A group of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians Friday released a new manifesto on the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and religious liberty.
The document, called the Manhattan Declaration, has been signed by more than 125 religious leaders from different backgrounds, ranging from several Catholic Archbishops to the leaders of the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family.
"The declaration gives a common Christian witness across the historic lines of ecclesial difference on three foundational issues, issues that are foundational to our society … the sanctity of human life in all stages and in all conditions, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife and the principle of religious freedom and the freedom of conscience," said Prof. Robert George, one of the crafters of the document.
Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., said the document was an effort to enshrine the great traditions of Christianity.
"Today we simply come together, in a period in our time when that needs to be said and said with the collective voice," he said. "To do it in our nation's capital is a sign that this voice is meant to reverberate through our entire community."
Timothy George, the dean of the divinity school at Samford University, another drafter of the document, said the issues addressed in the document are not new.
"What is new today is the kind of unprecedented coalition that we see around us," he said. "The three issues we are talking about today do not constitute the entirety of Christian moral concern … but they are threshold issues on which everything else we do is related: our concern for the poor, for peacemaking in our world, for the care of creation, our concern for nurturing children in the faith."
Archbishop Justin Rigali, of Philadelphia, said the declaration was prompted in part by recent legal decisions permitting gay marriage, the fear of abortion being expanded and the seeming unwillingness of governments to permit Christians to decline to recognize practices they find morally wrong, pharmacists being forced to dispense or refer patients for "morning after" pills.
"These are not sectarian causes any more than the cause of racial justice championed by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a sectarian cause," he said. "We will ungrudgingly render unto Caesar what is Caesars, that too is a commandment of the Lord."
He added, "We will not render unto Caesar what is God's. Neither we nor the institutions for which we have responsibility will yield to pressure of any type to facilitate or implicate ourselves in the taking of innocent human life."
Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in Maryland, one of the area's largest black congregations, said the document should be seen as a call to the faithful.
"Today we celebrate the diversity and the unity of the body of Christ," he said. "It is in fact the church that is supposed to be a preservative for our world and our culture."
He added, "This declaration transcends politics as usual and it really is a call to the faithful to grab hold of the fundamental distinctions of what it means to be a Christian and live out those values in our world."
Robert George added that the religious leaders and signatories to the document would seek to support Christians who felt they needed to engage in acts of civil disobedience to uphold the principles of the document, including pharmacists who resign rather than dispense morning after pills or institutions that felt that they must shut down or stop offering services.
"There are limits of what can be asked of people," he said.Although the declaration is being unveiled the day before a crucial test vote on a Senate health reform bill that has reignited arguments over abortion, all of the leaders at the press conference insisted that the document had been in the works many months and that the timing was merely a coincidence.
However George did concede that having a president who is strongly pro-choice and has already lifted restrictions on embryonic stem cell research, along with a strong Congressional majority who agree, had added urgency to the group's decision to issue the document.
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