The Manhattan Declaration, the conservative Christian manifesto nailed (metaphorically) with great fanfare to the door of the National Press Club today, ends with this orotund pronunciamento:

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 Declaration's list of signatories includes not only a bunch of Catholic, (non-Greek) Orthodox, and Protestant prelates and denominational bureaucrats but also "Christian leaders" who are uneluctably lay--professors like Robby George of Princeton (who helped write the thing), editors like David Neff of Christianity Today, activists like Gary Bauer of American Values, etc.

I'm curious to know what rules purporting to force them as individuals to treat, say, same-sex married couples as "marriages or their equivalent" they intend not to bend to. What acts of disobedience to Caesar, if any, are they contemplating? What martyrdom do they seek?

Speaking at an ecumenical meeting in Rome yesterday prior to meeting with the pope today, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams threw down a theological gauntlet to Roman Catholics who regard things like papal primacy and the ordination of women as fundamental obstacles to ecumenical progress. Rather cleverly, Williams used the divided Anglican Communion as a model to show how those who disagree vigorously on issues of practice can nonetheless be in communion with each other (kind of).

For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn't, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

In the course of his talk, Williams waved away the pope's recent opening to disaffected Anglicans as so much pastoral piffle:

In his RNS report yesterday, Dan Burke got a couple if bishops to comment on the John Jay study de-coupling clerical homosexuality from sexual abuse. Most notable was St. Paul-Minneapolis Archbishop John Nienstedt's "I wouldn't put a lot of credence in it." Nienstedt, as Burke notes, was the guy who led the Vatican's post-scandal investigation of homosexuality in the seminaries, the idea being that if you got rid of the gays, the abuse would stop. Not that Nienstedt doesn't have a fall-back position; to wit: "a priest has to be accessible to all his people, and someone with a strong same-sex attraction would not be good to have in the pastoral care of people." As opposed to a priest with a strong opposite-sex attraction?

The bishops' problem with the John Jay study goes beyond Nienstedt's species of homophobia, however. If, as the study suggests, sexual abuse by priests is the result of not homosexual orientation but the availability of certain types of people (i.e. altar boys), then someone might be led to the conclusion that clerical celibacy is a big part of the problem. The horror, the horror!

Gibson reports on latest from the clergy sex abuse study by the folks at John Jay, presented to the USCCB yesterday:

"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse."

A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls -- a ratio found to be about 80-20.

"It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior," Terry said. "Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity." Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.

How about some reax from a bishop or two? What do they make of this?

Before he became Pope Innocent III in 1198, Lotario dei Conti of Segni wrote De quadripartita specie nuptiarum, a treatise defining marriage as a four-part thing according to the four ways that Parisian scholastics of the day interpreted Scripture: historical, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical. According to Lotario,  the "historical" was the carnal marriage of man and woman, designed for the procreation of offspring and the avoidance of fornication. The "allegorical" referred to the sacramental marriage of Christ and the Church; the "tropological," the marriage of God and the individual soul; and the anagogical, the marriage between the Word of God and human nature in the Incarnation of Christ. For Lotario, the four types of marriages were equally "marriage." His point was to enable each to shed light on the others--to create an interpretive web for enriching his readers' understanding of all the relationships.

This excursus is prompted by a reading of the pastoral letter on marriage issued yesterday by the USCCB. It, too, makes reference to spiritual marriages--between Christ and the Church, within the Trinity. But unlike its medieval precursor, it tends to privilege the historical sense as the only "real" marriage. It's not a medieval document, but I'm not sure it's better for that. Carnal marriage--between a man and woman, sans contraception or divorce--becomes an object of transcendant significance, the bedrock of society and even of the Church. Marriage as an idol has been a Protestant temptation, and a Mormon one--but in recent years the Catholics have embraced it too.

If the Church wants to do that, it's not for us non-Catholics to object. But it also teaches that monogamous, heterosexual marriage is a natural phenomenon, created in obedience to Natural Law, and therefore that it can intervene to try to make society at large toe the line. In that regard, the pastoral's secular argumentation with respect to non-heterosexual marriage is notably weak--mostly just ex cathedra table-thumping like the following:

The legal recognition of same-sex unions poses a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve. Such recognition affects all people, married and non-married: not only at the fundamental levels of the good of the spouses, the good of children, the intrinsic dignity of every human person, and the common good, but also at the levels of education, cultural imagination and influence, and religious freedom.

When it comes to plain old cohabitation, the pastoral refers its readers to empirical data:

Social science research, however, finds that cohabitation has no positive effects on a marriage....The findings of the social sciences confirm that the best environment for raising children is a stable home provided by the marriage of their parents.

Regarding same-sex marriage, the findings of social science are conspicuous by their absence.

Jim Wallis' endless apologia pro Stupakia sua on Huffpost is an awe-inspiring exercise in injured innocence. According to him, the collapse of a compromise on abortion in the House health care bill was all the fault of the House leadership (which disrespected pro-life moderates) and pro-choice activists (who just couldn't see past their zealotry). Were there partisans on the other side to be named and blamed? Not so far as Wallis is concerned.

Now as Sarah Posner's fine blow-by-blow on Religion Dispatches makes clear, the abortion issue was badly handled by the pro-choice forces. But as usual, Wallis portrays himself, Rodney King-like, as just trying help people get along. No, in fact they can't all get along. If you're going to be for compromise in order to get health care passed, you've got to take a stand, and tell your interlocutors what to rally around.

To its credit, Third Way has done just that, criticizing the Stupak-Pitts Amendment (as it is now called) for violating the principles of abortion neutrality embraced in word by many, and backing the failed (but perhaps to be revived in the Senate) Ellsworth Amendment. (See memo, after jump) Michael Sean Winters, vigorous pro-lifer that he is, recognizes that Stupak-Pitts went too far, and supports dialing it back for the greater good. Does Sojourners do the same? Tell us, Jim. And while you're at it, how about shouldering a little responsibility for what happened, O Prophet of the Common Ground?

Pew has a new study out on faith-based social service provision, and the striking news is that, although Americans continue to support (by wide margins) allowing faith-based groups to apply for government funding, they remain very separationist in how they want those groups to behave. Thus, by a 68-27 margin they believe "religious charities" should be eligible for government funds, but oppose eligibility for "groups that encourage religious conversion" by 63-28.

And on the major bone of contention--permitting government-funded groups to "limit hiring to those who share their religious beliefs"--Americans are opposed by better than three-to-one, 74 percent to 21 percent. Pew puts a slight gloss on that number by pointing out that "relatively large numbers" of Republicans and white evangelicals support such hiring, but "relatively" ain't much: It's 62-32 against among Republicans and 61-33 against among white evangelicals. Let it be noted that Obama himself took a firm position against such faith-based hiring during the presidential campaign.

Under the circumstances, you've got to wonder why the Obama administration is being so incredibly gingerly about dealing with the issue. Yes, it involves more legal complexity than lay citizens understand. And there are some moderate evangelical faith-based enthusiasts that the administration wants to cuddle with. Still, when you've got over 60 percent of the other side in your corner on an issue, it shouldn't be hard to get the thing done. It's way past time for the Office of Legal Counsel, where it's currently languishing, to make with a set of rules.

Sean Michael Winters, fighting the good fight at the USCCB. Good luck with that, SMW. I'll believe it when I see it.

If the extraordinary interview-by-proxy of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in today's WaPo is to be believed, accused Ford Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan made contact with him last December, and emails between the two followed from there--including "two or three" responses from al-Aulaqi. The Yemeni journalist who conducted the interview--a man with close ties to Aulaqi--"declined to comment" when asked "whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target."

Did he or didn't he? Whatever, it's hard to believe that the FBI was as blithe or asleep at the switch as it now claims about the connection. Al-Aulaqi is, as the Post makes clear, a very well known figure--one of a handful native English-speaking radicals capable of influencing susceptible American Muslims to engage in acts of violence. And Hasan had given more than sufficient indiciation that he was susceptible.

But: Did Hasan pretend to the FBI that he was just pretending to be susceptible? In the reporting on his background, there are various stray remarks that people thought he was conducting research on the impact of Islamic teachings on Muslims in the military. It seems less and less plausible that what was going on here was nothing more than a troubled man increasingly drawn into a radical version of his faith and pushed over the edge by assignment to an overseas combat zone.

In its summary of the Hasan evidence to date yesterday, the NYT states that it all

will be studied by Army and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents trying to answer the same questions that many Americans have debated over the last 10 days:

Was Major Hasan a terrorist, driven by religious extremism to attack fellow soldiers he had come to see as the enemy? Was he a troubled loner, a misfit who cracked when ordered sent to a war zone whose gruesome casualties he had spent the last six years caring for? Or was he both?

Or, in addition, was he a man whom the FBI and/or the Army thought they were using for their own counter-terrorism purposes? And who will be looking into that question?

A week ago, over at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg chastised his fellow Atlantians for the sin of political correctness in not identifying alleged Fort Hood murderer Major Nidal Hasan as the Muslim jihadi Goldberg takes him to be. A double standard, he claimed, is at work here: "elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims."

Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

By way of response, religion prof. Dan Mathewson argues over on Religion Dispatches that, in fact, the MSM did pull its punches when it came to attributing Christian motives to Scott Roeder, the man charged with murdering abortion doctor George Tiller. Roeder, writes Mathewson, "was described in the media as a right-wing, anti-government, anti-abortion activist; but not a single article that I was able to find in the mainstream media discussed Roeder's Christian faith as a motivating factor of his crime."

Actually, as Andrew Walsh points out in his article on the Tiller case in Religion in the News, the very mainstream Kansas City Star, whose coverage was superb, gave extensive attention to Roeder's somewhat complicated Christian journey and how that related to his anti-abortion and anti-government views. But it's true that Roeder was not generally characterized as a "Christian extremist"--and, so far as I know, no one has proposed calling what he did "going Christian," the way Tunku Varadarajan, over on Forbes. com, provocatively proposed "going Muslim" to describe Hasan-like acts.

Varadarajan, whose column is not quite as appalling as it sounds, remarks in passing (in contrast to both Goldberg and Mathewson) that the real problem is not the media's favoritism toward one religious tradition over another but towards religion in general: "This is part of a larger--and too-hot-to-touch--American problem, which is the privileging of religion, and its frequent exemption from rules of normal discourse." The same point is made today by On Faith's leading secularista, Susan Jacoby: "My own view is that the U.S. media, when a violent act is linked to religion--any religion--always downplay any influence that might have been exerted by an extremist interpretation of that religion."

The secularists have a point. There is something like what Jacoby calls "religious correctness" that has long led Americans to downplay religion as a motive for public hostility. The "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s were called that because the members of the American Party recognized that it was un-American to say openly that their primary motivation was anti-Catholicism--religious prejudice.

For all that, it's hard to argue that religion has not been part of the national discussion of both the Roeder and Hasan affairs. Debate over responsibility for the murder of Dr. Tiller centered on the demonization of "Tiller the Baby Killer" and the advocacy of violent action against abortion providers generally by religious activists in the anti-abortion movement and their advocates in the, ah, MSM. Likewise, Hasan's Muslim connections and views have been vigorously pursued by, yes, the MSM. As in the case of the Know-Nothings, everybody knows what the game is. And minimizing the significance of the religion of the alleged perpetrator, and accusing others of political correctness in refusing to blame that religion, are both part of the game.