Civil Disobedience - Christian leaders to defy immoral laws
A host of national Evangelical and Catholic leaders - including Dr. James Dobson, Chuck Colson and Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. - are calling for civil disobedience when America’s laws violate the teachings of the Bible.
Add Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, to the list who have already signed. Hundreds of Christian leaders are signing the Manhattan Declaration, A Call of Christian Conscience, in response to the lack of Christian morality expressed in America’s laws. A 4,700-word document was drafted Oct. 20 and released on Nov. 20.
“Through the centuries, Christianity has taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required,” the declaration states. “There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings. …King’s willingness to go to jail, rather than comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring. 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. We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.”
The Manhattan Declaration points to the Christian heritage of battling abortion, infanticide, the plague, slavery (Papal edicts in the 16th and 17th centuries), child labor, the divine right of kings and supporting the rule of law, suffrage and civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Christians now battle human trafficking, sexual slavery, AIDS and promote clean water and housing in developing nations.
”We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, … are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions,” the declaration states.
The declaration affirms that every person is made in the image of God, that marriage is ordained by God and is between one man and one woman and that religious liberty is “grounded in the character of God…”
“We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right - and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation - to speak and act in defense of these truths,” the declaration states. “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”
It specifically criticizes the Obama Administration.
“The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense,” it states. “Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views.
…The president has also pledged to make abortion more easily and widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring waiting periods for women seeking abortions, and parental notification for abortions performed on minors. The elimination of these important and effective pro-life laws cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the number of elective abortions by which the lives of countless children are snuffed out prior to birth.”
It criticizes both Democrats and Republicans for supporting abortion, what Pope John Paul II described as “the culture of death.”
This view has led to public funding for human embryo-destructive research and Obama favors the expansion of embryo-research to include the taxpayer funding of so-called “therapeutic cloning.”
“This would result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues,” the declaration states.
At the end of life, the Obama Administration is promoting assisted suicide and “voluntary” euthanasia for elderly and disabled people.
“We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion,” the declaration states. “ … The Bible enjoins us to defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and the dependent.”
It calls marriage the first institution of human society - the institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation.
“Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all persons in a society,” the declaration states. “Where marriage is honored, and where there is a flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits - the spouses themselves, their children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest themselves.”
The out-of-wedlock birth rate in America was under 5 percent 50 years ago. Now it is over 40 percent. Society is paying a price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration, hopelessness and despair, the declaration states. Non-marital sexual cohabitation leads to high divorce rates - even among Christians.
“The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture,” the declaration states. “It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition that contributed to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy marriage culture. It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way, about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and protection of life.”
“Some who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard their unions as truly marital,” it continues. “They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the sexual complementarity of man and woman, and that the comprehensive, multi-level sharing of life that marriage is includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a reproductive unit.”
_ __Religious liberty is also at risk.
“It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn, aged and disabled and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices, and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be recognized and blessed by law - such persons claiming these ‘rights’ are very often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife,” the declaration states. “We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses, and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain cases, even to perform or participate in abortions. We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business.”
After the judicial imposition of “same-sex marriage” in Massachusetts, for example, Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic moral teaching. In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital “civil unions” scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax-exempt status when it declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions. In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality.
“New hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here,” the declaration states. “As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral. The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the common good; yet laws that are unjust - and especially laws that purport to compel citizens to do what is unjust - undermine the common good, rather than serve it. Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to compromise their proclamation of the gospel.”
Some Manhattan Declaration Signees
• Dr. Daniel Akin, president, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Leith Anderson, president of National Association of Evangelicals
• Kay Arthur, author, CEO and co-founder, Precept Ministries International
• Dr. Mark L. Bailey, president, Dallas Theological Seminary
• Gary Bauer, president, American Values
• Bishop Basil Essey of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America
• Rev. Michael L. Beresford, managing director of church relations, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association
• Dr. Robert C. Cannada, junior chancellor, Reformed Theological Seminary
• Dr. Bryan Chapell, president, Covenant Theological Seminary
• Rev. Charles J. Chaput, archbishop, Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver
• Chuck Colson, author and founder, The Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview
• Jim Daly, president and CEO, Focus on the Family
• Dr. James Dobson, founder, Focus on the Family
• Rev. Timothy Dolan, archbishop, Roman Catholic Diocese of New York
• Dr. James T. Draper, Jr., president emeritus, LifeWay
• Dr. Michael Easley, president emeritus, Moody Bible Institute
• The Rev. Jonathan Falwell, senior pastor, Thomas Road Baptist Church
• William J. Federer, president, Amerisearch, Inc.
• Jerry Jenkins, chairman of the Board of Trustees, Moody Bible Institute (Black Forest, Colo.)
• Josh McDowell, author and founder, Josh McDowell Ministries
• Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• David Neff, editor-in-chief, Christianity Today
• Dr. J.I. Packer, Board of Governors’ Professor of Theology, Regent College
• Tony Perkins, president, Family Research Council
• Dr. Everett Piper, president, Oklahoma Wesleyan University (Bartlesville, Okla.)
• Dennis Rainey, president, CEO, and co-founder, Family Life
• Dr. Timothy C. Tennent, president, Asbury Theological Seminary
• Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster, Ph.D., archpriest, Orthodox Church in America; Professorial Lecturer, The George Washington University
• Ravi Zacharias, founder and chairman of the board, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries
• Professor James R. Thobaben, Ph.D., Professor, bioethics and social ethics, Asbury Theological Seminary