A little boy in my 8-year-old son’s Cub Scout den could not join the rest of us on a camp-out last weekend.
He had to stay home while his father, a neighbor of ours, went to the Promise Keepers rally on the Washington Mall.
When I asked the dad if he had thought about taking his son with him, he looked at me as if I had just said something in Martian. Then he sheepishly muttered something about how, no, that just wouldn’t be a good idea.
I’m particularly sensitive to this because I didn’t take my son to the Million Man March and I have regretted it ever since. I thought that, at 6, he’d be too young to care. But when he saw on the evening news that black men had gathered on the Mall to atone and make better men of themselves, he said, he wanted to go, too.
“I’m a little black man,” he said.
He had a point. He was a little man looking for guidance on how to become a big man. There are a lot of places, good and bad, to learn how to be a man. None are more effective than dear old dad.
Of course, not every dad who went to the Mall–either for the Million Man March or the Promise Keepers rally, which was multiracial–left his kids behind. Quite a few of the hundreds of thousands of guys who gathered on the Mall brought their sons with them.
But most didn’t. Nor were daughters–Heaven forbid!–part of the mix. The Christian evangelical men’s group has filled stadiums across America, almost entirely with men, in the belief that men got themselves–and America–into the mess it’s in and only men can show each other the way out.
So, that night, as I found myself sleeping–or trying to–under a tent while my neighbor was back home snug in a warm civilized bed, I thought about the irony of the Promise Keepers: They gather in stadiums and on the Mall to profess their love for Jesus and devotion to their families. But, first, they’ve got to get away from their families.
Many wives and mothers have gone along with this, largely because they’ve heard about what angels most of the men are when they get back home.
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Different strokes for different folks. As any Promise Keepers organizer will tell you, it’s not what the participants do at the rallies that counts. It’s what they do when they get back home.
This has given rise to the sort of creativity displayed on the T-shirts of three guys The Washington Post spotted at the Saturday Orioles-Mariners playoff game: “My wife thinks I’m at Promise Keepers.”
(Why not, guys? Just come home with a smile on your face and a Bible under your arm, kiss the kids and pick up a sock or two off the floor, and you can probably get away with it.)
But, I will not pre-judge my neighbor. I hope he and his family benefit from his trip to the Mall. It is hard to imagine that it will do any harm.
I know there are skeptics, most notably the National Organization for Women, who view the Promise Keepers with alarm. They speculate that Bill McCartney, the former University of Colorado football coach who founded the organization seven years ago, is leading some kind of sexist Christian reactionary army to take over Washington.
But those who attended the rally heard little talk of politics. Instead, they heard a lot of talk about relationships. You don’t usually think of relationships as a topic for guy talk, except maybe the relationship between the designated-hitter rule and the decline of baseball.
It is heartwarming to see men able to bond around something a little more wholesome than the traditional B’s–booze, “broads” and ball games.
It is also delightful to see the social service work Promise Keepers do. A day before Saturday’s rally, for example, about 1,500 Promise Keepers volunteers swarmed over a local public junior high school building to repair it and help ease the cash-strapped District of Columbia’s school troubles.
Inasmuch as the Promise Keepers have improved people’s lives, God bless ’em.
Still, I could not help but wonder how many children were left behind while their fathers went off to learn that they should spend more time with their children.
The single most controversial vow the Promise Keepers make is to take “responsibility” for their families. To me, that doesn’t necessarily mean bossing everyone around, although critics like NOW read that into it. I think it means real men don’t try to shuck the blame off on someone else, if their marriage or their parenting fails.
Men have taken the lead in committing evil in this country. We commit far more crimes, violent and otherwise, than women do. McCartney is right to suggest that we can take the lead in redeeming this country, too.
It all begins at home.