The Manhattan Declaration was released today at noon:

More than 150 Christian leaders, most of them conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Roman Catholics, issued a joint declaration Friday reaffirming their opposition to abortion and gay marriage and pledging to protect religious freedoms.

The 4,700-word document, called “The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” sounds familiar themes from political and social debates over the health care overhaul and gay marriage battles.

While acknowledging that “Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage,” the group rejects same-sex marriage. The declaration states that opening a legal door for gay marriage would do the same for “polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.”

Currently, the web site of the declaration appears to be overloaded with traffic, so make sure to check back later in order to read through this important document.

You can also read it at First Things here.

ADDENDUM: WORLD Washington Bureau reporter Emily Belz attended today’s announcement. Read her report here.

Whether it’s about trees, parades, festivals, displays, or greetings, the outcry this time of year usually involves someone deciding to call something “holiday” rather than “Christmas.” Not so in the community of Patchogue on New York’s Long Island. Last year, the town and the local chamber of commerce were concerned about a popular annual event not being inclusive enough so they rechristened it the “Holiday Boat Parade.” However, the number of spectators dramatically dropped off last year, so the Patchogue Riverfront Committee, which assumed sponsorship of the event this year, has renamed it the “Christmas Holiday Boat Parade”

The Atlantic this month offers a piece on Christian financial guru Dave Ramsey – any of you used his advice? The author, Megan McArdle, summarizes his advice thus:

[G]ive 10 percent of your income to charity, save 15 percent for retirement, build up a sizable emergency stash and a college fund for your kids, and above all, stop borrowing money. Ramsey devotees pay cash for everything they can. They are allowed only one exception to the no-more-debt rule: a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage.

Christianity Today’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey critiques the article’s use of canned phrases about evangelicals and generalizations:

“the format was more tent revival than accounting seminar”

“his disciples routinely shun lucrative financing deals”

“Ramsey is not the first evangelical to sell financial advice to his co-religionists”

“Ramsey devotees”

McArdle, however, has a generally positive take on Ramsey’s advice, though she scoffs a bit at his evangelism.

The piece shows Ramsey as a foil to prosperity-gospel (debt-ridden) Christians, which The Atlantic details in its breathless cover story: “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” There, author Hanna Rosin explores the idea that mainstream denominations promote risk-taking because the prosperity gospel offers material rewards, creating a culture of debt.

For a secular writer, McArdle rather surprisingly offers Ramsey as an antidote.

Every week, my local newspaper runs a small piece called “A Student’s View,” written, as you can probably guess, by a high school student on the topic of his or her choice.

In a recent one, titled “Oh my God,” a Jewish girl wrote protesting her parents’ insistence that she attend synagogue services for the High Holy Days. The author was clearly bright, and the piece was thoughtful and well-written. And having experienced teenage rebellion in various forms firsthand, I pass no judgment on her or her parents. (If anything, I admire them for insisting she attend.)

Making no excuses but raising a good point, she writes, “A majority of my classmates . . . say the Lord’s name in vain all the time. . . .” And it’s not just her classmates. All day, every day, on TV and in movies, in real life and in books, the phrase “Oh my God” is uttered. Hearing that relentlessly, what must young people think? How could it not diminish the meaning behind the name?

It wasn’t always so. I don’t remember hearing the phrase as a child, on TV, or used by my classmates. But it slowly crept into common useage and is now ubiquitous, with its very own texting shorthand, “OMG.”

I sometimes wonder what would happen if school children—or TV characters—en masse started saying “Oh my Allah” instead. I doubt that would be tolerated. But never mind the sensibilities of believing Christians and Jews. And how many of us say it ourselves? How many of us let it slide when others say it? We allow it to happen.

Writing for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, S.M. Hutchens describes a scene in C.S. Lewis’s book, Perelandra. The character representing Satan continually calls out the name Ransom, who’s been sent to oppose him. The first few times Ransom hears his name he answers, “What is it?” “Nothing,” comes the reply. This continues until Ransom simply stops responding.

Hutchens writes: “[A]t the heart of this nothing was a denial of the person called upon, an aggressive attempt to negate his being, an attempt to equate him with nothing, an attempt to kill.”

Perhaps that’s the reason behind the Third Commandment.

After a vote in September to spend a year considering the formation of a new denomination, Lutheran CORE (Coalition for Renewal) has shifted into high gear to distance itself from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The move is in reaction to a vote taken in August by the ELCA to allow practicing homosexuals in committed relationships to serve as clergy, a move that Lutheran CORE members say directly contradicts Scripture.

Ryan Schwarz, who is leading the organizing effort, said a committee would begin work immediately on drafting a constitution and building a budget for the new denomination, which CORE hopes to launch by next August.

“Many of us have spent years now struggling to call the ELCA to remain faithful to the Orthodox Christianity of the last 2,000 years,” Schwarz said. “While this is of course a wrenching decision, there is also a sense of hope in refocusing on our true mission, which is evangelizing the Lutheran faith.”

Lutheran CORE is urging supportive congregations to stop paying support to the ECLA, and for those opposed to the denomination’s liberal policy but don’t want to leave the ELCA, CORE will continue in its efforts to try to create a free-floating synod within the ELCA.

Captives Maryam Rustampoor, 27, and Marzieh Esmaeilabad, 30, were freed today by Iranian authorities after almost nine months’ confinement in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for refusing to deny their Christian faith. According to Open Doors and its sources in Iran, the two were set free without bail and are currently at home.

As I reported in the current issue of WORLD the two were charged with “propagation of Christianity,” apostasy (for converting from Islam), and “anti-state activity.” It is not known if their release is unconditional, and if all charges were dropped. The two are reportedly in poor health following their captivity.

The grandiosity and confidence of some theologians and pastors in an age of democratic theology is something the early church fathers would find puzzling. If you’re attending a vibrant church, it seems easy to assume that your church must be “right.” In evangelicalism, what qualifies as credible is often church size and pastoral charisma. If the church is big and the pastor is a good speaker, then the church must be preaching something right. God must be “in it.” However, in an age where theological accuracy and biblical fidelity to the historic teachings of the church are authenticated by the size of parking lots, media appearances, profiles in Christian magazines, the pastor’s “hipster” quotient, believing that Christianity began in the 16th century, and so on, I’m not so sure we should be as dogmatically confident as we profess.

Churches without pastoral leadership bound and accountable to higher ecclesial authority and oversight, outside of the local congregational setting, typically end up with pastors who surround themselves with “yes men.” These men may be called “elders” but they were selected by the super-pastor and are not considered his theological equal.

For pastors driven by numbers (followers), influence, making the church catholic into their own image, and so on, it is also easy to fall prey to the group-selected narcissism that feeds the arrogant self-deception that “pastor X’s” or “Dr. X’s” theological preferences are best for the church universal. A congregation’s “vision/mission statement” or “statement of faith” is treated as creedal and used as a basis for assessing the orthodoxy of the church down the street.

Perhaps this is why celebrities, in general, believe their own hype as suggested in Dr. Gad Saad’s article, “I’m not a Doctor, But . . . ,” in the most recent issue of Psychology Today. Narcissism, grandiosity, fame, “yes, men,” the post-modern democratization of opinion lead us to wrongly believe that well-known people must be right. I think issues may apply to well-known pastors, theologians, and Christian musicians, as well.

Honestly, I struggle with theological humility in my own writing and speaking. This is not a problem, then, exclusive to those who are well-known. There is also the opposite extreme of those who believe they are “right” because their church world is small and their pastors are not well-known.

What’s different about a church world of democratized theology is that we no longer have the authority to declare something heretical nor in error. We can’t remove bad teaching from church communities. We can only blog about error or slander error on Facebook and Twitter. Sadly, numbers feed the self-deception that Paul the apostle would agree with whatever your church teaches and practices. Church history should remind us that it is entirely possible, because of sin and deception, for any of our churches to be large, or your favorite pastor or theologian to be famous, because God is, in fact, not “in it.”

Robert Kaplan writes at the Atlantic that in the United States’ current battles abroad, having more Muslims in the ranks is vital.

Inevitably, a minute percentage of these Muslim recruits may be influenced by jihadist propaganda, which certainly seems to have been the case with Maj. Hasan. So what do we do?

Better security surveillance and background checks, as well as better coordination within the defense bureaucracy to ferret out troublesome individuals, make sense.

He concludes:

More Maj. Hasans may lurk in the barracks and public squares. The way to find them out is not in a shrill witch hunt, but quietly, methodically, and legally, even as we open up our military to a wider spectrum of recruits.

But wouldn’t extra surveillance of Muslims entering the military be a deterrent to the Muslim recruits who Kaplan’s hoping join up? Thoughts?

Thanks to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, most Americans have at least heard of the godfather of community organizing, Saul Alinsky (1909-1972), and his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals. Turn on conservative talk radio any day and there’s a good chance you’ll hear Alinsky’s Rule No. 13 cited derisively: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, politicize it and polarize it.” It’s important to understand this rule, but I think it’s more important to understand why Alinsky wrote this book that continues to influence the American left.

In the book’s prologue, Alinsky wrote:

“The revolutionary force today has two targets, moral as well as material. Its young protagonists are one moment reminiscent of the idealistic early Christians, yet they also urge violence and cry, ‘Burn the system down!’ They have no illusions about the system, but plenty of illusions about the way to change our world. It is to this point that I have written this book.”

Sprinkled with religious language, profanity, Scriptural references as well as a dedication to Lucifer, Alinsky sought to guide members of the younger generation interested in changing their world.

Yet it’s apparent that Alinsky sought to give them something much more important than rules for radicals. He wanted to give them meaning for life. In the prologue he continued, “Today’s generation is desperately trying to make some sense out of their lives and out of the world. . . . The young are . . . looking for what man has always looked for from the beginning of time, a way of life that has some meaning or sense.”

On the last page of this manual that teaches community organizers how to take from the “Haves” and give to the “Have-Nots,” Alinsky wrote, “The human cry . . . is one for a meaning, a purpose for life—a cause to live for and if need be die for. . . . This is literally the revolution of the soul.”

According to the Chicago-based organizer, there were no fixed principles by which the community organizer should live, other than the 13 rules for radicals. He said that the organizer “knows that life is a quest for uncertainty. . . . He knows that all values are relative, in a world of political relativity.” Yet the atheist Alinsky wrote, “[T]he organizer is in a true sense reaching for the highest level for which man can reach—to create, to be a ‘great creator,’ to play God.”

He said that the young “are searching for an answer, at least for a time, to man’s greatest question, ‘Why am I here?’” In short, the writer told his followers to find life’s meaning and salvation in conflict-based community organizing for the purpose of taking from the Haves and giving to the Have-Nots.

When we think of Alinsky, we miss the bigger picture if we focus on Rule No. 13. However misguided, he sought to give his followers meaning for life. By sharing the gospel with modern-day community organizers, we can show them true salvation in Jesus Christ and life’s meaning and purpose in glorifying God.

“The Young and the Reckless,” an op-ed in today’s New York Times, provides us an opportunity to think through the issue of “life without parole” sentencing of juveniles here in America.

On Monday, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases that ask whether sentencing a juvenile to life in prison without the possibility of parole is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Those who hope the court will ban this sort of sentencing point to the 2005 decision in Roper v. Simmons, in which the court abolished the juvenile death penalty. They believe that the logic the justices applied in Roper to exclude minors from capital punishment should extend to life without parole as well.

What do you think? Should “life without parole” punishments be given to juveniles?

There is no question that teenagers who commit serious crimes should be held accountable and punished, and that society must be protected from young people who are violent and dangerous. But studies show that the vast majority of juveniles who commit crimes — even very serious crimes — grow up to be law-abiding adults, and that it is impossible to predict which juvenile offenders will become career criminals.

Absent an ability to do this, and in light of what science tells us about the capacity for adolescents to change, it makes no sense to lock up any young offender and throw away the key.