Hunter Baker has criticized John Stackhouse’s recent post defending his decision not to sign the Manhattan Declaration. However, I would like to make a qualified defence of Stackhouse, who is correct in his assessment of the document in so far as the section on religious liberty is not entirely consistent with the argument of the rest of the document. I repeat what I wrote in the comments to an earlier post, beginning with a direct quotation:
“Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience.”
This is not a fully accurate account of the human heart and its created capacity for communion with God and with his other image-bearers. We are conditioned by the communities of which we are a part, and our consciences are formed by these communities. God’s call to us comes through these same communities, and our consciences are continually “constrained” by them in numerous ways. I don’t think the authors would deny this, but I found the language here troubling at the very least.
The emphasis on what seems to amount to the sovereignty of the conscience is at least in tension with the emphasis elsewhere on a normative order in which the unborn and marriage find a place and which makes an obligatory claim on us. There is in fact a fundamental difference between the two sets of issues. The protection of marriage and unborn life arguably finds a basis in the Decalogue, where we are commanded not to commit adultery or to murder. These precepts are further echoed in what some traditions label the natural law.
Of course, not all the precepts of the Decalogue have the same public legal implications. For example, there can be no positive law against covetousness, although it can certainly undertake to punish offences against property that might stem from it. Yet virtually every legal system imposes sanctions against taking innocent life and in some fashion places boundaries around the institution of marriage. Disagreements over these issues revolve around, in the first case, whether the unborn child is innocent life and, in the second, whether marriage has an enduring structure of which sexual complementarity is an integral component. Conflicts over these issues are contentious precisely because their resolution is binding on all of us, irrespective of our ultimate religious orientations.
By contrast, the defence of religious liberty arguably finds biblical grounding in Jesus’ parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24-29, 36-41). The final separation of belief and unbelief awaits the eschatological consummation. In the meantime God is patient, as we must be as well. The Decalogue, on the other hand, far from defending religious freedom, proscribes all idolatrous worship in no uncertain terms. The adoption of religious freedom in the modern era has two basic justifications: (1) the recognition that the imposition of a particular religious confession on a population goes beyond the normative competence of the state; and (2) prior to the Final Judgement we must not undertake on our own to separate the sheep and goats. The recognition of religious freedom is based, less on the enduring principles of God’s law and more on the practical recognition that, in a less than perfect world, people have diverse ultimate commitments. For this reason religious freedom must be treated differently from life and marriage.
Religious freedom cannot be used as a general cover for all manner of licentiousness. It certainly does not give us the right to alter the given nature of core social institutions. The Manhattan Declaration would have done well to emphasize that religious freedom does not amount to the right to do as we please, or, to quote the US Supreme Court’s notorious Casey decision, “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” No court or legislature can confer such a right, because it goes against the very way God has structured our human nature and that of the entire cosmos. Religious freedom does not entail leaving open or refraining from taking a stand on the structure of marriage or the boundaries of life. The very nature of a legal system means that all sorts of things require specific and binding definitions if justice is to be done. Unavoidably these definitions will be rooted in someone’s or some community’s religious worldview.
What Stackhouse seems to be sensing is the composite nature of the Declaration and its dependence on different authors with different perspectives on some basic issues, which were not sorted out completely in the final published version. That the drafters consist of two Baptists and a Roman Catholic is a simple enough explanation for its internal inconsistencies. Yet most committee-produced documents suffer from similar defects, so the Manhattan Declaration is typical in this respect. While Stackhouse has decided that the defects prevent him signing, nearly 300 thousand have concluded otherwise.
Related posts:
December 14th, 2009 | 2:33 pm | #1
David, you are my favorite “progressive” Christian. If only Stackhouse’s post was as thoughtful as yours.
December 14th, 2009 | 10:22 pm | #2
Thanks, Albert, for the vote of confidence.
December 14th, 2009 | 11:32 pm | #3
No, he’s not right in even a qualified fashion. Throughout this discussion, particularly at the Acton and Touchstone blogs, he has maintained that the problem is that the MD signers are endorsing an “unqualified” right to religious liberty. They do no such thing. It is clear from the text of the document that there have been specific threats to religious liberty motivating their statement. The signers, in a very real way, represent the aggrieved party. They are protesting the aggressive actions of a public policy aimed at reducing their traditional religious freedoms while simultaneously eroding respect for other critical civilizational building blocks like the sanctity of life and the nucleus of the family (the father and mother). I don’t understand how they can be seen as anything other than defenders of things that need defending.
December 15th, 2009 | 3:49 pm | #4
Hunter Baker,
To foist your religious definition of marriage on others of a different religious belief is most definitely an act contrary to the teachings of Christ.
Did Jesus use the laws of Rome to ban the practice of polygamy? No. In fact, at the Council of Neocaesarea (315 AD) sinners like polygamists were required to do penance and to refrain from Church activities until a “purification” period had been completed, demonstrating their personal reformation. Yet polygamy was still practiced as was the worship of other god(s), non-observance of the Sabbath, and other normal (legal) violations of Christian doctrine.
You must remember that defending marriage requires advocacy and leading by example. But to deny others who are naturally attracted to the same sex to marry someone of the same sex in no way diminishes the quantity or quality of heterosexual marriages (see Massachusetts marriage statistics since legalizing SSM) — unless you fear/believe millions of Americans are closet gays trapped in traditional marriages only for conformity sake and legal limitations. In which case you are using the law to prop-up a very weakened Church – an implicit admission that Christianity can not succeed strictly by Free Will alone. Now that is what I call “Crisis of Faith”
Therefore the only defense for banning SSM must come from secular arguments, at which point I must ask how is the Manhattan Declaration Christ-inspired?
December 15th, 2009 | 8:50 pm | #5
R. Hampton writes:
“To foist your religious definition of marriage on others of a different religious belief is most definitely an act contrary to the teachings of Christ.”
There is no getting around the fact that, as soon as the state accepts a legal definition of anything at all, it is imposing that definition on every citizen, even those who might disagree with it. Should we accept equality of all citizens with respect to exercising the franchise? Most governments now say yes, but it is not that long ago that votes were weighted with respect to such factors as gender, property ownership and education.
If someone has more of a financial stake in the commonwealth, should he not have more of a say in its governance? If someone has a college degree, shouldn’t her voice count for more than that of the high school dropout? There is nothing irrational about such proposals, but a government must necessarily decide one way or the other which view of equality or inequality it will accept. And, yes, it must impose one view or other on everyone.
“But to deny others who are naturally attracted to the same sex to marry someone of the same sex in no way diminishes the quantity or quality of heterosexual marriages. . . .”
All governments must necessarily decide what is a marriage and what is not. Again there is no getting around this. The issue is not whether to draw a boundary but where to draw it. Is sexual complementarity intrinsic to marriage? If so, then it is not an unjust imposition for a government to recognize this and enforce those boundaries. In so doing it is not unfairly singling out homosexuals. Homosexuals have always had the same legal right to marry, but not to redefine their own relationships as marriages.
December 15th, 2009 | 9:22 pm | #6
All governments must necessarily decide what is a marriage and what is not.
True, and in the United States, such decisions are bound by the Fourteenth Amendment which profoundly altered the nature of “States’ rights”.
Because there are Churches that do perform gay marriage ceremonies, the State must show a compelling need to violate their religious rights.
But as I mentioned previously, the 6 year history of Massachusetts has failed to demonstrate any harm to the institution of marriage. In fact, the rate of divorce for heterosexual marriages has continued to be the lowest in the nation – 2 per 1,000 – a rate not seen since 1940 (before the sexual revolution). Thus the State has no (secular) reason to continue this discriminatory practice.
December 16th, 2009 | 6:03 pm | #7
So, let me get this straight. Stackhouse thinks the Manhattan Document is a “waste of time.” This is the same guy who not only signed the “Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to ‘A Common Word Between Us and You’” but took up a public defense of that feckless document in the journal The Review of Faith and International Affairs. You can access his “Why I Signed the Christian Response to A Common Word’” here:
http://www.rfiaonline.org/authors/370-john-stackhouse-jr
As I said in my companion piece, “Why I would Not have Signed,” one of the most problematic issues that Christians failed to account for is exactly the issue of religious liberty. (my piece can be found here:
http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.3639/pub_detail.asp)
Isn’t it a bit odd that Stackhouse would sign a document with obvious problems related not only to religious freedom, but with implications for the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries, but gets all hot and bothered when it comes to the threats to religious liberty mentioned in the Manhattan Declaration?
December 16th, 2009 | 7:12 pm | #8
Keith, your second link is a dead one. Could you repost the correct link? Thanks.
December 17th, 2009 | 7:52 am | #9
This is baffling to me. I don’t understand why the link doesn’t take you to the article. So, if you are really interested go to http://www.eppc.org
Then click on “scholars”. Then click on “Fellows and Scholars” go to my name “Keith Pavlischek” and you should see a list of publications etc which should include “Why I would not have signed The Yale Response to A Common Word.” Click on that.
If this doesn’t work take out your pistol and shoot your lap top!
December 17th, 2009 | 7:26 pm | #10
[...] which ensued, Frank Turk tried to clarify and summarize his views. David T. Koyzis weighed in with Why Stackhouse is Partially Right (a related but parallel discussion), and then Mark Olson attempted to define That Line Between Good [...]
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