The Manhattan Declaration
By: Navin (December 16th, 2009)
“We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them”. This statement is part of the Manhattan Declaration*, a manifesto which was drafted on October 20th, 2009 and released on November 20th, 2009 with the support of more than 150 American Christian leaders. The declarations website encourages supporters to sign the declaration affirming their support for the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife and the rights of conscience and religious liberty.
If you take down a summary of the declaration from the site, it explains the stand on each issue and the reasons behind taking such a stand. To explain the first point on human life it says that despite the public opinion moving towards a pro-life stand there are powerful and determined forces working towards expansion of abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia. It goes on to say that despite protection of the weak and vulnerable being the first obligation of the government it often finds itself enlisted in the cause of promoting what Pope John Paul II called the ‘culture of death’. It goes on to say that all those who have given their support to this declaration will not permit themselves or their institutions to become instruments for taking human lives.
About marriage, the declaration says that, it is already wounded by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce and is at the risk of being redefined and thus subverted. It supports the Biblical stand that marriage is the original and the most important institution for sustaining the health, education and welfare of all. It draws a direct relation between the erosion of marriage and the rise of social pathologies. It makes a very bold statement against prevalent trends in the society by saying that ‘the impulse to redefine marriage is a symptom, rather than the cause, in the erosion of the marriage culture’. It implores us to resist any such impulse because it would result in the abandoning the possibility of restoring the understanding and the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would also lock in to place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions. It terms marriage as an ‘objective reality’ - the covenantal union of husband and wife - which is the duty of the law to recognize, honor and protect.
And last it dealt with the subject of religious freedom and rights of conscience. A search on the web will tell you how medical students get threatened by professors for writing against the process of abortions and health care workers are forced to administer abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide failing which is termed as a ‘crime against humanity’. The declaration refers to the efforts to weaken or eliminate conscience protections for health care institutions and professionals who refuse to administer such procedures owing to questions of conscience. It also refers to anti-discrimination statutes that are used as weapons to force religious institutions, charities, businesses to accept activities and relationships they judge to be immoral or face the threat of going out of business. It goes on to say that such attacks on religious freedom are not just threats on individuals but also to institutions like families, charities and religious institutions which are critical for the society in general.
It closes on a rebellious note by stating that even though they consider the democratic society as a privilege they cannot write off the possibility of gravely unjust laws and under such circumstances they will be justified in invoking ‘civil disobedience’ but will do it openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. And they say that they do not fear the consequences of the same as such laws lack the power to bind in the conscience because they can claim no authority beyond that of sheer human will. If such a bold statement gets the backing of the larger community it is bound to get the attention of the government and law making bodies because the American constitution acknowledges the concept of ‘limited governance’ as proposed by the father of the democratic process, John Locke.
Let’s go further in to history to understand this development a little better by putting it in the right context. The birth of democracy can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries when philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke advocated the social contract theory. According to Hobbes before governments and civil society were created, humans lived in a state of nature having natural rights. In the state of nature despite every person’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of property (later changed to happiness by Thomas Jefferson), Hobbes who lived during the English Civil war which ended up killing King Charles I, was disturbed that each man was equal to the extent that ‘the weakest he’ can kill ‘the strongest he’ while he was sleeping. For him the liberty of each man to do what he desires including confiscating others property called for the forming of a government through a social contract. For him the most oppressive of governments was preferable to the wantonness of the state of nature. But he proposed absolute government stating that such a contract was indissoluble and natural rights once given away cannot be taken back.
However, John Locke kept all the elements of the Hobbsian theory except the giving up of natural rights thus introducing the concept of limited governance which has been adopted by the U.S. and other democracies. Locke made a provision to revolution if the government becomes oppressive and oversteps the bounds of the contract. John Locke’s influence was so much that Thomas Jefferson wrote “Bacon, Locke and Newton…I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences”. But the social contract theory was not so significant compared to the impact that he had as a proponent of enlightenment, the origin of the modern conceptions of identity and the self. He was against the existing Christian thinking that ‘man was born sinful’ but believed that man is born without innate ideas (empty mind) rather ‘knowledge’ was determined only by experience derived from the human senses. His work greatly influenced other thinkers like Voltaire, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant who believed that human reason, human autonomy and human progress will bring in an ever increasing knowledge of the created order and result in an ever increasing expansion of dominion over the nature and its realities and relegated all kinds of moral values, divine purposes and traditional institutions to the background. This philosophy penetrated western culture along with the social contract theory which formed the foundation of modern democracy. In fact some of the works of John Locke were taken verbatim in the American Declaration of Independence. So more than the modern democracy, we see here the birth of a thought that man’s ideas and empirical evidences which finds its source in Science and modern inventions are authoritative in all matters they address and thus taking every citizen’s moral opinions captive and hence the inevitable surrender of the latter.
Such tyranny was spoken of also in the Judeo-Christian world view when Prophet Samuel pronounces God’s anger when the nation of Israel asked for a king. God pronounces this request as the ‘rejection of God’ and not any human authority or ’state of nature’. Here we see how God tells the nation of Israel that asking for a king or a new form of government will eventually lead to loss of their very freedom when the king himself will take away his subjects property and also subject them to slavery. If you dig deeper in to the Biblical origins, the book of Genesis shows how it all started with man choosing to eat of the fruit of ‘knowledge of good and evil’ and thus rejecting God, who was the original source of all things that the Manhattan Declaration seeks to reclaim. Not going much in to the details of this landmark Declaration and how it seeks to take it forward, I believe it is still a good move for the people to go back to God who gave us the ’sacredness of life’ because we belonged to him, ‘liberty or free will’ to choose between good and evil and also the ‘institution of marriage’ between a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’. And the very desire of the modern man to still seek these values show that we are created in God’s likeness.
The Manhattan Agreement ends it aptly by saying that ‘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’.
Tags: Catholic, democracy, evangelical, Manhattan Declaration, Orthodox