Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian
Conscience
Drafted October 20, 2009
Released November 20, 2009
Preamble
Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s
word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.
While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian
institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing
discarded babies from trash heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire’s sanctioning of infanticide. We
remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying
during the plagues, and who died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.
After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved
not only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture. It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery:
Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and
first excommunicated anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led by John Wesley and William
Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in that country. Christians under Wilberforce’s leadership also formed hundreds
of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.
In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully
fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which made modern democracy possible. And in America,
Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. 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.
This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade
to work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery, bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers
in Africa, and assist in a myriad of other human rights causes – from providing clean water in developing nations to
providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and gender discrimination.
Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called
to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the human person and to stand for the common good.
In being true to its own calling, the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a profound contribution
to the public good.
Declaration
We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered, beginning
in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration, which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations,
but speaking to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God, the triune God of holiness and
love, who has laid total claim on our lives and by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek
and defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in light of the truth that is grounded in Holy
Scripture, in natural human reason (which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very nature of
the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect
critically on the issues we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s conscience in the sight
of God.
While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern
for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn,
the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity,
infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion
and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons
of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.
Because the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as a union of
husband and wife, and the freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we
are compelled by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we affirm: 1) the profound, inherent,
and equal dignity of every human being as a creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal
dignity and life; 2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the creation, and historically understood
by believers and non-believers alike, to be the most basic institution in society and; 3) religious liberty, which is grounded
in the character of God, the example of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the divine
image.
We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial
differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense
of these truths. We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political,
will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to fail in that duty.
Life
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male
and female he created them. Genesis 1:27
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10 Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life
direction, we note with sadness that pro-abortion ideology prevails today in our government. The present administration is
led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions
at taxpayer expense. Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views. The Supreme Court, whose infamous 1973
decision in Roe v. Wade stripped the unborn of legal protection, continues to treat elective abortion as a fundamental
constitutional right, though it has upheld as constitutionally permissible some limited restrictions on abortion. The President
says that he wants to reduce the “need” for abortion—a commendable goal. But he has also pledged to make
abortion more easily and widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring waiting periods for
women seeking abortions, and parental notification for abortions performed on minors. The elimination of these important and
effective pro-life laws cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the number of elective abortions
by which the lives of countless children are snuffed out prior to birth. Our commitment to the sanctity of life is not a matter
of partisan loyalty, for we recognize that in the thirty-six years since Roe v. Wade, elected officials and appointees
of both major political parties have been complicit in giving legal sanction to what Pope John Paul II described as “the
culture of death”.
We call on all officials in our country, elected and appointed, to protect
and serve every member of our society, including the most marginalized, voiceless, and vulnerable among us. A culture of death
inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature,
or inconvenient are discardable. As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began with abortion has
now metastasized. For example, human embryo-destructive research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science
and in the cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries. The President and many in Congress favor the
expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called “therapeutic cloning”. This would result
in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell
lines and tissues.
At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote assisted
suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable elderly and disabled persons. Eugenic notions
such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”) were first advanced in the 1920s
by intellectuals in the elite salons of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th century, they have returned from the grave. The
only difference is that now the doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of “liberty,” “autonomy,”
and “choice.”
We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to
kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion. We will work, as we have always worked, to bring assistance,
comfort, and care to pregnant women in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand resolutely
against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate
killing of their unborn children. Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly Christian answer to
problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for mother and child alike.
A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have
been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against
violent attack, and to do so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination. The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot
defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled,
and the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make clear. We must be willing to defend, even
at risk and cost to ourselves and our institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of development and
in every condition.
Our concern is not confined to our own nation. Around the globe, we are witnessing
cases of genocide and “ethnic cleansing,” the failure to assist those who are suffering as innocent victims of
war, the neglect and abuse of children, the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and young
women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and
the failure to take steps necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS. We see these travesties as flowing
from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion
industry and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for biomedical research. And so ours is, as
it must be, a truly consistent ethic of love and life for all humans in all circumstances.
Marriage
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall
be called woman, for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his
wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis
2:23-24.
This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.
However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:32-33 In Scripture, the creation
of man and woman, and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation. In the
transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners
with God Himself. Marriage then, is the first institution of human society—indeed it is the institution on which all
other human institutions have their foundation. In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as “holy matrimony”
to signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ in his participation at a wedding in Cana
of Galilee. In the Bible, God Himself blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.
Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important
institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and
where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits—the spouses themselves, their children, the communities
and societies in which they live. Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest
themselves. Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades a serious erosion of the marriage
culture in our own country. Perhaps the most telling—and alarming—indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate.
Less than fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. Our society—and particularly its poorest
and most vulnerable sectors, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average—is paying
a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness, and despair. Other indicators are widespread
non-marital sexual cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.
We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often
scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar
as we have too easily embraced the culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the dignity
of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.
To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity
and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and holiness of faithful marital love. We must reform
ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral
divorce. We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young people a sound understanding of what
marriage is, what it requires, and why it is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.
The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple
partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding
of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed
to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility
of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would lock
into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in
any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped
by their aptness for the generation, promotion, and protection of life. In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who,
as gifts of God, are the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for and benefits of
the marriage covenant.
We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and
polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed towards other forms of immoral conduct. We
have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and
we pay tribute to the men and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to yield to desires
that they, no less than we, regard as wayward. We stand with them, even when they falter. We, no less than they, are sinners
who have fallen short of God’s intention for our lives. We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience,
love and forgiveness. We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and at the same time refrain
from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it. Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection
of sinners. For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our destruction but rather the conversion
of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander from the path of virtue to “a more excellent way.” As his disciples
we will reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.
We further acknowledge that there are sincere people who disagree with us,
and with the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition, on questions of sexual morality and the nature of marriage. Some
who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard their unions as truly marital. They fail to understand,
however, that marriage is made possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman, and that the comprehensive, multi-level
sharing of life that marriage is includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a reproductive
unit. This is because the body is no mere extrinsic instrument of the human person, but truly part of the personal reality
of the human being. Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds, or spirits, inhabiting non-personal
bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when,
forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being—the biological,
the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual—on a commitment that is sealed, completed and actualized
by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling
together the behavioral conditions of procreation. That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law,
consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of infertility, even though the nature of the marital
relationship is shaped and structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation.
We understand that many of our fellow citizens, including some Christians,
believe that the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman is a denial of equality or civil rights.
They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm would be done to them or to anyone if the law of
the community were to confer upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the status of being
“married.” It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it? On inspection, however, the argument
that laws governing one kind of marriage will not affect another cannot stand. Were it to prove anything, it would prove far
too much: the assumption that the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not only argue
for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even
adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships. Should these, as a matter of equality
or civil rights, be recognized as lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships? No. The truth is
that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law may legitimately define and re-define to please those who
are powerful and influential.
No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a marriage.
Marriage is an objective reality—a covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize
and support for the sake of justice and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow. First, the religious
liberty of those for whom this is a matter of conscience is jeopardized. Second, the rights of parents are abused as family
life and sex education programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding recognizes as “marriages”
sexual partnerships that many parents believe are intrinsically non-marital and immoral. Third, the common good of civil society
is damaged when the law itself, in its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound understanding of
marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in any society vitally depends. Sadly, we are today far from having
a thriving marriage culture. But if we are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to rebuild
such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false
proclamation about what marriage is.
And so it is out of love (not “animus”) and prudent concern
for the common good (not “prejudice”), that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition
of marriage as the union of one man and one woman and to rebuild the marriage culture.
How could we, as Christians, do otherwise? The Bible teaches us that marriage
is a central part of God’s creation covenant. Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ
and his church. And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the church in a complete sacrifice,
we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is
marriage.
Religious Liberty
The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives, and release
from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1
Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. Matthew 22:21
The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and
arduous, but it is not a novel idea or recent development. The nature of religious liberty is grounded in the character of
God Himself, the God who is most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ. Determined to follow Jesus faithfully in
life and death, the early Christians appealed to the manner in which the Incarnation had taken place: “Did God send
Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing fear and terror? Not so, but in gentleness and meekness..., for compulsion
is no attribute of God” (Epistle to Diognetus 7.3-4). Thus the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the
example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human person created in the image of God—a dignity, as our
founders proclaimed, inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right reason.
Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from
religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against
his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely
and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.
It is ironic that those
who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and
even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law—such persons claiming
these “rights” are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express
their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband
and wife.
We see this, for example, 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. We see it in the use of anti-discrimination 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. After
the judicial imposition of “same-sex marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great
reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal
mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment
of a quasi-marital “civil unions” scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax-exempt status when it
declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing
homosexual unions.
In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted
for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the
same practice here. In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in respect for religious values
in the media, the academy, and political leadership, resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion. We view this
as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless
of his or her faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture of freedom on which our system
of republican government is founded. Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of one’s
own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions, for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate
structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism
Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.1 Disintegration
of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.
As Christians, 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.
Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to
compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, “Judge
for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have
seen and heard.” Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes
required.
There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience
than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian
perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human
beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. Inasmuch
as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack any power to bind in conscience. King’s willingness
to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.
Because we honor justice and the common good, we 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; 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.
Drafting Committee
Robert George Professor, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, Princeton University
Timothy George Professor, Beeson Divinity School,
Samford University
Chuck
Colson Founder, the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview (Lansdowne, VA)
1 Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
