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The Promise Keepers' philosophy holds that American men face a moral and spiritual crisis. And the group has a simple solution: shape up in the eyes of the Lord, or you're going straight to hell. And if you don't shape up, you'll be responsible for dragging this great land of ours right down with you. "A house divided cannot stand," says McCartney. "We're going to be a house united, a brotherhood of believers." That insistence on brotherhood has wedged the Promise Keepers into the gender wars of late 20th century American Christianity. As Catholics debate the ordination of women and as mainline Protestant groups are having to deal with invocation of the "Goddess" and gay marriage, the Promise Keepers strike up the stentorian strains of patriarchy.
Promise Keepers believe a man's spiritual makeup differs from a woman's. Men need something McCartney calls a "masculine context that allows them to come clean"; and the group describes itself as a "Christ-centered ministry dedicated to uniting men through vital relationships to become godly influences in their world." The organization seeks to lead men to Christ by creating a climate in which men are more likely to view themselves and their lives more honestly, forums for mea culpas to be performed without female assistance. Indeed, women are seen as an impediment to a man's immediate soul-searching and are not invited into Promise Keepers rallies, prayer groups or other religious activities.
The group makes a strong case for single-sex worship. While generic evangelical appeals open Promise Keepers rallies, the sermons can quickly get down to the nitty-gritty. At a recent gathering at the Pontiac Silverdome, in a Detroit suburb, the second speaker spent half an hour hitting hard at details of sexual sins, not just inner lust and the use of pornography but adultery and abuse as well. Why? Promise Keepers' surveys show that 62% of stadiumgoers struggle with sexual sin in their lives. No other issue comes close. At the end of his sermon, the speaker at the Silverdome asked men who had committed any sexual impurities to come to the front and confess them before God. At first nothing happened. Then a few guys trickled forward. Suddenly, thousands jammed the front, falling to their knees, weeping and accepting Christ as their Saviour. "When a man sees a stadium full of other men crying, he figures it's all right to cry too," says Donald Burwell, a Promise Keepers organizer in Detroit. "With women there, he might not get that honest."
To be sure, there is nothing new about men wanting to pray together. In the early 1900s Billy Sunday, a former major league baseball player, caused a stir organizing men-only tent revivals featuring swashbuckling sermons of "Muscular Christianity." More recently, author Robert Bly raised eyebrows with Iron John, a book that sparked a small but significant "Wild Man" movement in the early '90s, gathering men in the woods to howl like wolves to "get away from their telephones" and in touch with their true nature. In 1995 Farrakhan captured the world's attention by galvanizing a vast African-American throng in his historic Million Man March, an event shrouded in controversy for its exclusion of whites and women.