for the Kingdom of God.

None of these is used for the channel's own identity, the audience, the content being produced, or the Gospel itself. Those sentences get rewritten, not relabelled.

Scripture is never rewritten

Three verses in the corpus use the word:

• Acts 11:26 — the disciples were first called this at Antioch
• Acts 26:28 — Agrippa's reply to Paul
• 1 Peter 4:16 — suffering "as a" one of these, and not being ashamed

A style rule never edits the text of Scripture. If a verse says it, the verse is read as written and explained. The gate therefore exempts verified quotations: a quotation is exempt only if it matches the licensed corpus. An unverified quotation containing the word is not exempt, so the exemption cannot be used to smuggle the wording back in under quote marks.

How it is enforced

PRO-15 applies to every document kind — scripts, narration, descriptions, shorts, titles, thumbnails, community posts, comments, research, storyboards, SEO, and engagement.

Detector	Catches	Result
DET-PRO-15a	the -ism itself	blocks
DET-PRO-15b	the label used to describe the movement, its media, or its content	blocks
DET-PRO-15c	the -ian label for people	routes to review

The third detector is deliberately a review rather than a hard block, because context decides: a verified quotation, or an accurate description of how others self-identify, is legitimate. The default is still that the wording changes.

VAL-17 adds the corresponding attestation, required on scripts and research. The terminology list in the constitution also carries the phrase forms — "Christian religion", "Christian faith", "Christian worldview", "Christian nation", "Christian media", "Christian content", "Christian values" — so phrase-level drift is caught even where the standalone label is avoided.

Known limitation

The negation heuristic exists so that a contrast ("this is not a transaction with God") is visible without blocking publication. It inspects the surrounding sentence, so a negated following clause can downgrade a match that the negation does not actually govern. DET-PRO-15c findings remain visible in the audit for exactly this reason: the reviewer sees the flag even when the heuristic judged it non-blocking.

Pillar rename

The content pillar previously slugged jesus_and_christianity is now jesus_and_the_kingdom, labelled Jesus & the Kingdom of God. Pillar slugs are persisted on content projects, so the rename ships with an idempotent data migration (app/migrate.py) that runs on startup.