Promise Keepers Eclipsing Secular Men’s Groups

A shadow has fallen over the secular men’s movement, and it looks a lot like a cross.

At the end of July, Robert Bly, grandfather of the drum-beating, get-in-touch-with-your-”wild-man” branch of the men’s movement, spoke in Portland, Ore., at a national conference on men and masculinity. Three hundred people attended.

Little more than a week later, a Christian gathering at Autzen Stadium a hundred miles away in Eugene drew nearly 40,000 men, who pledged themselves to God, family and personal responsibility.

They call themselves the Promise Keepers, and their rapid growth and religious traditionalism has secular activists dazed and bemused.

“Are we jealous of their numbers? A little bit,” said Michael Kimmel, a New York sociologist and speaker at the Portland men’s conference.

The Eugene event was the 18th of 22 men-only Promise Keepers conferences around the country this year. In six years, nearly 2 million have attended similar gatherings, where they sing “Amazing Grace” with no sopranos and hear talks on biblical brotherhood.

It is a spiritual and sociological phenomenon, with an annual budget that has ballooned from $4 million in 1993 to $115 million this year.

Bill McCartney, former football coach at the University of Colorado, came up with the Promise Keepers concept in 1990, just before Bly’s best-selling book, “Iron John,” sent men off into the woods to find their “warrior spirit.”

While Bly told mythical tales, McCartney quoted Scripture, telling men that “until we are reconciled to God, we can never be reconciled to our families and brothers.”

Men rallying around their God is nothing new.

*

From the time of the apostles, Christianity and masculinity went hand in hand. Well into the 20th century, the “Christian gentleman”--pious, protective and strong--was held up as a model of manliness in popular literature throughout the English-speaking world.

But the women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s challenged male dominance, and the secular men’s movement tended to look for inspiration elsewhere--in the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung, in male archetypes derived from pre-Christian folklore and myth, and in equal-rights language borrowed from feminists.

It spawned not one secular men’s movement, but several: mythopoetics such as Bly, pro-feminists such as Kimmel, and the fathers’ rights activists who argue the system discriminates against men.

Today, these three branches of the secular men’s movement total fewer than 200,000 serious followers, about one-tenth the number of men who have attended Promise Keepers conferences in the past six years. And those 2 million do not include other church-affiliated men’s-only meetings and a surge of seekers buying he-man devotionals and religious books.

Nor does that figure include the hundreds of thousands who answered the call to participate in October’s “Million Man March” in Washington, backed by Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan.

The religious leaders “have struck a chord that we have not,” Kimmel says.

“It was stupid of the left to allow the right to grab the family values concept,” Bly adds.

Frederick R. Lynch, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, links the Promise Keepers phenomenon to the aging of the baby boomers. “It’s like the song ‘Cat’s in the Cradle,’ ” he said. “A lot of men reach their middle to late 40s and say, ‘My God, I missed the kids!’ ”

Promise Keepers tells men how to find and hold on to them, using the Bible as inspiration.

Critics from the secular men’s movement accuse Promise Keepers of being simplistic, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal.

“It’s based on exclusion,” Kimmel says, referring to Promise Keeper tenets that homosexual behavior is sinful and men should lead their families. “There is no place for gays and lesbians. There is no place for women except as subservient to men.”

But Promise Keepers spokesman Mark DeMoss said that criticism is insignificant in light of the millions of men who have renewed their commitments to their family and their faith.

The irony, DeMoss says, is that both sides of the divide preach similar messages.

“A secular men’s movement stands up and says: ‘Men need to take more responsibility. We need to crack down on deadbeat dads. We need to take care of our children.’ Society applauds them. Then a Christian movement says essentially the same thing and you have parts of society crying foul,” DeMoss said.

Others also see common ground.

“It’s the understanding that men have to be back into the family, that men need to connect more effectively with children,” said writer Warren Farrell, a spokesman for men’s and fathers’ rights.

Even Bly admits that the two prongs of the movement share some common goals: “You have to be an idiot not to see that the major crisis of our culture is the disintegration of the family.”