Saturday, October 11, 1997

Promise Keepers aren't flexing political muscle - yet

By Donald Kaul

The biggest crowd of guys since the Normandy Invasion flooded the National Mall in Washington last weekend. Promise Keepers, they called themselves, and they didn't, as you might imagine, drink beer, loot, pillage or burn. No, this bunch prayed. They also hugged each other, listened to uplifting speeches and repented their sins; they promised to be better husbands, fathers and Christians.

In other words, they didn't act like any large crowd of men you've been around lately.

Which is the whole point, I guess. Promise Keepers is a fairly young back-to-the-Bible movement which recognizes that the male animal has, in recent years, progressively abandoned his role as mainstay of the family, its protector and chief provider. It calls on men to confess their sins, return to the church, honor their wives and take responsibility for their children. It is the fastest growing men's movement in the country, faster even than the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Fan Club.

Naturally, the Woman's Movement hates it. Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, said that the Promise Keepers' philosophy is informed by a "nostalgic view of when men were in control and women were in submission."

The Promise Keepers deny this. Bill McCartney, the ex-football coach who started the movement, says that he wants men to be leaders, yes, but not autocrats at the breakfast table:

"The biblical definition of leadership is servitude," he said. "A real man should be serving his wife. A real man should be getting up in the middle of the night and changing the diapers. And so, what happens in a biblical relationship is that they are a team, and they complete each other."

But then he adds this kicker: "However, when there is a final decision that needs to be made and they can't arrive at one, the man needs to take responsibility."

Feminists know a loophole when they see one.

I don't worry about that aspect of the Promise Keepers so much. It's not as though these guys, if they don't get involved in Promise Keepers, are going to be Alan Aldas. If they quit chasing around and stop beating their wives and pay more attention to their kids, I look at that as a plus. I imagine most of their wives do, too.

True, I'm a little put off by the hugging and crying and the ostentation of their religious observance, but that's me. I'm quite comfortable stifling my emotions and not being in touch with my inner child. My inner child belongs in reform school. But if it works for them, fine.

What I worry about is these guys taking over the country.

Oh, they'll tell you that's not what they're about, that they don't have any politics, but the Washington Post polled a sample of the Washington ralliers and found that nearly two-thirds of them admitted to being either "conservative" or "very conservative," compared to 6 percent who said they were "liberal." That sounds like politics to me.

And the thing is, there are a lot of them. It truly was a stunning sight on the Mall Saturday. I thought the Million Man March was big, but this was bigger, much bigger. The police estimate of 400,000 for the Million Man March seemed low to me, but if that was accurate there were 750,000 on the Mall Saturday.

My fear is that, if that many men can get together just to hear speeches and feel their collective strength, sooner or later it's going to occur to them they can use that strength to change things: to stop abortions, mandate prayer in schools and get them to stop promoting homosexuality and sexually promiscuity through "permissiveness."

They want to bring the country back to Jesus. I don't.

It's not that I have anything against Jesus or his followers, but I don't really trust fundamentalists of any stripe - Christian, Muslim or Jew. Because they each have a book that holds for them all the answers of life, they are a literal-minded lot and because of that, largely humorless. Oh, they have their own little jokes, I suppose, but they're not very good ones.

I feel about their rally just about the way they'd feel if 750,000 atheists gathered on the Mall to announce a movement to cleanse this nation of God.

Not that a giant rally of atheists will happen, of course. You might get three atheists to agree on lunch, but 750,000 on a rally? Forget about it.

Thank God.

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