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The wives of Promise Keepers don't seem to be complaining much about their husbands. For 14 years, Cissy Wong says, she lived in a fairly miserable, uninspired marriage with her husband Larry. Then in 1994 things got out of hand for the Houston couple. During an argument, Larry, a martial-arts expert, started to beat Cissy. She called the police, who arrested Larry. After his release three days later, the family pastor took Larry to a Promise Keepers meeting. Today, Cissy says, Larry is so romantic and attentive that it is sometimes unnerving. "Once, he came home and apologized for treating me so badly over the years, and said he wanted to wash my feet," she says. "I let him, but I really thought he had lost it."
Women married to Promise Keepers have been inspired to start half a dozen Christian women's ministries, pray for the financial health of the group and "spiritually prepare" the home for the return of their husbands. One such group, Suitable Helpers in Wheat Ridge, Colo., got its start when Cheri Bright bought tickets to a Promise Keepers rally for her husband in 1993. In starting the group, Bright says she prayed that "women wouldn't be a discouragement, that women wouldn't become a hindrance to the work God wanted to do in their lives, but that women would step back and take their hands off the situation." Other, larger women's conferences--including Renewing the Heart, sponsored by Dobson's Focus on the Family organization and featuring such speakers as Billy Graham's daughter Anne Graham Lotz--are filling their own arenas.
Outside the home, Promise Keepers also preaches a rather amorphous message of "racial reconciliation," constantly pointing out that 11 a.m. Sunday is the beginning of the most segregated hour of the week. Phillips admits the organization is still paying a price for failing to reach out to minorities during its inception. "We started off with white leaders," so men of color were "the add-on, not the DNA. That was wrong, and we got hurt." The organization has made major progress since then: today minorities constitute 38% of its staff and a growing share of the attendance at its rallies. "Where I grew up in Philadelphia, I never associated with any other race. I was a bigot," confesses a 55-year-old white Promise Keeper. "Blacks--I wanted no part of them." Nevertheless, Promise Keepers' pronouncements on eradicating racism strike some as naive. The problem is that Promise Keepers almost purposely seems to avoid terms like integration and equality, instead advocating the fuzzier "reconciliation."
For now, Promise Keepers seems intent on framing the issues of gender and race in the most biblical of contexts. And while the sonorities of Scripture can work miracles in individual souls, they can also alienate non-Christians and create confusion and paranoia in an already heavily secularized America. Even so, liberal watchdogs are probably overstating their case when they argue that Promise Keepers is part of a Trojan-horse strategy of the religious right. The men involved at the grass roots see only their own souls at stake. Indeed, America can benefit to a degree from the Promise Keepers' brand of healing.