Christian Men’s Movement Taps Into Identity Crisis : Religion: Promise Keepers has exploded from churches into stadiums. It offers guidance but raises questions.

In the stands of Mile High Stadium, Rocky Thompson was seeking divine guidance on how to keep his work--serving scofflaws with eviction notices and court subpoenas--from hurting his relationship with his wife and children.

Thompson made the pilgrimage from Northern California to be in the company of 70,000 other men seeking salvation at a recent two-day gathering organized by the Promise Keepers, a controversial evangelical Christian movement for men only that has grown in massive proportions since it was founded five years ago by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney.

“For the first time in my life,” said Thompson, 43, “I’m on my knees praying to God for the world not to divide my family with job stress and bills and pressure to achieve the American Dream.”

The Promise Keepers, which has experienced a growth rate of 400% each year over the past four years with minimal mass media publicity, is expanding its reach largely through word of mouth and from the pulpit in churches across the country.

Its leaders say they are tapping into a mass identity crisis among men who have come to feel isolated, powerless and threatened by a society in transition. And the members of no group, they say, are being harder hit with fear for the future and their role in society than middle-class and lower-middle-class Christian men.

Because men are not keeping their promises to their wives, families and churches, they say, America is in a moral free fall. The results are rampant crime, racial strife, soaring divorce rates, a decline of sexual morality, children embracing unwholesome lifestyles and elected officials making decisions that adversely affect their personal lives.

At stake, according to the movement’s leaders, is nothing less than the future of America. That message has been conveyed in spirited sports-stadium gatherings and in small, church-based groups designed to make men feel free to express their emotions.

The first Promise Keepers conference attracted 4,200 participants to the University of Colorado’s football stadium in 1991. This year, the organization expects to draw 500,000 men at 13 stadiums across the United States. In 1997, they hope 1 million men will descend on Washington to kneel in prayer and ask God for forgiveness as men--and to restore America.

“It’s part of a larger movement across America in which people are saying we need to strike back at a culture that has become our enemy,” said Tony Campolo, a sociologist at Eastern College in St. Davids, Pa., and a supporter of the Promise Keepers.

“We are no longer sure about our art, film, music, dress, politics and competitive business structures,” he said. “The huge Promise Keepers rallies enable men to feel they can initiate a movement that will revitalize America in a spiritual way, and instill the kinds of beliefs, morals and convictions that once made this nation strong.”

But even Campolo points out that the Promise Keepers remains a largely white, male, middle-class Protestant phenomenon--despite heavy lobbying by the organization’s leaders for greater participation from African American, Latino and Asian churches of all denominations.

The fact that some Promise Keepers pay enrollment fees for some minority participants at its stadium gatherings has raised suggestions that the organization is trying to engineer diversity that is not happening naturally.

Other critics worry over a perceived intolerance in the movement toward abortion, non-Christian religions and gays.

It was McCartney, they note, who proclaimed at a 1992 news conference that “homosexuality is an abomination against Almighty God.” In addition, Pastor Harvey Baynes, a full-time employee of the Promise Keepers, was arrested in March in connection with a protest outside a Denver Planned Parenthood clinic.

In an interview at Mile High Stadium, David Wardell, Promise Keepers’ co-founder and ambassador-at-large, blamed many of America’s problems on the movements spawned during the 1960s when, he said, “we saw moral absolutism replaced by moral relativism, all these foreign religions and a countless myriad of beliefs without unity.”

Feminists have a particular problem with the “hierarchy of power” espoused by some of the movement’s leaders: God, Jesus, man, woman and children.

“In reality, their ideology is the same one evangelicals have believed for 300 years--if you get out of that hierarchy of power, you are causing the world to be disordered,” said Diana Butler, a self-described evangelical feminist and syndicated columnist for the New York Times.

But desperate men like Thompson say these critics just don’t get it.

“I came to pick up seeds of belief that can make life better for my family,” he said. “Right now, my family is like an airplane going down. My wife is the right wing, my children are the left wing. I’m the pilot and we’re about to crash.”

Thompson first heard about the movement from a brother who lives in Grand Junction, Colo. But it was his wife who helped him overcome fears of becoming “a holy roller.”

“She said it would make me a better man if I came,” he said. “I’ve learned that swimming upstream to achieve the American Dream means neglecting your family. My new priorities are God, family and then profession--in that order.” On the other side of the Denver Broncos playing field, 34-year-old hiking-gear repairman Lysle Carter said he got a taste for the Promise Keepers’ brand of preaching and praying in 1991, when he needed it most. After years of 90-hour workweeks, he said, his family was falling apart and he was suicidal.

“In those days, I carried a bullet with my initials carved on it along with a .44-caliber pistol,” he said. His wife “turned to a psychologist for help and I turned to the Promise Keepers and the Bible. We got a divorce.”

Carter joined a small men’s group organized by the Promise Keepers at his church. There, he said, “the guys helped me feel not so isolated and alone. They loaned me cars, got me jobs, gave me money, food, a place to stay and someone who would listen.”

Since then, Carter has married a woman who, he says, “tells me: ‘If you follow God, I’ll follow you anywhere.’ ”

“Promise Keepers gave me hope,” he said, leaning back in a folding chair on the Mile High Stadium playing field with a contented smile. “Jesus gave my life meaning, purpose and fellowship.”

All this for the $55 it costs to attend a Promise Keepers rally. Collectively, the proceeds of these events are the lifeblood of the movement that is targeting 30 cities next year.

About 90% of the money raised at the stadiums, which averages about $3 million per event, is used to pay for ongoing rallies and planning for future events. The rest is spent on organizing a nationwide network of 10,500 men to spread the word in local churches and to create and maintain the small men’s groups.

As one staffer put it: “Promise Keepers without small groups would be like a Rolling Stones tour without CDs.”

Still, some members are beginning to wonder whether the organization is placing too much emphasis on huge rallies.

“I have great fear of going to Washington; just by going there we are politicizing this thing,” said Lee May, Denver coordinator for the Promise Keepers. “Meanwhile, this movement is growing so fast that we’re falling behind with the small groups.”

If there are serious cracks in the imposing organizational edifice that the Promise Keepers presents to the world, its top leaders are not talking about them. They seem eager, however, to respond to critics who wonder why women are barred from participating.

At the opening-day news conference held in Mile High Stadium’s sweltering locker room, McCartney, 55, said: “We do not exclude ladies.”

“Rather, we ask men to go home and to honor their wives by out-serving them,” he said. “We want men to be successes with their families. Because no success outside the home can make up for being a failure with one’s family.”

McCartney speaks from experience. In 1989, he said, his unwed teen-age daughter, Kristyn, gave birth to a child fathered by a University of Colorado athlete. In 1993, Kristyn, still not married, gave birth to another son fathered by a different university football player.

Meanwhile his wife, Lyndi, grew weary of sharing her husband with his career. It all came to a head in January, 1994, when the couple began serious discussions about their family problems.

McCartney, who was raised in the Roman Catholic faith and now is a “born-again” Christian, decided there were enormous penalties for his obsession with success. In November, 1994, the University of Colorado’s most successful football coach called it quits after 13 seasons to devote his energy to his family, and to help the Promise Keepers deal with problems that included its low minority participation.

African American Promise Keepers such as John Owens, a 58-year-old former Denver school bus driver, is praying that McCartney is successful at his new calling.

“I’m asking all the time at these events: Why aren’t minorities here in droves?” Owens said, scanning the Mile High Stadium stands that seemed to have a meager turnout of African Americans. “I’m so tired of this one-race church stuff, it just breaks my heart.”

R.J. Lane, a 23-year-old auto mechanic who traveled here with his father from Amarillo, Tex., had other concerns on his mind, like the bottle of tequila he keeps on a night stand.

“Right now, my life is just parties and trouble--lots of trouble,” Lane said. “My dad brought me here because of it. He said Promise Keepers has been an eye-opener for the guys at his church.”

Standing near a stadium entrance just before the event, Lane added: “I hope it does the same for me. I don’t have the courage to dump that tequila bottle. It just keeps staring at me.”

Lane entered the stadium and took a seat beside his father under gray and windy skies. He did not know that a week ago a group of 75 people, many of them wives of Promise Keepers, had prayed over each and every seat in the place.

“We prayed that the speakers, lights, music system and stage equipment would work well,” said former nurse Liz Schlafer, “and that God will give these men the things they really need.”