As I said in my previous post, I can find things to applaud in the recent Manhattan Declaration along with things to dispute. But I don’t think Chuck Colson got it quite right when he spoke about the statement to the New York Times: “We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues. A lot of younger evangelicals say they’re all alike. We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

His statement deserves at least two responses. First, our failure to join in their project is not due to a lack of attempts to “educate” us via long but well-written arguments and declarations. In fact, a little more respectful listening and a little less arguing, educating, and declaring might have been good for all parties. Second, I’ve never once heard a single “younger evangelical” say all issues are alike. We would agree that there is a hierarchy of issues. The difference lies in what goes near the top of our lists. For example, Jonathan Merritt points to “anti-life atrocities” like these:

… the 3 million people in this world who will die this year from easily preventable water-related diseases, the 143 million orphans crying out from filthy beds in musty orphanages and the 1 million Africans who will unnecessarily die of malaria in the next 12 months.

I’ve had “skin in the game” in this regard myself. I wrote a whole book a couple years back about a hierarchy of four critical issues, and I explained in some detail why I believe those issues deserve our primary focus.

I certainly respect the determination of the Manhattan Declaration’s signors. They’ve chosen a set of priorities and a way of pursuing them, and they’ve stuck with their agenda for decades now, come hell or high water. If determination and focus guarantee success, then perhaps they’ll succeed in the end. But I can’t help but think of the old saying about doing the same things and expecting different results. That’s why I think it’s a good time, educated by the efforts of the Manhattan signors, for the rest of us to dig deeper and seek better understandings of social problems and wiser approaches to how our faith equips us to address them. For example, maybe we should consider whether the “culture of death” described in the declaration might itself be a symptom of deeper cultural forces like these?

1. The culture of greed: When individuals, powerful and unaccountable corporations, and political parties are held captive to greed, won’t everything lose its proper value? Aren’t our daily headlines telling us that greed is a terrible foundation on which to build an economy and culture?
2. The culture of power: When individuals, corporations, governments, and political and religious parties are driven by the love of power more than the power of love, won’t valuable things be treated as garbage? And won’t the fear of losing power motivate people to savage other people, treating them with something far less than the dignity they deserve?
3. The culture of lust: Might it be wiser to identify issues in human sexuality less in terms of sexual orientation, and more in terms of sexual obsession that can pervert both homosexual and heterosexual behavior? Should we look at the economic forces that put marriage and biology farther and farther out of sync? Should we put more focus on the corporate and entertainment interests that sexualize children and decouple sex from commitment of any sort?

Few people would say, “Yes, we want a culture of death!” But many would freely admit that money, power, and sex drive their daily lives. And especially when it comes to money and power, we could say that our whole economic and political systems run on these fuel sources. Perhaps in seeking to address these deeper driving forces as the disease rather than arguing about which symptoms are most important, we can find more productive and truly spiritual ways of bringing about needed social change in the years ahead, as we seek the common good of peace, justice, and joy.

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is a speaker and author, most recently of Everything Must Change and Finding Our Way Again.