In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a General Election on the way. A month after the release of the Catholic Bishops Conference’s Choosing the Common Good, a second significant Christian intervention into the campaign was launched. This is the grandly named Westminster 2010 Declaration of Christian Conscience.

The online statement of putative Christian principles, styled as the British version of the Manhattan Declaration, has been signed by former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, Cardinal Keith O’Brien and – at the time of writing – a not insignificant 14,000 others. It calls on those who subscribe to the ‘historic Christian faith’ to add their signature to the Declaration and asks parliamentary candidates to ‘respect, uphold and protect the right of Christians to hold and express Christian beliefs and act according to Christian conscience’. States the Declaration, ‘we believe that protecting human life, protecting marriage, and protecting freedom of conscience are foundational for creating and maintaining strong families, caring communities and a just society’.

Whether this reflects what are matters of conscience for those who subscribe to ‘historic Christian faith’ would certainly be debatable. The Declaration could be charged of putting those issues which are in the background into the foreground, and relegating what is in the biblical foreground to half a catch-all sentence on ‘those who are sick, disabled, addicted, elderly, in single parent families, poor, exploited, trafficked, appropriately seeking asylum, threatened by environmental change, or exploited by unjust trade, aid or debt policies’. But most of its critics have concerns of an entirely different order.

According to one commentator, the Declaration is evidence of the emergence of a ‘coherent rightwing bloc’ in British Christianity. This is ‘nationalist, socially conservative, suspicious of markets, critical of Islam, authoritarian’, similar in nature to the BNP, no less. Others have found this to be a serious misreading, and it would certainly be hard to evidence charges of nationalism, suspicion of markets or Islamophobia on the basis of the text itself.

What of authoritarianism? Hardly. Rather than a statement on what policies governments should pursue, the paragraph on ‘life’ issues is a call to activism on the part of the Christian community. No doubt that activism is and would be directed towards legislating pro-life positions should the chance present itself, but that is surely what a plethora of civil society groups are seeking to do on a range of issues at any given time. The paragraph on marriage calls on government to honour, promote and protect the institution. Even though the authors clearly reject the notion of equality between opposite- and same-sex partnerships, that in itself is hardly dictatorial.

Indeed, rather than advancing some kind of Christian nation position, the Declaration preferences a liberal and plural view of society.  ‘We call upon all those in UK positions of leadership, responsibility and influence to pledge to respect, uphold and protect the right of Christians to hold these beliefs and to act according to Christian conscience’. Apparently, what the signatories to this document want more than anything is not, as some critics might worry, to legislate Christian morality for all but to secure the space to pursue their own projects, practices and vision of the good – the very thing that liberal pluralism purports to offer.

Liberal secularists should note this with interest. Even if they have had cause to complain in the past that the religious want to foist their own morality on a plural society, it is clear that this Declaration does not really look for that. Granted, this new pluralist orientation is not explicit within the document and, should the authors ever identify themselves, it would be worth asking if this is really what they intend. But if it is, then it represents a genuine and significant change in the rules of engagement from what might be termed the ‘Christian right’ and signals just how embattled those behind this project feel.

But if liberals have decried the Declaration when they should have seen something that they might celebrate, Christians who might sign it should give some thought to the implications of such an emphasis on their rights and freedom of conscience. This concedes that the Christian community is just another sectional interest group alongside others, and thus strengthens the claim of liberalism to be the only show in town, the only way of setting the rules of the game and the only way of managing a plural public space.

To continue to aspire to provide a persuasive and comprehensive view of the common good that counts for everyone, not just for us, is a far harder and more complicated road. But it is one which the Christian community should continue to walk.

Paul Bickley is Senior Researcher at Theos.