Via Pharyngula, I learn that Campus Crusade for Christ, the evangelical organization, has decided to change its name. The new one? Cru. Yes, really. Apparently college affiliates had been referring to themselves this way for a while.

I don’t know about this. Cru sounds more like the stage name a rapper would adopt, as in ‘DJ Cru’. Furthermore, the university where I work at has the acronym CWRU that is spoken as ‘crew’ which sounds the same as ‘cru’. So the members of the campus affiliate of this organization will become known as the ‘CWRU Cru crew’, which when vocalized will sound like you are doing bird imitations.

The reason for the change is that apparently the words ‘Campus’ and ‘Crusade’ had negative connotations. More interestingly, they found that even ‘Christ’ was off-putting because people “might initially be turned off by a more overtly Christian name”. They seem to think that having a name that gave no hint of being Christian would enable their members to sneak their religious message into conversations with people who were unaware that they were targets of a proselytization effort.

This is of course the kind of sneaky tactics religious people use. But despite that, I took it to be a very encouraging sign that the brand ‘Christ’ is seen by even evangelical Christians as being tarnished.