Chapter One

Promise Keepers: An Introduction to the Study

By Dr. Andrea Stepnick

Copyright 1999

Please do not copy or reproduce in any manner without written permission from the author.

Imagine a professional football stadium filled with 54,000 men, most of whom are clean-cut, young adult to middle aged, white, and married. They wear casual clothing such as shorts, athletic shoes, and tee-shirts that proclaim messages such as "He who dies with the most toys still dies. He who dies with Christ wins," "If you can’t stand the heat stay out of hell," "God Bless America," and "Promise Keepers Men of Integrity." The men greet each other enthusiastically, saying "Praise Jesus!" and "Hello Brother!" Many men carry well-thumbed Bibles.

At either end of the football field scoreboards flash "Welcome Promise Keepers" in digital red and white. On the top rows of the stadium the Promise Keepers have spelled out "Jesus" by taping white plastic over the stadium’s bright turquoise seats. A plane flies overhead trailing a message that says, "God Reigns." Another reads, "We love you pastor Gene Flaherty." Hanging from a railing is a white sheet spray painted with big, red letters that reads, "Nothing is impossible with God."

At one end of the field, a large all-men choir wearing matching black tee-shirts stands on a temporary stage. Their voices booming through the stadium, they sing, "Stand up for the Savior, in unison together." In a quick, noisy shuffling, the entire stadium of men stands and sing along. The band switches to the slow and reverent hymn "How Great Thou Art" and the men sing along, "Then sings my soul, my savior, God to thee . . . how great Thou art, how great Thou art." The sound of the men’s voices reverberates; as the music quiets, so do the men. During the next two days, these men gather to hear six speakers talk about how to be "godly men." They sing, laugh, cry, kneel, and pray together. They break into small groups of two or three and hug each other, hold hands, confess their sins, ask each other for forgiveness and support, and tell each other, "I love you. You’re my brother." These images are standard fare at the Promise Keeper (PK) stadium rallies, 65 of which have been held in the United States between 1991 and 1999.

This description suggests the intense emotional and spiritual climate that men experience at Promise Keeper stadium events. However, rallies are fun, too. The participants laugh, eat "junk food," do the "wave," bounce beach balls through the stands, and shout cheers such as, "We love Jesus yes we do, we love Jesus, how ‘bout you?" According to one of my respondents, rallies are "fun, and that vibe gets ‘em, you know the wave. You know, we have a good time."

This fun has a serious side, however. The Promise Keeper organization is "after" men’s souls, identities, hearts, and commitment to a particular ideology and set of practices. This dissertation tells a story of this remarkable organization and the men who belong to it. Additionally, it attempts to make sense of this organization as a site where religion, masculinity, and identity converge.

My observations during the past four years, combined with interviews with 36 PK members and four wives of PK members, suggest that Promise Keepers is complex and rife with contradictions. However, understanding this organization and its members can inform us about U.S. society and culture in the late twentieth century. That an evangelical religious all-men organization could burgeon in numbers from fewer than 100 in 1990 to more than one million attending special events in 1997 suggests that the PK has touched a nerve among certain groups of U.S. men. The fact that PK excludes women suggests that the PK founders believed that the Christian men they hoped to recruit needed to be "away from women." Why? What did they envision that men could do together that they could not do if women were present? Was the decision to have men only membership an anti-woman decision reflecting a rejection of women as somehow tainting men? Was it a man-affirmative decision, proclaiming that men offer something special to each other and only if women are not present can and will they offer it? Answers to these questions can offer insights into the social constructions of masculinities by some U.S. men as the new millennium begins.

My study adds to a sociological understanding of contemporary society in three ways. It sheds light on a new social movement aimed at defining and creating a particular kind of man. Over the past decade, the study of gender has expanded from a focus primarily on women to include men’s "social constructions of masculinity" (Connell 1995; Kimmel 1996; Martin 1996; Messner 1997; Schwalbe 1996). Most of this work has analyzed the multiple forms of masculinities displayed by men and the tendency of some forms to be dominant in a given historical context. My study adds to this work in several ways. It analyzes efforts by contemporary men to socially construct themselves by defining a particular vision of masculinity and men. Masculinity is constructed in relation to femininity (Connell 1995). Aspects of the PK movement address how a PK kind of Christian man should behave in relation to his wife, his men friends, his coworkers, his pastor, people of other denominations, his children, and members of other racial groups. However, I focus primarily on how men relate to their wives and construct masculinity in relation to their wives’ femininity (see Chapter 6).

Second, my study tells a story of how and why Promise Keepers as a social movement organization began and how it has fared. In particular, I seek to understand how Promise Keepers emerged and grew so rapidly, from only four men in 1990 to more than a million men attending PK events just six years later. Using a Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT) framework from social movements literature, I identify its linkages to other U.S. religious organizations that give it support and resources, thus locating PK within the U.S. Christian fundamentalist movement (as I describe in Chapters 2 and 4).

Third, using New Social Movements (NSM) literature, I examine how PK leaders combined Evangelical and non-religious sport symbols, practices, and metaphors to recruit adherents and constituents, shape their identities, and pursue organizational goals (see Chapter 5). My study adds to our understanding of religion as a cultural and social dynamic in contemporary society. Most Promise Keepers are active members of churches in their home communities. Why do they attend PK events, join PK groups, and volunteer to organize and support PK efforts? My research suggests that they see themselves as participants in a global religious movement that has the potential to transform themselves, their marriages, their communities, the nation, and ultimately the world.

Promise Keepers’ combination of religious and secular ideology and practices are reminiscent of the so-called Muscular Christianity movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My analysis raises questions about whether PK is a "new" phenomenon or a re-emergence of a religious movement that concerns the status and identity of men qua men, especially in regard to a "Christian" kind of man.

Overall, I view Promise Keepers as a men’s social movement organization (SMO, see Chapter 2) aimed at re-framing definitions of what a Christian man is and how such a man should behave within and beyond his family. A SMO is a "complex or formal, organization which identities its goals with the preferences of a social movement…and attempts to implement those goals" (McCarthy and Zald 1977:1218). According to McCarthy and Zald (1977:1217-1218), a social movement is "a set of opinions and beliefs in a population which represents preferences for changing some elements of the social structure and/or reward distribution of a society." My research on this organization contributes to the understanding of men in contemporary times. By exploring the meaning men attach to their participation in Promise Keepers, I offer insights into some men’s dilemmas with contemporary masculinity, gender identities, and relations with each other and women. By understanding the appeal of PK and the benefits men derive from participating in it, I offer insights into their struggles to become men of a particular kind in a particular socio-cultural, political, and historical place and time. I address these issues in Chapter 6.

In line with New Social Movements theory, my study adds an understanding of identity politics (as I discuss in Chapters 5 and 6). When collectivities in society demand the right to define themselves, for themselves, and when they organize to fight for this right, they engage in what new social movement theorists call identity politics (Jensen 1995; Melucci 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1995). I address how the PK organization has attempted to shape gender identities and relations among men in the U.S. and throughout the world, according to its vision.

How it was possible that PK rose in numbers, wealth, and public attention in such a dramatic fashion in a very short time? I use Resource Mobilization Theory, a sociological perspective on social movements that was developed in the 1960s and 1970s and that remains in use today (McCarthy and Zald 1977). The main idea of Resource Mobilization theory is that social movements are not irrational outbursts of discontent by the least privileged and oppressed. Rather, many social movements are created through the rational actions of people with the most resources and contacts who tap into existing elites for support and material resources (Jenkins 1983; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Obershall 1973).

In addition to Resource Mobilization theory (RM), I employ selected concepts from New Social Movements (NSM) theory that serve as a corrective to RM’s rejection of the social psychological aspects of social movements (McAdam 1982; Beuchler 1995). New social movement theories, according to Buechler (1995), have come primarily from European sociological and political analysis and refer to social movements that focus more on identity than on economic or social class concerns. "New theory" is required for these "new movements" because the aims, methods, practices, and meanings of the new movements differ from earlier ones.

In particular, new social movements are concerned with creating "new social spaces" and "the freedom to be" according to one’s sense of identity (Habermas 1981:36-37). New Social Movement theorists recognize that "logics of action" besides class (e.g., gender, religious orientation, sexual orientation) compel people to act in collective ways (Buechler 1995). Additionally, they address symbolic issues of culture, including values and beliefs (Buechler 1995; Habermas 1984). I elaborate on these themes in Chapters 4 and 5.

While some people posit Resource Mobilization and New Social Movement theories as competitors, I view them as addressing different aspects of social movement organization and processes and, thus, as complimentary frameworks. Resource Mobilization theory helps me analyze the internal structure and external relations of PK while New Social Movement theory helps in the analysis of PK’s mobilizing tactics and social psychological aspects of its efforts.

The third theory that guides my study concerns masculinities, particularly as developed by Robert Connell (1995), which I situate within the context of contemporary gender theory. Connell (1995:72) views masculinities as "configurations of practice" that exist within a system of gender relations. By this he means that masculinity takes many forms at any give time and over historical time; thus the plural term masculinities. The kinds of masculinities that are dominant or hegemonic at any given time are contested and a dynamic that Connell calls masculinity politics reflects the struggles among men (and between women and men) about which kinds of masculinities will dominate in a given context or time. In the next section, I discuss gender as a social institution and I review Connell’s (1995) theory of masculinities that I apply to my analysis of Chapters 5 and 6.

The use of gender as an analytical concept within sociology, and allied disciplines, is a recent development (Lorber 1994; Scott 1997). Cultural conceptions about what it means to be a boy or man, a girl or woman, or even another gender (e.g., some Native American and other societies have multiple conceptions of gender). Early social science conceptions of gender embraced a biological reductionistic explanation where the two sexes were assumed to be very different not only morphologically, but also emotionally, intellectually, and in most other ways (Connell 1987; Hess and Feree 1987; Lorber 1994).

In the past two decades, developments within sociology have moved toward social constructionist, political, and cultural explanations of gender. Thus, the concept of gender came into use and has become a major analytical tool within the discipline. Hester Eisenstein (1991) argues that conceptions and theories of gender are "unsettling" social theory in the late twentieth century in the same way Marx’s theory of social class did the nineteenth century.

My study employs the conception of gender as a social institution. Following Connell (1987), Lorber (1994), and Martin (1996, 1997, 1998, 1999), gender is not a phenomenon that can be "limited" or seen only in the home/family or in the small group or in face-to-face primary groups, as socialization theories would have one assume. Instead, gender’s many faces and dynamics are pervasive and omnipresent. Every society has a gender stratification system, distinct gender statuses, gender ideologies, and varying gender-related practices, beliefs, and identities (Martin and Collinson 1998). As a practice, gender is "actively" done, not merely taught, absorbed, or acted out (West and Zimmerman 1987). Given these premises, we can also view gender as a social institution.

The foregoing features of gender endure over time, adding additional grounds for viewing gender as a social institution. Cultural, social, and political arrangements in a society that pertain to gender persist over generations, changing slowly and not necessarily in a linear direction (Acker 1992). Martin (1997, 1999) argues that all other societal institutions such as the family, the economy, religion, and so on, are embedded in the institution of gender. Viewed in this light, one would not be surprised to see "gender" exemplified in religious organizations. Rather, one would expect religious organizations to constitute and be constituted by the gender institution of the society in which the organizations exist. I use the conception of gender as a social institution to analyze how Promise Keepers reflects certain themes in the societal gender order and how it aims to change that order largely by harking back to an earlier historical era that, for example, viewed women and men as very different creatures with very different potentials, obligations, and rights. Since my overall analysis frames Promise Keepers as a social movement organization, I see it as engaged in gender politics on the side of defining men as having certain divine obligations and rights (Connell 1995; Griffith 1997; Messner 1997). I discuss PK men’s obligations and rights in relation to their wives in Chapter 6.

Connell (1995:71) argues that masculinities are practices that can exist only in relation to the gender order and that these practices are tied to the way one does gender in the culturally specific context in which one lives. He pays attention to how the relationship between masculinity and other social structures such as race and class form multiple masculinities that coexist and sometimes contradict each other in contemporary Western societies. Although multiple forms of masculinities exist at any one time, a hegemonic ideal always exists. Connell (1995:77) defines "hegemonic masculinity" as the "configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees . . . the dominant position of men and the subordination of women." By this he means that people in society deem one particular form or forms of masculinity superior to all other forms within a particular culture at a given time.

By examining different kinds of masculinities in relation to each other, Connell (1995) shows how masculinities are historically specific constructs that mirror relationships of domination and subordination between groups of men (i.e., gay men, lower class men, feminist men, men of color) and between men and women. Connell (1995) defines complicit masculinities as "masculinities constructed in ways that realize the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy" (Connell 1995:79). By this Connell means that all men benefit from some men’s practice of the hegemonic ideal of masculinity although they, personally, may not embody this ideal in their own practices. That is, although not all men are aggressive, physically powerful, economically successful, and so forth, all men gain some benefit from some men’s enactment of these idealized practices. Thus, they collectively benefit from them.

Connell recognizes that masculinities are shaped, in part, by social structures such as race and class. I suggest that religion is another social institution that shapes masculinities. Christianity, at least the type practiced by Promise Keepers members, encourages some kinds and discourages other kinds of masculinities. Connell’s (1995:37) research on "oppositional masculinities" or the relations between different kinds of masculinities is relevant to my study. By representing some men as deviants or at least as sinners--gay men, workaholic men, lustful men--Promise Keepers actively constructs a hierarchy among differing forms of masculinity that valorizes heterosexual masculinities over homosexual masculinities. Finally, my evidence suggests that Promise Keepers also valorizes patriarchal or paternalistic masculinities where men exercise authority over wives and children. This thesis developed in Chapter 6.

The dissertation is organized as follows. Chapter 2 reviews two historical precursors of Promise Keepers: U.S. fraternal orders and men’s clubs and associations of the late 19^th and early 20^th century and the Muscular Christianity Movement of 1858-1925 which sought to "re-masculinize" the Christian Church. It also describes the U.S. Christian fundamentalist movement (CFM), the social movement community within which Promise Keepers is situated.

Chapter 3 presents my data and methods of analysis. Data for the dissertation include interview data from 36 Promise Keeper members and four PK wives, observational data from seven Promise Keeper events, and archival materials. I provide a demographic profile of my interviewees and compare them to PK members in general. Finally, I explain the process I used to obtain participants for the study, the interview process, and the interview topics.

Chapter 4 analyzes Promise Keepers in line with Resource Mobilization theory. I show that Promise Keepers’ rapid growth did not occur simply because its message resonated in the hearts of men. Rather, I show how Promise Keepers emerged within a context of like-minded Christian organizations that provided it with resources including money, personnel, publicity, and legitimacy, especially in its formative years. I first review the history and structure of Promise Keepers from its beginning in 1990 to May 1999 and review PK’s inception and growth and offer a biography of the group’s co-founder and charismatic leader, Bill McCartney. I describe other members of PK’s leadership cadre, professional staff, and its workers (see Chapter 4 and McCarthy and Zald 1977). I review PK’s organizational goals and mobilization strategies, particularly its mass stadium rallies. Finally, I analyze PK’s links with other organizations within the U.S. Christian fundamentalist movement and examine the resources these organizations gave to PK and that PK gave to them in return.

Chapter 5 analyzes the culture of Promise Keepers, using concepts from New Social Movements theory and Resource Mobilization theory. I show how PK strategically appropriates two familiar cultural forms, evangelical Christianity and organized sports, to meet its organizational goals. I describe and analyze the evangelical culture of Promise Keepers, including its emotional expressivity and emphasis on "witnessing" to others. I analyze how PK uses sport images and metaphors to bind men to the organization, promote camaraderie and a sense of collective identity among PK members, provide cultural legitimacy, define Promise Keepers as an "all-man preserve," and deflate men’s potential feelings of homoeroticism and effeminacy. Although PK’s use of sport to mobilize men is strategic, it is also somewhat paradoxical. That is, PK leaders use the ideals or organized sport, a symbolic representation of hegemonic masculinity, to encourage PK members to reject certain aspects of that ideal and practice a new, "softer" kind of "Christian Masculinity" promoted by organizational leaders.

Chapter 6 discusses PK’s constructions of men/masculinity and women/femininity by addressing what a PK man is, how PK constructs this ideal, and whether PK’s ideal Christian man is a "new" conception. I focus on the PK conception of a "good" husband and describe PK’s prescriptions for how a PK man should treat his wife. I examine the ways PK members learn these behavioral guidelines, and analyze PK men’s behaviors toward their wives and the reasons they give for their behavior.

Chapter 7 reviews the study’s findings and theoretical contributions and its strengths and limitations. My conclusions focus on how my study adds to an understanding of gender relations, religion, and new social movements in a post-modern world. I also identify issues that call for further research.