For six years, the evangelical Christian men’s movement Promise Keepers prompted more journalistic head-scratching than any other story in religion.
Male reporters joined Promise Keepers’ pilgrimages to distant stadiums, riding buddy-crowded buses across the country in hopes of encountering some pre-dawn, interstate epiphany that would explain this phenomenon.
Women “infiltrated” the stadium events, sometimes in disguise, hoping to snare the big scoop, to uncover the nefarious hidden agenda that just had to be behind Promise Keepers’ bland theology.
Founder Bill McCartney’s football-field conversion to Christianity was recounted every time the Promise Keepers road show arrived at a new venue. Critics and defenders jousted in the best traditions of he-said-she-said journalism.
So it is curious how little has been written, faxed or shouted about the announcement last month that Promise Keepers had gone belly up.
On Feb. 18 McCartney told his troops that all 345 full-time Promise Keepers employees would be laid off March 31, shuttering one of the slickest operations ever built around a religious mission.
The official PK line is that employees will be rehired as soon as donations pick up. But that is a little like looking at the site of a plane crash and saying the flight will take off again shortly after refueling.
If there is any Promise Keepers in the future, it will not look much like the stadium-packing, boxed-lunch-and-Bible dynamo of the last few years.
That was apparent even at the Promise Keepers’ finest hour, the Stand in the Gap assembly that brought at least three-quarters of a million men to the Mall in Washington, D.C., five months ago.
The novelty, the simplicity of the message, the size and breadth of the coalition–the very qualities that defined Promise Keepers also defined its limits and suggested its logical conclusion.
Evangelical Christianity is far from a monolith. Promise Keepers did, as critics charged, have followers who were part of the political Christian Right; next to them stood Pentecostalists who speak in tongues and believe that time devoted to worldly politics is time wasted.
Promise Keepers included strict Biblical fundamentalists, old-line evangelical moderates and members of new, non-denominational seeker churches. If you got much beyond the notions of Christ as savior, traditional family as good and racism as bad, agreement would fast evaporate.
Far from conspiring to promote a secret agenda, Promise Keepers officials fought desperately to keep specific politics and specific theology off their podium, knowing a sharp move in any direction would alienate some large portion of its audience.
That did not leave much room for growth, however. Once the novelty of matching T-shirts, religious cheers and sports metaphors wore off, there was not much reason for men to attend the trademark stadium conferences.
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So in a sense, it did not come as a surprise that the Promise Keepers edifice was suddenly swallowed into the earth, leaving hardly a trace.
But there is still a story out there more mysterious, and ultimately more important, than the rise and fall of the Promise Keepers organization.
For more than 10 hours on Oct. 4, 1997, a wall of men formed at the foot of the Capitol in Washington. If you squeezed in sideways, you could begin to jostle your way down the Mall, to the place where the crowds at so many marches and rallies thinned out.
Only this one didn’t thin out. It rolled up onto the steps of the buildings on either side and flowed out between them. It persisted, step after step, body upon body, yard after yard for more than a mile.
It washed up the hill of the Washington Monument and down the other side, across streets and toward the Lincoln Monument. Overflow crowds that would have filled any good-size stadium swung north, over the Ellipse, up to the back yard of the White House.
Neither those men nor their religious fervor was created by McCartney, nor was the itch that drove them to join the world’s largest foot-traffic jam.
They were galvanized into a large and powerful movement by the Promise Keepers apparatus. Now that movement has been deprived–and freed–of the apparatus, the packaging and the pre-fabricated outlet.
The real story of what Promise Keepers was or was not, and what it tells us about the peculiarities of religion at the end of the millennium, is only now beginning to unfold.
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