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.
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