Feeling what they consider “threats” from American culture, a diverse group of Christian leaders are vowing unspecified civil disobedience against abortion, same-sex “marriage” and limits on religious liberty.
In a 4,700-word statement named the “Manhattan Declaration,” about 150 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox signers said they are coming together to “embrace our obligation” to speak and act in support of the dignity of all human beings, marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and the freedom to express religious convictions.
“[W]e will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act,” the statement says, “nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.”
The drafters and other signers of the “Manhattan Declaration” unveiled the statement at a Washington news conference Nov. 20. The document gets its name from the location of the first drafting committee meeting. One of the document’s three drafters is Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham.
“Our hope would be that we would have up to a million signatories who will want to stand with us,” George said. “This is an important time for all Christians to come together, stand together and make clear what our convictions are.”
At press time Nov. 25, the declaration had garnered more than 115,000 signatures.
The timing of the document’s release — 10 months into the Obama administration — was affected by the policy proposals of the new president and a Democrat-controlled Congress, but the principles in the statement are timeless, they said.
But this “is not a politically motivated agenda,” George said. “While the urgency of the moment is impacted by what’s going on around us, and we need to be discerning of that, the principles that undergird the ‘Manhattan Declaration’ are enduring. They are motivated and come from the deepest resources of our faith. And in that sense, it’s a statement that could have been made last year, 10 years ago, and we think will be relevant 10, 50, 100, 1,000 years from now.”
He added that the three issues the statement focuses on “do not constitute the entirety of Christian moral concerns.”
“Obviously not. But they are threshold issues on which everything else we do is related,” he said. “Our concern for the poor, for peacemaking in our world, for the care of creation, our concern for all of the issues of nurturing children in the faith, these are all related to the three issues we are talking about today.”
Another drafter, Robert George, said the document shows that “we see a genuine increase in the threat, especially on the sanctity of life front.”
“That’s the result of the federal government having an administration that is deeply committed to legal abortion and [government funding] and a majority in both houses of Congress that share that commitment,” said Robert George, a Roman Catholic and a professor at Princeton University. “We could have said many of the things that we are saying today a year ago, but some of the things we are saying today have an urgency to them as a result of the [Obama administration].”
In addition to Robert George and Timothy George, Charles Colson was a member of the committee that drafted the statement with input from many of the signers. Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, is a member of First Baptist Church, Naples, Fla.
Among others who signed the document were three Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) entity heads: Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.; and Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.
Two former SBC entity heads signed the document: James T. Draper Jr., president emeritus of LifeWay Christian Resources who also is a former SBC president, and Bob Reccord, former president of the North American Mission Board and founder of Total Life Impact, Inc. In addition to Draper, another former SBC president listed among the signatories is Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, Plano, Texas.
Other leaders who signed the declaration include David Dockery, president of Union University in Jackson, Tenn., and Alabama Baptist pastor David Platt of The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham.
The declaration includes a preamble and a declaration, along with sections on life, marriage and religious liberty. The preamble says Christians have stood up for the helpless for centuries, beginning during the Roman empire by “rescuing discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide.” It was Christians who “combated the evil of slavery” and the slave trade in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and who, in more recent U.S. history, “stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement” for women.
“The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and ’60s were led by Christians claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every human being regardless of race, religion, age or class,” the preamble reads.
The trampling of religious freedom, the document says, is seen “in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions.”
It is also seen “in the use of antidiscrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business.” The document cites as evidence a New Jersey Methodist ocean-front retreat center that lost part of its tax-exempt status when it refused to allow a lesbian commitment ceremony to be performed on its property.
Timothy George said the drafters “are speaking out of our deep convictions that grow out of biblical faith.”
As Christians, the document reads, “we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust — and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust — undermine the common good, rather than serve it.”
Regarding civil disobedience, the signers “certainly hope that it does not come to that on any of these issues for any American,” Robert George told reporters at the news conference. However, he said, “[W]e see in case after case challenges to religious liberty, impositions, such as impositions on pharmacists. … There are limits to what can be asked of people. There are limits to what can be imposed on conscience.”
For more information or to read the document, visit www.manhattandeclaration.org. (BP, TAB)
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