An Ecumenical Message of Male Superiority

On Saturday, a large group of men will gather on the Mall in Washington. They will marvel at their assembled numbers and pray for the strength to be stronger, more responsible and more accountable to their women, children and communities. They feel that life will be better for their having met together. Their political opinions and religious convictions will strike some as incorrect, others as morally repugnant. There will be lots of commensurate opining in the media by people who don’t much understand what’s going on.

Sound familiar? Only this time it won’t be a million black men, lured by a former Calypso singer’s stern injunction to get their lives and themselves together. This time, it will be nearly a million (mostly) white men, lured by a former football coach with, interestingly, much the same message.

Like Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March,” Bill McCartney’s “Stand in the Gap” mallside revival by the organization he started seven years ago, the Promise Keepers, is for men only. Women are welcome to send their prayers of support, pack lunches for the guys and point out the magnificence of the gathering to their children from televisions conveniently placed at hearthside. But like minister Farrakhan, when coach McCartney and his followers invoke God, they are calling upon a He with a capital H. Literally, our Father, who is in heaven.

Like many men in the world’s traditional religions, Promise Keepers’ “manly Christians” believe in supporting and protecting women--as long as women remain in an approved context. McCartney and his followers fervently believe that men must reclaim the spiritual leadership of their homes and families and that in doing so, they take back some of the responsibility women have had to assume in order to ensure that the world keeps running. (Well hey, somebody has to sit down with the kids while they do their homework and work out all the unrespected but vitally necessary details that go into keeping a family going.)

But there’s a catch: In order to receive all this love and support and honor, women must agree to submit to their husbands. In McCartney’s ideal vision as he’s outlined in several interviews, “she would come alongside him and let him take the lead.” In return, he would serve her. By helping out with the kids. By being more romantic. By not physically abusing her. It sounds like the real-life version of a tired old vaudeville joke: “My wife lets me make all the major decisions in my household--it’s just that none have come up yet.”

But what decisions, really, would a Promise Keeper’s mate get to make? And what happens when she decides that he’s making the wrong decision and that she cannot sit still and allow this to happen? Is affection withdrawn? Does support wither? Do some men get frustrated enough by the real-life scenario that they actually use their physical strength (or imply its forthcoming use) if the line is not toed?

Sometimes my mother laments that I, who faithfully attended church from childhood through high school, no longer go. I believe in God, I remind her, but I have a much harder time believing in church. Especially when so much organized religion has decreed that women hold a place somewhat lower than men on the evolutionary ladder. The pope asserts that the bishops of Christ have been and always will be men. Orthodox Jewish men begin their day with a prayer that thanks God for not making them women. Protestant ministers in many denominations “just happen” not to have any women represented in the church’s power elite.

To someone like me, who chafes at the inherent inequality and paternalism in such institutions, the Promise Keepers doesn’t look any better or worse than religious movements that have come before. Patriarchy is patriarchy, whether it wears a yarmulke and phylacteries in the temple, a kufi in the mosque or baseball caps and Nikes on the Washington Mall.