Come On, You Call This a Manifesto?

Professor Alan Jacobs / The Wall Street Journal:
Another group of evangelicals released "An Evangelical Manifesto: The Washington Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment." Like the Lausanne Covenant, it restates much basic Christian doctrine, proclaims the need for evangelism and contains passages of penitence. ("We must reform our own behavior.") So how does this document add to, or differ from, the Lausanne Covenant? I had read much of it -- it runs to 20 pages -- before I began to understand what it's all about. If Lausanne was an international document based on international concerns, the Manifesto is a very American document, the product of an election year, and a strong reaction against a quarter-century of evangelical identification with the Republican Party. But one thing the document is not is a manifesto...The true manifesto is bold, even extreme: It leaves us in no doubt about its commitments...The Evangelical Manifesto, by contrast, is both long and insistently moderate.

Posted by Editor at May 13, 2008 03:14 AM