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Imagine a future historian or sociologist attempting to capture the status of American Christianity at the turn of the twenty-first century. Among the movements she will have to consider is Promise Keepers. Indeed, the 1990s might well be characterized as "the decade of Promise Keepers" in American Christianity.
Consider: On March 20, 1990, Bill McCartney—the highly successful football coach at the University of Colorado—and his friend Dave Wardell from the university's physical education faculty drove from Boulder to Pueblo for a Fellowship of Christian Athletes banquet where McCartney was speaking. Among their topics of conversation en route was the need for a new group specifically aimed at meeting the spiritual needs of America's men. McCartney verbalized to Wardell his dream of filling a football stadium with thousands of men willing to commit themselves to God, to their families, and to "Christlike masculinity." From that chat grew a group of 70 men who dubbed themselves "Promise Keepers," which in turn led to a 1991 meeting of 4,200 men at the university's basketball arena and the launching of the decade's most unexpected and immediately successful movement within the American church.
Promise Keepers grew from that single meeting in 1991 to 22 stadium rallies nationwide attracting nearly 1.2 million men in 1996. In its peak years, the movement received enormous media coverage, much of it presenting McCartney and PK in exaggerated rhetorical extremes. For some, McCartney was a Hitler-like cult figure, stealthily seeking to manipulate the PK organization to impose his right-wing political and cultural agenda on the unwitting and beleagured men of America. For others, he was a muscular Christian exemplar of virtue and godliness, bearing witness in a postmodern and pagan world.
By mid-1997, however, the movement had clearly begun to sputter, with Promise Keepers trimming its staff by 20 percent even as it prepared for the much-trumpeted "Stand in the Gap" gathering that October in Washington, D.C. By March 1998—two weeks after McCartney announced he intended to lay off 345 members of PK's paid staff and rely mainly on voluntary help—religion editor Steven Kloehn of the Chicago Tribune could observe that it did not really come as a surprise when the Promise Keepers edifice was suddenly swallowed into the earth, leaving hardly a trace.
In fact, the organization has proved to be more resilient than many people expected; an obituary would be premature. And the real story of this movement—its rise and fall and scaled-down continuing existence, and what it tells us about the peculiarities of religion at the end of the millennium—is only now beginning to unfold.
In early 2000, Dane Claussen of Southwest Missouri State University's Department of Communication and Mass Media published two edited volumes, The Promise Keepers and Standing on the Promises, consisting of 39 essays that look at Promise Keepers from multiple angles. Shortly after, the quarterly journal Sociology of Religion released a special issue edited by sociologist Rhys Williams that included six more essays on PK. In addition, PK's first decade inspired a number of theses and dissertations, with the field of mass communications and rhetoric best represented and historical, theological, and biblical studies underrepresented.
Taken together, these essays show that the published literature in the first decade of PK consisted mainly of articles in a wide variety of sources, ranging from newspapers and popular magazines to academic journals. Most of these pieces were of the polarizing sort mentioned above. Negative responses to McCartney and PK from journalists and activists tended to center on the culturally explosive issues of race and gender. Simplistic misrepresentations of PK as merely a version of the larger men's movement, as essentially homophobic, and as inherently repressive of women were common. For example, the National Organization for Women passed a resolution in 1997 denouncing PK as militaristic and anti-woman. Less noticed were similarly harsh, theologically based critiques that attacked PK for its biblical and theological naivete, its misinformed ecumenism, and more.
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