Thousands–maybe hundreds of thousands–of men will be coming to Washington this weekend for the purpose of calling themselves (and us) to repentance and commitment.
It is a measure of the state of the society they hope to change that a lot of people are extremely nervous at the prospect of their coming.
Not the police. If previous gatherings of the Promise Keepers are any indication, this will be an orderly rally–heavy on the spiritual and emotional, but light indeed on anything that would give a cop grief.
No, the uneasiness is from other quarters. Some black people are nervous because Bill McCartney, who founded Promise Keepers, is, like a majority of those expected to show up on the Mall on Saturday, white. Can these be the “angry white men” they’ve been hearing about? Oh, sure, they’re not the Klan, but . . .
Some women wonder at the very notion of a gathering of men. If repentance and commitment are such good things, why not for women, too? It’s like the question heard so often in connection with the Louis Farrakhan “Million Man March.” Can this be an attempt to put men back in charge of things–to undercut the progress that women have made in the past decades?
And some liberals are concerned that so many of the men who have declared for Promise Keepers are politically conservative. Certainly some of the movement’s support comes from men and organizations associated with the dread “religious Right.”
McCartney, who quit his job as football coach at the University of Colorado seven years ago to launch the Promise Keepers movement, is wonderfully patient with questions that (were I in his shoes) would strike me as bizarre.
He has recognized the “white” problem and the organization has gone to some lengths to get black Christians involved at every level, including the chairman and maybe a quarter of the members of the national board of directors.
As for the stag-party aspect of the gathering, McCartney points out that since men are at the root of so much of what has gone wrong in the society, it makes sense to call them to account.
“Social problems are moral problems, which ultimately have a spiritual cause,” he wrote in the September/October issue of Policy Review. “The failure of large numbers of men to live up to their family and social obligations represents a failure of faith. More to the point, the growing irresponsibility of men points, in large part, to a failure in our Christian churches.”
It must strike him as strange how glibly we can trace so many social problems to men–to both their anti-social behavior and the havoc created by their absence from families–and question the male-specific nature of his organization.
McCartney comes across to me as a blend of repentant true believer and master psychologist.
As for the first, his Policy Review piece recalls his coaching days, when he saw too many men–including those who professed to be Christians–letting their priorities slip out of whack. And not just other men, either. Listen:
“To be honest, I watched my own family suffer as I poured myself into my career. I rationalized my workaholism, of course, but in reality I was letting go of my most basic responsibilities . . . in essence directing my life without reference to God. Because I failed so miserably, I’ve been able to see that many men today are doing exactly the same thing I did.”
The psychology: “When men are simply left to themselves, whether roving in gangs or gathering in locker rooms, they often are trouble waiting to happen. (But) men can meet and work together for positive purposes. . . . Men are eager to make and keep promises; they want to be challenged to `be all they can be.’ “
McCartney sees from a biblical viewpoint what I see as a reporter: that for reasons ranging from the success of feminism to the failure of welfare policy, men and boys are losing the certainty of their place in things. Part of the sense of placelessness, I believe, may be the result of the emerging belief that gender-specific roles are an anachronism best done away with.
Promise Keepers may be too straightforwardly Christian for some in multicultural America, but they are onto something potentially very powerful. They understand that that bundle of instincts, urges and psychic imperatives we call maleness needs space, and that it is no contradiction of equality to say so. Indeed it just might be our society’s salvation.
