The Manhattan Declaration

Manhattan Declaration:

A Call of Christian Conscience

October 20, 2009

Preamble

Christians are heirs of a 2,000year

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 16 th and 17 th 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 nonbelievers

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 nonbelievers

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 prolife

direction, we note with sadness that proabortion

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 proabortion

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 prolife

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 thirtysix

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 embryodestructive

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 embryoresearch

to include the taxpayer

funding of socalled

“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 mid20

th 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 oneflesh

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 outofwedlock

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 outofwedlock

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 nonmarital

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 illadvised

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 samesex

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 samesex

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, multilevel

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 nonpersonal

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 redefine

to please those who are powerful and

influential.

No one has a civil right to have a nonmarital

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 nonmarital

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

redefine

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 7.34).

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 prolife

institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and prolife

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 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. After the

judicial imposition of “samesex

marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities

chose with great reluctance to end its centurylong

work of helping to place orphaned children in

good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in samesex

households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment of a

quasimarital

“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 hatecrime

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. 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, embryodestructive

research, assisted

suicide and euthanasia, or any other antilife

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.