Promise Keepers Dodges Skeptics in Dropping Bid for Rose Bowl Rally

Was Promise Keepers running from a political fight or seeking the high road to racial reconciliation when it unexpectedly withdrew its request to hold a major Christian men’s rally at the Rose Bowl?

Last week, the nation’s fastest growing men’s movement surprised the Pasadena City Council with its eleventh-hour decision not to use the stadium for its May rally. Although the organization did not say where it would meet, one leading location is the Los Angeles Coliseum, where Promise Keepers drew a total of 122,000 men the past two years.

Far from clear was why the group looked to move to Pasadena--only to back out.

Feminist writer and researcher Nancy Novosad of Lakewood, Colo., who criticized Promise Keepers in testimony before the Pasadena City Council, said the group was trying to avoid a public airing of its views on hot-button political issues such as the primacy of men as heads of households, abortion rights and homosexuality.

She called Promise Keepers “a male supremacist, conservative religious organization that advocates strongly gender bigotry.”

But Promise Keepers’ national spokesman Steve Chavis insisted this week that the move had nothing to do with political objections. “It was not related to the protest,” he said.

Rather, Chavis said, the decision was made for “business and strategic” reasons, including a desire to promote racial reconciliation--which had figured in the group’s decision to meet this year and last in the Coliseum, in largely minority South-Central Los Angeles. By contrast, the Rose Bowl is nestled within a largely white and affluent section of Pasadena.

Whatever the reasons behind Promise Keepers’ decision, the flap briefly put a spotlight again on the group’s religiously based views on gender roles.

It also exposed tensions over the handling of racial issues by Promise Keepers, which annually draws hundreds of thousands of men--overwhelmingly white--to rallies throughout the United States.

Promise Keepers, founded by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, is unabashedly patriarchal. The group follows what it calls the biblical norms of placing men at the head of households, and of condemning homosexual sex.

Promise Keepers officials say the group has no political agenda, though, and that its only goal is to make men better husbands, fathers and grandfathers. It wants to make men “promise keepers” instead of “promise breakers.”

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The Rose Bowl episode came to a head Nov. 26 when Promise Keepers informed the City Council that it was withdrawing its application to use the stadium.

Days earlier, Promise Keepers officials became aware that Pasadena Mayor William Parparian was planning to show the council a critical documentary about the organization, produced by Sterling Research Associates, of New York.

Parparian said he wanted the council to hear dissenting views about the group, and thus also arranged for Novosad--who is writing a book about Promise Keepers--to fly to Pasadena and present her findings to the council. Novosad’s travel and hotel expenses, about $700, were paid by Parparian out of the mayor’s private, non-tax-supported discretionary fund set up by political supporters.

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‘I’m absolutely sure that the men that attend these events are genuinely seeking to express their Christian faith,” Parparian explained this week. “As a Christian I deeply respect that. My concern had to do with the extreme views and affiliations of the national leadership.”

At the time of the council meeting, a Promise Keepers regional official, John Reekie of San Gabriel, said that the group had been tipped to plans for Novosad’s presentation and to the videotape screening and wanted to avoid “an adversarial position and [having] to go to bat against a municipality.”

But Chavis, the group’s national spokesman, said the decision not to use the Rose Bowl was made before Promise Keepers had any hint of a protest in Pasadena. The concern, he indicated, was how best to pursue racial reconciliation.

“There may be other ways--another venue--to make more progress to advance our ministry objectives, the key of which is reconciliation,” Chavis said, an apparent reference to concerns the group might be accused of back sliding for leaving the Coliseum.

Though no formal contract had been signed with the Rose Bowl, the withdrawal came as a shock to Dave Jacobs, general manager of the Rose Bowl Operating Co.

“As far as I’m concerned, we absolutely had a deal,” Jacobs said. “We had agreed in principle to all the deal points.”

A decision on a location will not be announced until early next year, Chavis said.

Clearly, the group’s leaders are grappling with how much emphasis to put on race in an organization whose members are more interested in issues of family and faith.

Some Caucasian men who attended last year’s Coliseum conference complained afterward that they resented suggestions that they were racist.

“It didn’t come across right,” said one white regional officer who was there. “I don’t think the speakers thought about what they were really talking about. They were sawing off their own logs talking about how bad things were.”

Chavis acknowledged that Promise Keepers may have pushed “too hard” when it implored participants to seek forgiveness for the sin of racism.

“We learned an important lesson at L.A. about the capacity for guys to receive the reconciliation message,” he said. “. . . Maybe we didn’t offer enough hope. Sometimes you try too hard.”

But Chavis insisted that no matter where Promise Keepers holds its Southern California rally next year, the agenda will be the same.

“Southern California is pretty diverse,” he noted. “Almost any community you go to the message from the podium won’t change. . . . We’re not going to back down. It’s part of who we are. People still say we harp on [racial reconciliation] too much. They think it’s out of place. Some say we’re guilt mongers. We just know our Gospel calls us to reconcile.”