Somewhere in the shift from sanctuaries with steeples to converted warehouses, American Christianity discovered the power of a good PR pivot. The most famous one is a line deployed with a rush of clarity:
“It’s not a religion, it’s a relationship.”
At the time, it felt like a theological breakthrough. For those of us desperate to save the faith we loved from the hypocrisy we saw, it felt like shedding dead traditions in favor of something authentic and alive.
But with the benefit of distance, it becomes clear that this phrase was never an endpoint, but was an entry point. It is just one move in a predictable, repeating pattern that activates every time Christianity’s output becomes embarrassing to its adherents.
The church’s instinct to rebrand rather than reckon is a defense mechanism. Every linguistic pivot, from “religion” to “relationship,” or from “Christian” to “Christ-follower,” serves the exact same function: to preserve the system by disowning the label once that label starts carrying the weight of what the system actually produces.
the armor of abstraction
When the brand becomes toxic, the institution can't just close down the factory, but rather it just changes the logo. And this rebranding always moves in one specific direction: away from accountability, toward abstraction.
For example, you can critique a “church” or an “evangelical institution” because those are tangible entities with histories, voting records, and bank accounts. But how do you critique a “gospel-centered faith community”? How do you pin down a “Jesus-follower” who claims to transcend the baggage of organized religion?
Spoiler alert: you can’t.
The vaguer the language becomes, the harder it is to hold the system accountable. The abstraction becomes the armor.
This isn’t a uniquely religious tactic; it is the standard playbook for any system of power trying to survive its own consequences. We see it constantly in the secular world.
Consider the defense of the Confederate flag and the so-called “Heritage, not hate.” It’s the exact same flag representing the exact same history, but the linguistic reframe subtly shifts the conversation away from the impact of the symbol and onto the internal identity of the person flying it.
By making it about “heritage,” the system makes the critic look like the aggressor for attacking someone’s ancestry.
Or even consider the phrase “officer-involved shooting.” Police departments and their PR wings built this language specifically to obscure who did what to whom. It purposefully avoids the active reality of “police killed a civilian.” The passive voice is the rebrand, diffusing responsibility into the ether.
When a secular system does this, it’s PR.
But when the church does it, it’s theology.
divine authority, human liability
Right now, the prevailing trigger for the church’s rebranding reflex is White Christian nationalism. As the rhetoric grows more extreme and the political power grabs become more apparent, the moderate church’s response is almost entirely one of differentiation rather than confrontation.
They look at the megachurch pastors stumping for politicians or the flags flying at the Capitol on January 6th, and they say, “Well, that’s not us.” But “that’s not us” is just doing the heavy lifting of “we don’t have to examine this.”
This differentiation relies on a classic rhetorical bait-and-switch, a theological Motte and Bailey.
When the institution wants your money, your submission, and your Sunday mornings, it claims absolute, divine authority: The Church is the literal Body of Christ. It is God’s hands and feet on earth.
But the moment a massive abuse scandal breaks, or the bigotry becomes too loud to ignore, they retreat to the safe, defensible fallback: “Well, humans are flawed. That was just the church, that wasn’t God.”
Or, they deploy the ultimate individualist rebrand: “I believe in God, I just don’t believe in the church.”
Well, which is it?
To borrow Jay-Z’s old hip-hop critique of Nas: is it Oochie Wally or One Mic? Are you the sacred, infallible prophet, or are you just playing the crowd?
You cannot claim to be the localized, divine manifestation of the Creator of the universe when the tithe checks are clearing, only to suddenly rebrand as a “loosely affiliated club of broken people” the second the PR goes bad.
This pivot allows moderate Christians to avoid a terrifying realization: the moderate and the extremist are running the exact same operating system.
For example, look at how the church views gender. The difference between a suburban community church teaching “complementarianism” in a polite pre-marital counseling session, and a militant nationalist church demanding the repeal of the 19th amendment, is only a degree of application.
They are both operating from the exact same source material, asserting that an ancient text dictates modern hierarchies.
One just so happens to be better at PR.
21st-century ethics, iron age cosmology
It is easy to critique the nationalist extremes. But this desperate instinct to protect the source material is precisely why I have some smoke for progressive Christians, too.
When I was halfway out the door of the faith, I spent some time in progressive spaces. In their rush to rebrand away from the toxicity of their fundamentalist roots, progressives cling to the comforting illusion that they are finally reading the Bible “right,” while the extremists are reading it “wrong.”
But anyone who takes a sober, critical look at the text, as I eventually had to do, knows that the word “biblical” means absolutely nothing.
The Bible is not a cohesive, univocal manifesto, but a messy library of competing ancient voices. If you want a theology of liberation and inclusion, you can point to the Exodus narrative or the Sermon on the Mount. But if you want patriarchy, xenophobia, and holy war? The book of Joshua and the New Testament household codes are right there on the page, ready to support you.
We can’t keep acting like the religious right is simply misinterpreting the text. They aren’t getting the Bible “wrong”, they are just highlighting the exact texts that progressives are desperately trying to rebrand out of existence.
Progressive Christianity often acts as the ultimate rebrand. It attempts to salvage the authority of the text by ignoring the inconvenient halves of it, applying a thick coat of 21st-century ethics over Iron Age cosmology.
the vocabulary of survival
To truly reckon with that would require dismantling the foundations. And that is why the instinct to rebrand is so fiercely protected. When I was deeply embedded in the church, my faith was the core of who I was, not just something I did. And when faith is your entire selfhood, critiquing the system feels indistinguishable from self-destruction.
New language is the psychological loophole I used to survive. It lets you keep the identity without owning the bill for what the system has built. It allows you to feel like you are stepping into something new and pure, without ever having to dismantle the machinery of the old.
And so, the cycle simply repeats. Every generation inevitably disowns the previous generation’s Christianity. The Millennials disowned the Boomers’ corporate, CEO-driven mega-churches by moving into cities and planting “missional, incarnational communities” with craft coffee and reclaimed wood.
Today, Gen Z is disowning the Millennials’ polished, aesthetic-driven church-plants for something even more “deconstructed,” trauma-informed, or “ancient-future.”
We change the vernacular and aesthetics. But we are just planting seeds for the next generation’s version of the exact same thing. Rebranding is nothing more than painting the walls of a factory while the machinery keeps churning out the exact same toxic smoke.
At some point, true accountability doesn’t look like finding a better word for the system. It requires having the courage to look at the machinery itself.
after the asterisk
I remember the profound exhaustion of the rebrand.
When I was halfway out the door, I spent hours scouring church websites, reading between the lines of their “About Us” pages. I was looking for the right keywords.
Were they affirming or just welcoming?
Were they egalitarian or was “complementarian” hiding down in the FAQ?
I was desperately searching for a community where I wouldn’t have to apologize for the machinery, wanting to keep the comfort of the sanctuary without the guilt of the system.
If you are reading this and you’re still inside, or hovering somewhere near the exit, I know exactly how much energy it takes to keep learning the new vocabulary.
But I gotta ask: What are you really protecting?
When you swap “religion” for “relationship,” or when you insist to your coworkers that your church is “one of the good ones,” are you actually changing the system, or are you just trying to avoid the embarrassment of its pollution?
Are you trying to save the integrity of the text, or are you just trying to save your own ego from the reality of what you’ve been a part of?
We add the asterisk (*We aren’t that kind of church, *I don’t read the Bible that way) because we think it shields us. But an asterisk does not rewrite the text. It merely proves that you know the text is dangerous.
There is a terrifying grief in realizing that you cannot rebrand a foundation, unable to PR your way out of the Iron Age.
But on the other side of that grief is a Sunday morning where you don’t have to parse a pastor’s sermon for dog-whistles. There's a Sunday where you can just wake up, make your coffee, and look at the person across the table without needing a theological caveat to love them.
You don’t need a new vocabulary word to be a good neighbor.
You just need your own two hands, and the courage to finally walk out of the factory.