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Promise Keepers 2001

By Bill Berkowitz

The Promise Keepers are smack dab in the middle of their latest cross-country male-fest. Unlike days past, this year they're mostly booked into much smaller venues. The glory days when the Promise Keepers flooded Washington, DC with hundreds of thousands of men to "Stand in the Gap" are over. Ironically, however, Promise Keepers' message now appears to extend all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I try to check out the Promise Keepers about as often as I get a colorectal examination. Neither endeavor is particularly painful; they are what doctors have taken to call "uncomfortable" procedures. My last check up went pretty well. So how's it going with Coach Bill McCartney's crew?

The grandstands and bleachers at America's football stadiums are no longer packed with spirited men listening to Promise Keepers' stable of speakers touting its obnoxious version of fatherhood, strengthening the traditional family and its own rendering of "racial reconciliation."

The media no longer looks to Promise Keepers' founder, former Colorado University head football coach Bill McCartney, for hot-button sound bites on man's role in the family. The organization's budget has dropped from nearly $120 million in 1997 to a still respectable $34 million this year. Staffing has been dramatically reduced -- some 100 people now work where 300 once toiled. The caps, mugs, sweatshirts, placards, posters and memorabilia are no longer rolling out of the concession stands.

Is anyone out there paying attention?

Even Promise Keepers "watchers" are not tracking the organization as closely as they once did. Promise Keepers Watch, a publication and a comprehensive Web site put together by the New York City-based Center for Democracy Studies (now the Institute for Democracy Studies), has been folded into IDS Insights, a newsletter covering the broader right-wing agenda. The last citation on the Promise Keepers Watch Web site references a 1998 news story about the major financial problem the organization was experiencing.

During Promise Keepers' meteoric ascension into the national consciousness, NOW (National Organization for Women) set up a useful Web site tracking the organization and offering updates on ongoing organizing campaigns against them. NOW's work on Promise Keepers also seems trapped in a bottle - its Promise Keepers Mobilization Project hasn't been updated in several years. (NOW's "Myths and Facts about the Promise Keepers" remains a handy background primer on the organization.)

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In June 1999, the Rocky Mountain News reported that "a group called Equal Partners in Faith (EPF), a coalition of advocates and religious leaders sympathetic to gay civil rights, will shadow the men's Christian movement Promise Keepers during planned rallies in Denver and cities across the country this summer." These days, Equal Partners in Faith, "a multi-racial national network of leaders and people of faith committed to equality and diversity" is focused mainly on Bush administration policies.

What are we to make of this? If progressives aren't paying attention does that mean that Promise Keepers, now in its eleventh year, is no longer a threat? As the FOX News Channel claims, but rarely delivers, "we report, you decide!"

In the presence of power

Despite sagging attendance, lower budgets and a smaller staff, Promise Keepers enters year eleven with at least one additional arrow in its quiver - now, more than ever before, they appear to have access to the politically powerful, including the president.

Item: One of President George W. Bush's closest spiritual advisors and confidantes is the Rev. Tony Evans, a homophobic, anti-feminist, African-American pastor at the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, Texas. The Rev. Evans, one of the most fiery and controversial of all Promise Keepers' speakers, once said: "I believe the feminists of the more aggressive persuasion are frustrated women unable to find the proper male leadership. If a woman were receiving the right kind of love and attention and leadership, she would not want to be liberated from that."

At an October 1999 Promise Keepers meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, Evans stated, the "bacteria of society are causing social breakdown of the church," and that some churches are already suffering from "spiritual AIDS." He demanded that Christians mobilize: "Hell, everybody else is coming out of the closet, you might as well too."

During the presidential campaign, Evans told The New York Times that Bush "believes that God has a place in government, that religion has a place in society, and it is not to be marginalized and put on the periphery as though it is some sort of extra. There is no America without a theistic world view." He recently, he has been the president's guest at several meetings involving Bush's faith-based initiative.

Item: In a recent extensive Washington Post profile, Rep. Tom "The Hammer" DeLay (R-Texas) claimed that the Promise Keepers had made him a kinder, gentler Christian and politician. If what we're seeing is the kinder, gentler version of Tom DeLay… uh, you know the rest.

Item: This year's 16 planned two-day events, called "Turning the Tide: Living Out an Extreme Faith," will not come close to the jamborees of days gone by -- Promise Keepers claims to have hosted more than 3.5 million men at its gatherings during the 1990s. However, the organization has scheduled stops in some of the nation's largest cities, including Baltimore, Chicago, Nashville, Indianapolis, San Jose, Kansas City, Charlotte, and Houston. A late-May gathering in Rapid City, South Dakota drew about 3,200 men.

Commenting on this year's focus, Promise Keepers head Bill McCartney said: "Tides are not something we turn by our will. But men should position themselves to deal with the prevailing currents of relative truth, pleasure at all costs, and spiritual apathy. We want this conference to equip men to live a bold faith. Extreme sports are the rage these days, but an extreme faith can change our families, our churches and our communities. We're calling men to an extreme commitment that will change their lives and challenge the culture."

Bill McCartney

The New York Times' Gustav Niebuhr pointed out that the theme is "a reference to a biblical verse about personal transformation (Romans 12:2) and an exhortation to live 'an extreme faith,' a phrase one official said was aimed at younger men, who have presumably been bombarded with the popular culture's use of the word 'extreme,' as in extreme sports."

Lee Cokorinos, Research Director at the Institute for Democracy Studies, tells me that the Promise Keepers movement has shifted to working more deeply within local communities and local churches these days. In addition, he added, Promise Keepers are beginning to have a much greater international presence.

The bottom line: Don't underestimate the Promise Keepers. Its fifteen minutes has turned into eleven years of steady, if no longer mediagenic, activities. While they're not drawing the crowds they once did and aren't the media darlings they once were, the organization retains the same unwavering commitment to its long-range mission.