The Religious Right name-change (fail)

Rebranding efforts by the Religious Right have attracted both gentle satire and serious response.

Neither journalistic answer considers doing as those interviewed by Christianity Today asked. That would involve adopting a new term with which to characterize the “Religious Right” — a new term which is less closely associated with “hard-edge politics and intolerance,” as it was put by John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Indeed, Christianity Today reports that those who compose the Religious Right would really like a term which permits them to cobble together a broader alliance:

Organizational leaders like Tony Perkins of Family Research Council want a term that includes other religious groups like Catholics, Jews, and Mormons so that they can see themselves as fighting for the same cause.

Image-preening and alliance-broadening are coalition marketing goals.

They are not reasons for the rest of us to abandon a long used, well-understood and carefully chosen term which has acquired negative connotations as a result of the behavior those to whom it is applied. A name change is in any case just going to move those connotations to a new name, although a change in behavior will eventually erase them.