FEATURE STORY: HE-MAN DEVOTIONS: Is Jesus taking over the men’s movement?

c. 1996 Religion News Service (PORTLAND, Ore.) A shadow has fallen over the secular men’s movement, and it looks a lot like a cross. At the end of July, Robert Bly, grandfather of the drum-beating, get-in-touch with your “wild man” branch of the men’s movement, spoke here at a national conference on Men and Masculinity. […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(PORTLAND, Ore.) A shadow has fallen over the secular men’s movement, and it looks a lot like a cross.

At the end of July, Robert Bly, grandfather of the drum-beating, get-in-touch with your “wild man” branch of the men’s movement, spoke here at a national conference on Men and Masculinity.


Three hundred people attended.

Little more than a week later, nearly 40,000 Christian men gathered at Autzen Stadium in Eugene to pledge themselves to God, family and personal responsibility.

They call themselves the Promise Keepers, and their rapid growth and religious traditionalism has secular activists dazed and bemused.

“Are we jealous of their numbers? A little bit,” said Michael Kimmel, a New York sociologist and speaker at the Portland men’s conference.

The Eugene event was the 18th of 22 men-only Promise Keepers conferences this year. In six years, nearly 2 million have attended similar gatherings, where they sing “Amazing Grace” with no sopranos and hear talks on biblical brotherhood.

It’s a spiritual and sociological phenomenon, with an annual budget ballooning from $4 million in 1993 to $115 million this year.

Bill McCartney, former football coach at the University of Colorado, came up with the Promise Keepers concept in 1990, just before Bly’s best-selling book, “Iron John,” sent men off into the woods to find their “warrior spirit.”

While Bly told fairy tales, McCartney quoted Scripture.

“Until we are reconciled to God, we can never be reconciled to our families and brothers,” McCartney says.


Men rallying around their God is nothing new.

From the time of the apostles, Christianity and masculinity went hand in hand. Well into the 20th century, the “Christian gentleman” _ pious, dutiful, protective and strong _ was held up as a model of manliness in popular literature throughout the English-speaking world.

But the women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s challenged male dominance, and the secular men’s movement tended to look for inspiration elsewhere _ in the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung, in male archetypes dredged from pre-Christian folklore and myth, and in equal-rights language borrowed from feminists.

It spawned not one secular men’s movement, but several: mythopoetics such as Bly, the pro-feminists such as Kimmel, and the fathers’ rights activists who argue the system discriminates against men in divorce cases.

Today, these three branches of the secular men’s movement total fewer than 200,000 serious followers, about one-tenth the attendance at Promise Keepers conferences through six years. The 2 million figure doesn’t include other church-affiliated men’s-only meetings and a surge of seekers buying he-man devotionals and religious books.

Nor does it include the hundreds of thousands who answered the call to participate in October’s “Million Man March” in Washington, D.C. In Portland and other cities, black men continue to pledge “atonement” for past offenses and to strive to improve themselves.

“They have struck a chord that we have not,” Kimmel says. “They ask a question that is legitimate: Why are men’s lives so empty and devoid of meaning?”


“It was stupid of the left to allow the right to grab the family values concept,” Bly adds.

Frederick R. Lynch, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College near Los Angeles, links the Promise Keepers phenomenon to the aging of the baby boomers.

“It’s like the song `Cat’s in the Cradle,'”he said. “A lot of men reach their middle-to-late 40s and say, `My God, I missed the kids!’ ”

Promise Keepers tells men how to find them, using the Bible as inspiration.

Critics from the secular men’s movement accuse Promise Keepers of being simplistic, sexist, homophobic and patriarchal.

“It’s based on exclusion,” Kimmel says, referring to Promise Keeper tenets that homosexual behavior is sinful and men should lead their families. “There is no place for gays and lesbians. There is no place for women except as subservient to men.”

Bly said: “I say we can’t go back to a patriarchal society. Forget it. Our culture is shipwrecked. If a ship is sunk, you can’t climb back on it.”


Michael Schwalbe, a North Carolina State sociologist and author of the newly published “Unlocking the Iron Cage: The Men’s Movement, Gender Politics and American Culture,” attended more than 100 men’s movement gatherings, none of them Promise Keepers.

But based on what he has read, Schwalbe contends men drawn to Promise Keepers are less educated than followers of the men’s movement he studied, with many favoring the views of conservative presidential candidate Pat Buchanan.

“The Promise Keepers has a message that appeals to a lot of men that have resentments about a lot of people in the culture,” Schwalbe said.

Mark DeMoss, a Promise Keepers spokesman, has heard it all before.

“What drowns out most of these critics is these events themselves,” he said. “Fifty, sixty, seventy thousand people in a stadium saying one thing has a way of overshadowing one or two professors on the outside saying this will ruin America.”

The irony, DeMoss says, is that both sides of the divide preach similar messages.

“A secular men’s movement stands up and says: `Men need to take more responsibility. We need to crack down on deadbeat dads. We need to take care of our children.’ Society applauds them. Then a Christian movement says essentially the same thing and you have parts of society crying foul,” DeMoss said.

Others also see common ground.

“It’s the understanding that men have to be back into the family, that men need to connect more effectively with children,” said writer Warren Farrell, a spokesman for men’s and fathers’ rights.


“I’m firmly on the left,” Bly said, “but you have to be an idiot not to see that the major crisis of our culture is the disintegration of the family. That’s where the grief lies. The grief of children is greater than that of women or men.”

MJP END RNS

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