Promise Keepers: Boomer Bias, Gen-X Benefits?
Rodolpho Carrasco
October 1, 1995
Promise Keepers started in 1990 as a humble, forty-man meeting in Boulder, Colorado. It espoused the need for Christian men to keep their promises to their wives, families, churches, and communities by faithfulness to Jesus Christ and committed relationships with other Christian men. Five years later Promise Keepers reached seven hundred thousand men in thirteen cities nationwide-hardly a movement to be ignored. The rapid growth of Promise Keepers-enshrined in the spectacle of a stadium full of roaring men, sans ball or beer-intrigued the national mainstream press. Newsweek, ABC News, the New York Times, and the rest sent reporters to Promise Keepers events to find out why primarily white, middle-class, middle-aged, conservative Christian men were forking over $55 each to "have church in a football stadium," as one scribe put it. At event-day press conferences, these reporters questioned PK leaders sharply about Angry White Males, rollback of the civil rights movement, female subjugation in the home, and parallels to Robert Ely's Wild Man. They probed politics, gender, and sociology for the Rosetta Stone of PK understanding. They searched every area, it seemed, except the one toward which PK leaders directed them: the spiritual. "Spiritual" means many things to many people, but in the context of Promise Keepers the word takes concrete shape. Evangelical publications like Christianity Today and Charisma got the message that the mainstream press did not, picturing Christian male spirituality in terms of action. Stories of men becoming more sensitive to their wives, more attentive to the children, and more responsible in their work and churches filled Christian publications throughout the summer of 1995. The evangelical press also ...
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