Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 11:2 (Spring 1997)
Article: The Direction Of Promise Keepers A Response To Papers On “Religion, Sports And Manhood”
Author: Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

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PP 11:2 (Spring 1997) p. 12

The Direction Of Promise Keepers
A Response To Papers On “Religion, Sports And Manhood”1

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, Ph.D., is a member of the Department of Psychology at Eastern College and Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Christian Women in Leadership. This article is adapted from her response to papers given at the American Academy of Religion, North American Section (New Orleans, LA, Nov. 1996).

For the past few years, I have been a close watcher of the Promise Keepers movement. This has included assiduously reading each issue of New Man magazine from cover to cover, keeping up with other movement literature, and in a temporary journalistic capacity attending a Promise Keepers stadium rally (Pittsburgh, July 1996). This included an opportunity to ask questions at two press conferences featuring Promise Keepers media representatives and leaders such as Bill McCartney and Raleigh Washington. At the same time I was watching the stadium event from the exalted heights of the press booth I persuaded a woman friend and fellow Christian feminist from Pittsburgh to spend half a day as one of the thousands of volunteers needed to run such a weekend. As well as getting a substantial box lunch and a special blue volunteer’s T-shirt, she was able to take stock of the general atmosphere while taking orders for taped lectures inside one of the exhibition tents.2

Much of my research is aimed at addressing a central question: Is Promise Keepers anti-feminist?

My position (you may be surprised to learn) is that the answer to that question, at least at this point in time, is “no”—but before explaining why, let me remind all of us of a point that should be obvious: Promise Keepers is a movement that began as Bill McCartney’s isolated dream in 1990; now, over six years later, it has drawn over a million men to twenty-two stadium rallies in one summer alone; it has a paid staff of over four hundred (some of whom are women, even in the upper managerial levels) and a budget of $115,000,000. Now a movement cannot expand that quickly without being something of a moving target, even to its own leaders. Indeed, so fast has Promise Keepers’ growth been that one of its regional directors commented in 1995: “If you don’t like change, don’t come to [work for] Promise Keepers.... We are creating policy before there’s a policy manual written down.”3

So social scientists and historians alike need to be careful not to regard all of the movement’s earlier pronouncements as fixed in stone. Promise Keepers, as I learned from its

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