Can a Culture War Manifesto Reach a New Generation of Evangelicals and Catholics?
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
A who's who of Christian right leaders, including Chuck Colson and Tony Perkins, have partnered with a handful of more moderate religious voices, including National Association of Evangelicals President Leith Anderson and New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, to release a document that reasserts the primacy of three culture war issues for Christians in the public square: abortion, marriage, and religious liberties.
A handful of those who signed the document, called "The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience," gathered today at the National Press Club for the launch event. The declaration reads like a throwback to the culture wars of the 2004 election, but Colson says the project is aimed at instilling social conservative political orthodoxy in a new generation of believers.
"We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues," he told the New York Times. "A lot of younger evangelicals say they're all alike. We're hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues."
It's an interesting goal that says a lot about the fears of a graying generation of culture warriors, but the big question is how to instill the declaration's principles in the new generation. Releasing a 4,700 word document at the National Press Club doesn't seem like the straightest path to young people's hearts.
Here's an excerpt from the declaration, which has 145 signers:
Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not 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 the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.
Read the full manifesto here.
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Reader Comments
Heredity And Homosexuality
While I suspect that ANY source that does not fit your limited views of the universe and life, here is a link to a livescience.com article on heredity and homosexuality.
http://www.livescience.com/health/080617-hereditary-homosexuality.html
Gene made me do it!
Although genetics may influence behavior and desires, they are not decisive. Humans still have the ability to control those desires and impulses not giving way to certain antisocial impulses and desires. In a civilized society, mature, healthy humans limit and control all sorts of desires and impulses, so as to maintain law and order. My genes made me do it, is not an acceptable defense to justify and rationalize dangerous and reckless behaviors. A person has no control over the color of their eyes, but the limited influences of genetics on behavior; all human beings do. Society must determine which behaviors are acceptable, healthy and worthy of engaging in. If a society accepts dangerous, reckless and unhealthy behaviors as having merit and worth pursuing, that society will break down into
all sorts of lawlessness and depravity. Which will result in untold pain and suffering for all it's citizens. Crime logs indicate giving way to some desires and impulses is counter-productive. No society has plunged into despair and undeserved suffering for obeying true Biblical laws and ethics.
Debunking the "science"
Recently, no new news has been published about the “gay gene” that caused such a hubbub in 1992 and 1993. Jeffrey Satinover, M.D. provides an excellent website discussing the problems of hasty publishing and over-simplification in connection with the gay gene. Also, the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) has a nice summary of the research on the gay gene. Other than this, the discussion of a gay gene, especially occuring in chromosome region Xq28, has ceased. This by no means implies that the discussion will not resume at some point in the near future, but no progress has been made recently. Unfortunately, even though the homosexual gene research was hyped by the media, the region of the X chromosome yields no functional proteins that relate to this study.
Conclusion:
Obviously, the genetics of homosexuality isn’t as simple as some in the media and elsewhere thought it would be. To be sure, little progress has been made after the initial findings provided such optimism. An interesting point can be made about the relationship between science and the media due to this study. The media, it seems, showered its skepticism on the interpretation of the scientific results while science, even with questionable practices among some of its own, corrected itself by placing the skepticism on the results themselves. Because the scientific process is necessarily reproducible, unsubstantiated claims fall by the wayside while those that can be corroborated stand the test of time.
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