Promise Keepers: Boomer Bias, Gen X Benefits?
by Rodolpho Carrasco
in Re:generation Quarterly 1996
(Rodolpho Carrasco is associate director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, Calif. and a columnist for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Check out more articles by Rodolpho Carrasco here.)
Promise Keepers started in 1990 as a humble, 40-man meeting in Boulder, Colorado. It espoused the need for Christian men to keep their promises to their wives, families, churches and communities by faithfulness to Jesus Christ and committed relationships with other Christian men.
Five years later Promise Keepers reached 700,000 men in 13 cities nationwide - hardly a movement to be ignored.
The rapid growth of Promis*e Keepers - enshrined in the spectacle of a stadium full of roaring men, sans ball or beer - intrigued the national mainstream press. Newsweek, ABC News, New York Times, et al., sent reporters to Promise Keepers events to find out why primarily white, middle-class, middle-aged, Conservative Christian men were forking over $55 each to "have church in a football stadium," as one scribe put it.
At event-day press conferences these reporters questioned PK leaders about Angry White Males, rolling back the civil rights movement, female subjugation in the home, and parallels to Robert Bly's Wild Man. They probed politics, gender, and sociology for the Rosetta Stone of PK understanding. They searched every area, it seemed, except the one PK leaders told them to: the spiritual.
The word "spiritual" means many things to many people, but in the context of Promise Keepers the word takes a definable form. Evangelical publications like Christianity Today and Charisma got the message, picturing Christian male spirituality in terms of action. Stories of men being more sensitive to their wives, more attentive to the children, and more responsible in their work and church responsibilities filled Christian publications throughout the summer.
The Evangelical press also outdistanced the mainstream press in reporting on race. Publications like Urban Family magazine compared Promise Keepers' offical stand promoting racial diversity to its record of utilizing and hiring non-Whites, and found signs of hope. To date Promise Keepers evidences one of the most ethnically diverse staffs of any national Christian organization, including staff specifically assigned to spread the PK message in African-American, Latino and Asian communities. Behind the scenes, REGENERATION QUARTERLY has learned of PK plans to direct 1996 event attendees to urban renewal work days and to declare 1996 the year of "Breaking Down Walls," which in PK parlance refers to racial and denominational walls.
Yet while both mainstream and Evangelical press brought Promise Keepers to the nation's attention in 1995, there was an important angle both missed. Nothing in print dispels the notion that PK is for middle-aged men. What is there, if anything, that Promise Keepers offers to Generation X?
A BOOMER THANG?: In examing Promise Keepers appeal for Generation X, let's first face facts: Promise Keepers appears to be a baby boomer phenomenon.
Consider the origins of Promise Keepers. The movement started in 1990 when two boomers - former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney and current PK president Randy Phillips - discussed the problem with Christian men while driving from Colorado Springs to Boulder. They shared these concerns with their friends who - surprise! - were also boomers. They strategized about reaching their male peers in uniquely male ways. And so on.
Five years later, at the Promise Keepers/Oakland event in September, I walked the perimeter of the stadium and passed twenty boomers before encountering a twentysomething. 20:1 appeared to be an accurate ratio of generational representation at the event, especially as in some sections of the stadium young men and women were in equally short supply.
The messages delivered by PK speakers further affirm who the primary is. The speakers - all over the age of forty - made statements like, "Try this with your teenager..." "When thoughts of a career change cross your mind..." and "We've abdicated our responsiblities as head of the home." I'm an industrious, hard-working person - nowhere near the Madison Avenue Gen X slacker parody - but I can tell you that I have no teenager or child, I would like to first have a career before I change it, and what home?
THREE BENEFITS: Despite PK's overwhelmingly boomer bias, Generation X indeed stands to reap a number of benefits from the movement.
FOR YOUNGISH ELDERS: For my peers who are elders in their churches, Promise Keepers helps them fufill them be good stewards despite their youth. My brother, 29, and my friend, 28, both use the "Seven Promises of the Promise Keeper" as a guide at home as well as in church. But though this demographic of twentysomething church elders is growing, it still represents only a small fraction of Gen X.
LEARNING FROM THEIR MISTAKES: The rest of us derive a benefit many boomers would sell an arm for. Before we make critical mistakes we are warned by the experiences of others. One experience I had this summer illustrates this point powerfully.
I was in a hotel room with a high-ranking Promise Keepers official when he asked me how my marriage of one year was going. "Good," I replied, "but we've been fighting lately." In fact, my wife and I had a major battle just before I boarded the plane. Without additional prompting this man sat me down and told me the story of how his wife almost left him six years ago. I was bolted to my seat, near tears several times. The story ended with a moral: "Get it together, man," this Promise Keeper urged. "Treat your wife like she's the most important thing in the world, because to you she is."
Later I learned that a boomer spontaneously pulling aside an Xer and giving him a loving earful is almost a Promise Keeper trademark. Attend a PK event and you will see why. At Promise Keepers the speakers expose all kinds of male shortcomings - moral confusion, sexual impurity, false notions of masculinity, racism, questionable financial integrity, unloving and domineering treatment of women and children, workaholism - in detail, for the purpose of making better men. It's not hard to understand why a man who has benefitted from such a direct approach would turn around and employ that approach on another.
SOLIDARITY: One would think such frank truthfulness would drive men away, rather than draw them 50,000 at a time. But it is precisely the size of the crowd that makes such straight talk effective.
A group of men from my church (all Gen Xers) attended the Promise Keepers/Los Angeles event in May. There we heard one speaker exclaim that, while Jesus said, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light," many Christian men believe we must carry our yoke by ourselves, without complaining and without asking for help. Our entire group felt challenged by this truth. We turned to each other and said, "He's right!" But we had to speak loudly, because the other 72,000 men in attendance were hollering the same thing to their friends. That experience - sharing unanimity with tens of thousands of men - emboldened us. We returned to our community and held a men's small group meeting, our first ever.
But while men's hearts may be quickened by truth and made courageous in a great crowd, the journey often remains slow. Eli Marez, pastor of New Beginnings Community Church in Phoenix, followed up a moving experience at Promise Keepers/Anaheim '94 by starting small group meetings at home. But the meetings were poorly attended. The reason? "A lot of guys are threatened by small groups, even by groups of twenty-five. Whether boomers or Xers, they weren't ready to open up to other men," Marez says. Marez reported regular attendance after switching to a quarterly, large group (100+) men's meeting.
LOOKING FORWARD TO '96: The example of Marez's church makes clear that much masculine spiritual soil remains to be tilled. In pursuing a plan of ambitious growth and outreach, Promise Keepers plans to hit 26 cities in 1996. Also in the works is an initiative to bring one million men to Washington D.C. in 1997 (the event was conceptualized month's before the Million Man March). Opportunities will be plentiful for Gen Xers throughout the nation to taste for themselves the hope embodied in Promise Keepers.
As for this Gen Xer, my hope is that the sixth promise of the Promise Keeper - promoting racial harmony - will extend to people like Manuel.
On the plane to the Oakland PK event, I sat next to this friendly, unassuming man. Manuel came from Mexico two months previously in search of work, explaining he could find no work in his native Guadalajara with which to support his wife and six children.
It must be hard to be away from your family, I said to him.
Truly, he replied.
I glanced away for a moment. When I looked back Manuel was crying softly. "No," he mumbled in Spanish, "it's not easy being away."
Lately in California people like Manuel have been vilified as perhaps the primary source of our fiscal and social woes. Forgotten in the political rhetoric is that underneath Manuel's brown skin and Indio-Euro-Afro features beats the heart of a man, a man trying to fulfill his responsibilities. Would that Promise Keepers help us not to forget.
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