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The whole point of this document was to threaten younger evangelicals who were perceived as getting a bit wobbly in their opposition to homosexuality. Evangelical Christians under 30 just don't seem to see that as a paramount moral concern -- and they can't see how gay couples wanting to marry could possibly be viewed as more morally significant than the fact that, by the time these younger evangelicals get to be Colson's age, Bangladesh will be under water.

Steve-b, you left out the alert

Sider's book Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger is an unflinching, uncompromising assessment of the Christian obligation to share with those in need. I know of few people able or willing to live up to that book's powerful call to sacrificial generosity, but Sider himself has done so for many decades. He is a gentle, irenic man and a Good Man....

....The organizers of this right-wing manifesto du jour needed a token liberal to provide a bipartisan fig-leaf, so they turned to Ron Sider (about as close as the evangelical world allows to a liberal) to be their Lieberman. But to convince him to play this role, they had to lie to him. I don't know which or how many of the declaration's three author-organizers did the actual lying. My money would be on convicted felon and would-be domestic terrorist Chuck Colson. (Yes, terrorist. Plotting to burn down the Brookings Institution in order to silence opposition from centrists is political terrorism.)

Sider is a marxist-socialist, pure and simple, who espouses UN population control and government wealth redistribution. He runs in the same circles and advocates the same kind of liberation theology that Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo do.

I wasn't going to sign the M.D. because I think there are more important things on earth than railing against homosexual marriage and abortion...namely evangelism and discipleship. But I may do so anyway because of this article.

In the great commission, Jesus did not command his followers to picket abortion clinics. He told them to go into the world and make disciples, baptize them and teach them to obey him. That's the most important thing.

Jesus never led a protest march to call Herod out for having John the Baptist executed... or even demanding his release before his death. Paul never led a grassroots movement demanding that Caesar stop gladiatorial games.

In my humble opinion, it is because Christians shirk their duty to evangelize that these problems (abortion, homosexual behavior, euthanasia, etc) become so pronounced.

Please don't get me wrong. Abortion is evil. Homosexual "marriage" should be stopped in its tracks. But these are not the most important issues facing Christian churches today. Evangelism and Discipleship are.

This attack on Ron Sider and his colleagues who are supporters of the Manhattan Declaration is remarkably uninformed and off the mark.

It is simply incorrect to say that the people involved in the Declaration are one-issue or two-issue (or even 3 or 4-issue) narrow-gauge zealots. Consider the principal authors:

Chuck Colson is a tireless advocate for prisoners and for people who are on the margins of society. His work has been of enormous spiritual and physical benefit to many who struggle and suffer most: drug addicts, convicted criminals and their families;

Dr. Robert George currently serves on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), and has taught and written extensively against torture and war crimes, and argued against forced marriage, the oppression of women, and sexual trafficking on the basis of Natural Law;

Rev. Timothy Beeson points out that the dignity of life and of marriage as proclaimed in the Gospel "touch on everything else we do including the proclamation of the Gospel, concern for the poor, nurturing of children, ministry to prisoners, care of creation, and peacemaking in a broken world."

On these matters, the esteemed Ron Sider is surely acting in full awareness and agreement with the authors and the other signers of the Manhattan Declaration. They have challenged us to see the full dimensions of the Gospel, and I say "Bravo" and God bless them all.