The Manhattan Declaration: Will Young Evangelicals Be Swayed?

On a slower news day, the Manhattan Declaration (so named because its drafters first met in New York) might have gotten more consideration -- not least because it bears the signatures of nine Catholic archbishops, the primate of the Orthodox Church in America, the liberal evangelical Ron Sider as well as the draconian African Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola. It also offers important clues to how direly the once-mighty conservative religious voting bloc views its current fortunes.

The declaration, it's true, doesn't cover much new ground: It states that the sanctity of marriage and life are still what Christians should fight for. Its third plank, proclaiming freedom of religious conscience, is very of-the-moment. With a ferocity about "resisting tyranny" that flashes more of Glenn Beck's brand of civil disobedience than Gandhi's, the signers promise not to "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 refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it."

There's more than a faint echo of "death panels" here, as well as a Beck-ish lip-quaver in the delivery. But as a whole the document's 4,700 words are more theologically earnest and broadly pitched than you'd expect from a run-of-the-mill religious right fundraiser. "There are strange things, like talk about 'gender discrimination,' that you don't normally hear out of evangelicals," says Missouri State University's John Schmalzbauer. The section on gay marriage draws on Catholicism's deeper theological tradition. "Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds, or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies," it reads. "The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit."

Whether or not this convinces anyone actually from Manhattan, the declaration's language is clearly intended to sway younger evangelicals. Chuck Colson, in introducing the declaration at the press club, spoke directly to the under-30 generation. "We're hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues," he said.


As for sexuality, younger evangelicals also tend to think less abstractly, if no less biblically, chiefly because they have grown up around out-of-the-closet gay friends or relatives. "The younger generation is not liberal," say Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., "but they are into relationships and personal stories."

Critics of the declaration may be right, then, that a finger jab from the older generation won't lure these younger evangelicals back to fold, but the compassion mixed into the declaration's combativeness shows they are willing to groom their rhetoric to fit a new sensibility. This inside baseball, however, doesn't explain the broad appeal the document had among religious leaders. The intense language of the statement, others say, reflects just how dire Christian leaders believe their situation has become. "This has more of a confrontational tone than I would used myself," Mouw told me. "But it's a cry of the heart."

Other signers call it a plea to take conservative Christian concerns seriously. Reverend Jim Pocock, pastor at the Trinity Congregational Church in the Boston suburb of Wayland, Mass., told me that even other clergy in town dismiss his objection to same-sex marriage as a simple animus toward homosexuals. "I'm not anti-gay," says Pocock, who signed the declaration after hearing of it from a member of his congregation who knows Colson. "I'm not a hate monger, though I've been called those things. What I favor is not changing the definition of marriage, but in a sense we can't even have a dialogue."