In the Name of the Father

T
he two men at my side are holding my hands so hard they leave marks. They don't mean me harm: it's simply Charlie and Jose's way of expressing tenderness and affection to the 16-year-old hoy they think I am. In the seats and bleachers around us, 50,000 other men are doing the same thing, embracing in couples, triads, and even bigger groups as they sing, "I am free to love you, Jesus." Radiant, swishy men wave bright Promise Keepers flags as though they were batons. Others raise their hands, palms outward, in the joyful "testifying" gesture that's been adopted at so many lesbian and gay pride rallies.
The Promi.sE Keepers may be a right-wing Christian men's group, but it's not at all what I expected to find when I paid $55 and prepared to attend this men-only conference—one of 13 the group held this year. After a Ms. editor phoned, pretending to be my mom, and registered me (her teenage evangelical son), all I needed was a couple of trips to a boys' clothing store and a costume emporium, and presto! a pint-size Promise Keeper. I look so handsome in my artificial mustache and Minimalist goatee that I begin to fantasize about wearing them every day.
By Donna Minkowitz
The overall effect is rakish teenager into heavy metal, and in my mind I'm already fending off the girls. Still, walking into the cavernous bowels of the St. Petersburg ThunderDome, I start to panic when I realize I'm surrounded by men.
There are so many of us that the group can only seep slowly inward, crowding up against the threshold: pumped-up men, pudgy men, men sweating profusely, little boys shrieking for attention, older men who look like they're accustomed to deference, teenagers smirking and punching each other in the upper arm. Am I walking like someone with the signifier of power between his legs? I notice we're all walking stiffly, with an almost painful air of dignity, trying to look as though we're too powerful to let our eyes meet. 1 suspect that I'm not the only one here who is afraid of being exposed as not enough of a man.
"Don Sornaga" is the name on the plastic identity bracelet that Promise Keepers issued me, the name of the fictive teenager I am masquerading as. But it's not entirely a masquerade— even though my breasts are squashed beneath two layers of Ace bandages, a torturous running bra, and an undershirt. There is a part of me that's a lot like a man; a person inside who's been trying to squash my own tenderness for too long, who—as the Promise Keepers have described men in general—is more afraid than anything else of looking like a victim. My phalanx of fears, my demand for deference, my refusal to get close are a lot like many men's. Maybe this conference is just what I need.
Y
et I can't open up too much. I'm terrified of being exposed as a counterfeit, terrified of being dragged to the stage as a girl and exposed to the righteous anger of all these men and the national media. Crammed close with the others, I desperately try to call up everything about myself that's obnoxiously male. I meditate on the sexy rolled-up sock in my underpants. / have something I'm incredibly proud and conscious of between my legs, I project telepathically—just in case anyone is listening. Sitting down, I pitch my knees as far apart as they'll go—as though a heavy, sacred jewel were poised between them.
I do get dangerously close to relaxing my guard when I see men in this stadium tenderly throwing each other objects that are soft and not dangerous—beach balls and paper airplanes. I even get a little misty when an announcement comes over the loudspeaker that we need to stop throwing even these soft projectiles—because we could unwittingly harm the visually impaired—and the men around me immediately stop.

"My choir leader said it would be good for me to come," I tell my seatmate Charlie, a kindly, rueful-looking Promise Keeper of about 35. Charlie's impressed that I've traveled all the way from New York to attend a gathering of men who want to sin no more. "I never could have done it at your age." He and Jose, my other seatmate, smile at each other over my head: they like me. And they clap me on the back. To my seatmates I'm an unusually dedicated and polite young man. It's uncannily comforting to hear their praise.
When I offer to bring Charlie back a soda from the concession stand, he seems surprised—even touched. Are teenage boys not even supposed to get other guys sodas? I wonder. All of a sudden I feel sorry for all the teenage boys I have ever hated for being cocky and contemptuous. How terrible not to be able to be nice to Charlie out of fear someone would think I was a wuss (read: pussy). Would only a girl do what I'm doing; will I blow my cover by sharing all my food with these men?
But instead of detecting my gender, Charlie and Jose take me for a boy who's seen the light. Jose is warmer than Charlie, about the same age, and just as suburban. They each sport what I will come to think of as the unofficial uniform of this conference: polo shirt, sweat, muscles, paunch, designer shorts, and a

Ms.   NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 Ms.

65
detectable air of longing and regret. Like Charlie—and a : men in our culture—Jose is extremely repressed when it to communicating in words. They both communicate r feelings for me through touch.
hands have never been held so passionately—not just by ■lie and Jose, but by the other men who come to console, sh, and absolve me in the course of my two days in Promise ers land. I'm sure our interaction would have been less lov-• they'd known I was a girl—and an unrepentant lesbian Ito boot. The Promise Keepers don't allow women at their cnngs, because "women's presence tends to inhibit men," ^rding to Dave Wardell, the group's national coordinator Jlocal leaders. They do let female journalists cover some , but when I initially asked for a press pass, PK press reps . three months to return my calls. All in all, it seemed more ductive to cover the Promise Keepers in mufti—letting the inside me meet the men who've found the courage to heal ■ arms of the Christian right.
Promise Keepers was founded by Bill McCartney, the former ersity of Colorado football coach who stumped for Coil's antigay Amendment 2 and has been a featured speaker eration Rescue events. McCartney once defended two of players accused of date rape by sa>l..g that it's only rape "real physical violence is involved." And it took the threat suit by the ACLU in 1985 to make him stop holding atory prayer sessions for his team members, t in 1990, Coach Mac—as Promise Keepers literature af-.mately calls him—took a car trip with Wardell, a close d from the Federation of Christian Athletes. In the car he a vision of a movement that would put the focus on men "further the kingdom of God." His fantasy was to fill his ersity's football field with 50,000 men "training [in] what rans to be godly men." The organization has mushroomed : 4,200 conference attendees in 1991 to more than 700,000 1^95. It's become arguably the largest men's movement in I'.S. But the organization McCartney founded is seemingly th more moderate than its founder.
Scrolling around the dome I see several guys in earrings, one fc a beautiful feathered one that perfectly accentuates his g black hair. There are hardly any political T-shirts, but one ir.e few I can find reads "Race Hatred Is Self-hatred" (on a Ke teenager). There are black leather vests, ponytails, tat-(tJ men, some obvious queens, one guy in a little-boy pro-Icr beanie: this is a gathering too uncramped and diverse to easily inside the Christian Coalition. Many have their arms nd other men, sometimes around their waists, sometimes trig them, "I love you." It's not that these men are openly -for all its liberatory atmosphere, this organization has a trion paper saying that homosexuality "violates God's de-i"—but they are men who are allowing themselves to pursue »uch wider spectrum of gender behavior than would ever be
jted in most organizations of the Christian right. There's a much larger racial spectrum, too. While most •man right organizations profess a desire to organize evangelicals of all colors, Promise Keepers is one of the few that have come through on the promise. Groups of black teenagers sit together, wearing identical T-shirts with the name of their Bible study group. Latinos perk up when one speaker makes fun of Anglos who massacre Spanish. Roughly a quarter of this Florida audience are men of color—which can be interpreted, variously, as a poor showing in an intensely multiracial state, or a tremendous success, given the long racial divisions among Protestant evangelicals in the U.S.
More surprising is the racial breakdown of the Promise Keepers staff. Twenty-five percent of the paid staff of nearly 300 are men of color, and among the top 14 managers, three are African American and one is Asian American. Speakers' lists for each of the conferences carefully combine white men with men of color, though Asian and Native Americans are barely represented. At the ThunderDome, the emcee is black, and so are two of the eight main speakers (Joseph Garlington and T.D. Jakes). Another speaker, Juan Carlos Ortiz, is Latino.
Men who couldn't afford the $55 conference fee were readily given scholarships to this gathering, and the group's instructions to its local activists, or Point Men, include an explicit mandate to build links with as many churches of color as possible. It may not seem like much, but in a Christian right that still opposes multicultural and bilingual education and affirmative action, it's a big deal.
O
n a personal level, I'm breathing easier here than I have at any other Christian-right event I've covered. Promise Keepers is publicly opposed to homosexuality and abortion. Yet there's much less hatred in the air—perhaps because this group hardly ever mentions gay people, feminists, single mothers, abortionists, or women who are too uppity, get too much aid from the government, or have too much sex. Unlike what I've heard at the Christian Coalition's conferences—or the Republican National Convention of 1992—most of the speeches are not about the evil of the other, but about how to refrain from abusing others.
T.D. Jakes, an intense West Virginian, tells the crowd: "There are many ways of dealing with conflict. We can go to war, we can beat our chests and brag about our own strength and power, and fight. But the greatest enemy I've ever had to fight is the enemy in me." Preventing abuse, Jakes and other speakers aver, means changing people's assumptions about what it means to be a man. Over and over, men are urged to show their emotions, to let go of their anger, to reevaluate how they treat the women in their lives. Six of the eight major speakers emphasize that men's fear of being seen as weak or unimportant—in effect, their fear of being equated with women— can become a terrible obstacle in all their relationships. I'm struck by how close it all sounds to feminism.
"Jonah was running from his own problems!" sandy-haired Greg Laurie from the Harvest Christian Fellowship is haranguing us. "Jonah was the original chicken of the sea!" The prophet ignored abuses, Laurie says, just as we do. He continues:

►tUBER/DECEMBER 1995 Ms.

67

 

"Many people have the same problems follow them from relationship to relationship. You're running from your own conscience! Many times we want to say the problem is in the White House or the Senate or the state house, but God says, 'The problem is my people!' Listen, men, we need to turn from our wicked ways!"
I'm not sure why Laurie's speech moves me so strongly. Maybe it's because he emphatically invokes the notions of conscience, forgiveness, and the capacity to change—qualities that are hardly ever referred to by Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or, for that matter, by the leftists and gay liberationists who've been my closest comrades. Laurie tells us about   the Prodigal Son, who, after rejecting his father, discovers that he wants the old man after all. And, instead of making him suffer, his father "runs up  to   him, throws his arms around him, welcomes him, and kisses him over and over again."
M
ost religious-right activists are obsessed with the image of the punishing Father who will throw all sinners in a lake of fire. For much of my own political life, I've been obsessed with throwing the punishing father in, instead. My own father was violent and hardly ever parental. He smelled bad, and 1 think he must have hated himself very much. In recent years I've been missing the man and, what surprises me more, remembering times he tried to give me love. I just couldn't accept it from someone that I found so repugnant. And I think I tortured him as much as he did me. As feminists, we're often uncomfortable speaking of the sins of the abused, and some of us are appalled by the injunction to forgive. But Greg Laurie's blend of warm compassion with undaunting talk about self-critique offers something that the simple consignment of one's abusers to eternal hellfire cannot—a way out, that is to say, a place in which individuals can transform themselves, heal, and "sin no more."
Formally speaking, I don't believe in "sin," but you could say that I've spent the past few years dealing with my own. I've been changing how I move in the world, changing my relationships with the people in my life. Like many of my fellow Promise Keepers, I've had a hard time leaving myself undefended, allowing people in. Opening to love in this way is not the same thing as "opening oneself to the love of Jesus," but I'm
A 'jW

wilting to bet that as the men at this conference experience it, the two are pretty similar.
In front of me, three 20-year-old Promise Keepers raise their palms to Jesus and to each other, like women greeting their long-lost sisters. They sway with a very un-male delight. In a letter to attendees, Promise Keepers president Randy Phillips reveals that one of the most important lessons of this weekend is that "the power of God comes only through intimate relationship with His Son." Maybe he really meant, intimate relationship with anybody's son. In a society where men arc trained to reject and humiliate one another, it's no wonder that simply getting close to other men can feel divine. Watching these three men blossom, I start to wonder if the key to men not oppressing women is for them to stop oppressing the woman inside.
Before I got here, I lay awake at night worrying about how I would use the bathroom and still preserve my secret. In my mind, it would be the hardest trial of the conference—maybe I would have to hold it in. But the men are using all the women's bathrooms in addition to their own, putting pieces of paper over the WO so that the signs read MEN. I head straight for these so I don't have to negotiate, or even see, a urinal.

No, the hardest thing is dealing with the other women in the ThunderDome. At every Promise Keepers gathering, women staff the overflowing merchandise tables, watch the doors, and hand out programs. They're supposed to stay outside, or in the merchandise area cordoned off in the middle of right field— though I did see one or two boldly occupying stadium seats with their husbands. Loading up on Promise Keepers gewgaws in the bustling merchant zone—mugs, a cap, a T-shirt, pens—I can't look them in the eye. Am I afraid they can tell? Guilty I'm enjoying what they can't? Actually, even if I weren't in drag, I'd probably find them terrifying. It's always harder for me to look at Christian-right women than their male companions. The volunteers aim plastic smiles at me and the other men, trying to look helpful, sugary, pristine. Most are white and thirtyish (my age) or younger. Their pinched, blond faces over fadeless lipstick look like masks; everything about them seems squelched and hidden. If my buddies in the bleachers look like men coming alive, why do these women look like Stepford wives?
Promise Keepers' message to men may be therapeutic, compassionate, and transformative—but on questions of gender, it's profoundly contradictory. Everyone I hear speak in the ThunderDome assumes that men are to blame. Randy Phillips and others harangue us with the accusation that most of us have hurt the women and children in our lives by being emotionally distant, selfish, or abusive. "It's not the women |who need reforming!!" he's told reporters. "It's the men!"
"I haven't been a giver, I've been a taker!" Coach Mac himself cries from the stage. "We always followed my dreams, never |my wife] Lyndi's!" One day, he declares, he looked at his wife: "And I didn't see splendor. I didn't see contentment. My own wife was wounded. I said, 'Lord, where did I blow it?'" In an ecstasy of self-abnegation, McCartney tells us how he "knelt before her and wept. . . and she didn't forgive me right away." His realization of his mistreatment of Lyndi led, McCartney says, to resigning his position as CU's head football coach. Now, he works unpaid for the Promise Keepers, full-time.
I have to confess that it's moving to hear a horrifying homophone and women's rights opponent apologize for his misdeeds against a woman, any woman. For a minute, I actually like him. But like all his organization's messages about men and women, McCartney's apology is unintelligible. How his abandoning the team for the Promise Keepers is supposed to help Lyndi fulfill her dreams is never made clear. He might spend more time with his unsplendid wife, but is that supposed to cure what's ailing her? For the Promise Keepers, the loving care of devoted husbands is the only thing required to improve women's lives.
On the stage of the dome, Randy Phillips declares: "Jesus has heard the cries of our wives, the cries of our mothers, the cries of our daughters for this moment." If this sounds like a grandiose assessment of individual men's effect on everyone, it is. The Promise Keepers spend the bulk of their time teaching men how to refrain from abusing because they believe men ought to be good masters, not abusive ones. They don't doubt for a moment that the ultimate responsibility for the world—for   men's   and   women's   lives   both—is men's.
This fantasy of benevolent domination is at the core of the Promise Keepers' vision. Phillips told the Baltimore Sun that feminism was largely "the result of the misuse of [men's] authority." It's no accident that these guys refer to themselves as "mighty" all the time—in their T-shirts, in their songs, in their speeches. To the Promise Keepers, patriarchal power is legitimate and, in fact, desirable, so long as it is not "misused." In their fantasy, everyone can remain in their place—men at the "head" of the family, and women behind—so long as men are kind and good. Women are innocent but inferior creatures who depend on men's benevolent stewardship.
T
ony F.vans, an African American pastor from Dallas, didn't make it to St. Petersburg, but the popular Promise Keepers speaker and author has preached at II of the 13 conferences this year. Judging by press accounts, Promise Keepers spokespcople have to spend a lot of their time "explaining"—that is to say, minimizing—F.vans' baldly patriarchal statements, but there are no signs of the group reining him in or kicking him off the speakers list. He gives the same basic speech in every town; in the version printed in the group's book Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, Evans says, "The first thing you do is sit down with your wife and say something like this: 'Honey, I've made a terrible mistake. I've given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.' Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I'm urging you to take it back. If you simply ask for it, your wife is likely to |refuse|. . . . Your wife's concerns may be justified. Unfortunately, however, there can be no compromise here. ... Be sensitive. Listen. Treat the lady gently but lovingly. But lead!"
Evans also has a message for women: '''Give it back!. . . For the sake of . . . our culture, let a man be a man if he's willing. . . . God never meant for you to bear the load you're carrying." His final word to the fairer sex: "Protect yourself, if you must, by handing the reins back slowly."
Flvans is hardly the only sexist speaker among the Promise Keepers. He couldn't be, in an organization where both president and members frequently cite F.phesians 5:23: "For the husband is the head of the wife, just as Christ is the head of the church." The others spend time tempering this pronouncement with the claim that being women's "heads" really means being their servants; Evans is simply the Promise Keepers speaker whose message is least mixed.
Despite the fact that men of color hold positions of prominence in the organization, the Promise Keepers' messages about race are almost as muddled. McCartney and others occasionally toss out lines like "Minority families are very much oppressed. They're very much under siege in every area of their lives." Even the songs sung at Promise Keepers gatherings are chosen to reflect a diversity of ethnic styles—pop, gospel, and salsa (but no rap). But it's unclear what PK's effort to be multiracial means politically. The riffs on race tend to be sweet but

68

Mi.   NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 Ms.

69
ity is an effort to stand

More than anything, the in-your-face mascul up for the goodness of men as a class.

incoherent—like emcee Wellington Boone's announcement: "There were three kings! The first was Rodney King. The second was Martin Luther King—he had a dream of reconciliation, and he died for his dream. The third was the king who walked the Via Dolorosa." Even more indecipherable is the line about race in the PK mission statement: "We believe that we have a God-given mission to unite men who are separated by race, geography, culture, denomination, and economics. We refer to something much greater than humanistic unification and more powerful than political equality." Given Promise Keepers' bizarre beliefs about "headship" in marriage, the assertion that a particular relation is "more powerful than political equality" sounds suspicious.
B
ut then, to set foot inside a Promise Keepers gathering is to click file find oneself awash in contradiction. Leaders have repeatedly insisted that the group is nonpolitical. Promise Keepers even postponed a massive march on Washington originally scheduled for 1996, out of fear of appearing to influence the '96 elections. Steve Chavis, the group's press rep, has declared: "We are dedicated to uniting men. We are not prescribing what party this is done through or what ballot measure."
And yet this organization has sponsored talks by Jerry Fal-well, been praised by antifeminist Beverly LaHaye, and brought its leaders on The 700 Club. The ultraright-wing Focus on the Family is a major Promise Keepers backer and has published the group's books. Several PK board members belong to the Council for National Policy, a network of the most influential right-wing activists and funders in the country. Nevertheless, the scene on the stadium floor reminds me strikingly of a gay pride rally—or the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. It's not just the homoeroticism, though that helps. The main similarity is the exuberant sense of community, accompanied by a perverse and funky spirit of rebellion.
The men in this room see themselves as people working counter to mainstream values—not in their defense. One guy's shirt says "Go Against the Flow." Another's reminds me so strongly of ACT UP that I start to miss my old seat at the New York meeting. It reads: "Yes, as a matter of fact I AM a wide-eyed/sanctified/blood bought/spirit taught/Bible totin'/scripture quotin'/Satan bashin'/sin trashin'/Christ followin'/pride swal-lowin'/hard praying/truth conveying/faith walkin'/gospel talkin'/Bonafide BIG-TIME Believer, and proud of it." While the specific tenets are different, the underlying feeling is the same: I am different from the way this culture wants me to be, and that's O.K. More than O.K.—it's beautiful.
Progressives sometimes assume that passionate Christian displays of the sort the Promise Keepers delight in are widely accepted in Middle America. But many Americans look down on evangelical culture as strange and weird—in much the same way that they see, say, lesbian and gay culture. Evangelicals of all political persuasions frequently see themselves as pariahs— scorned and stereotyped by the unbelieving majority. Perhaps that's the real reason so many of the T-shirts here remind me of
ACT UP's—there's the same deliberately offensive, outrageous, and vaguely hostile tone. "Can't Take the Heat? Get Out of Hell," says one.
The gathering in the ThunderDome celebrates not only in-your-face Bible-thumping, but in-your-face maleness. This year's tour is called "Raise the Standard," and the gigantic banners promoting it feature a succession of phallic symbols: three men's arms (black, white, and brown) struggle to hoist a huge flagpole. Meanwhile, PK speakers anxiously insist that churchy men aren't effeminate—one tells us that King David "wasn't Casper Milquetoast."
More than anything, the in-your-face masculinity is an effort to stand up for the goodness of men as a class. While feminists often receive the blame for male bashing, popular culture has done a much better job of portraying men as pigs. From TV to music to advertising, men are associated with a host of unsavory traits: emotional clumsiness, fear of love, selfishness, vanity, a propensity for violence, even poor grooming. Given those cultural messages, it's probably hard for most men today to arrive at an identity that encompasses some idea of maleness they can embrace as moral and appealing.
Promise Keepers turns these attitudes on their heads: we may be men, the group says, masculine men, even, but we are moral, loving to one another, and good to women. It's hard to know whether to call this message pro- or antifeminist. I wonder the same thing when Christian folkie Bob Carlisle sings "If you see me on my knees, it's not because I'm weak . . . I'm getting what?" and the men in the audience yell "STRONGER!" Is it progressive or reactionary for men to say they're becoming "stronger"? How can we tell definitively? Watching these men struggling toward becoming able to love each other and themselves, I kept thinking of a line from Ntozake Shange: "I found God in myself, and I loved her fiercely." It's difficult for me to admit, but as I participated in the sharing of love at the stadium, I came to believe that it may not be simply and purely reactionary for men to find God in themselves.
One of the reasons the Promise Keepers' politics is so incoherent is that our culture has very few paradigms for the liberation of a dominant group from the shackles of its own domination. It's not surprising that Promise Keepers, the first mass movement that has even attempted a partial liberation of men, is such a hotbed of contradictions.
Activists who have demonstrated against the group have described them as wolves in sheep's clothing, but I think it's more instructive to think of them as a peculiar hybrid of wolves and sheep. Theirs is not simply a cynical, stealth effort to attract new followers to the Christian right. For one thing, Promise Keepers is a diverse group, both politically and culturally. Not all are right-wingers. Many aren't politically active at all and some are even progressive. "They're not all from conservative churches," says Russ Bellant, an expert on the Christian right. "I know committed trade union supporters and social justice supporters who go."
The question remains why veteran right-wing activists like
Bill McCartney and Focus on Family's James Dobson would be interested in organizing such a group. Perhaps they hope to further their political ends by harnessing men's very desire to change. Though PK doesn't instruct its members to lobby against gay rights or obstruct abortion clinics, the creation of an evangelical men's movement with as many as a million members could be fertile    ground    for right-wing organizing. Beyond the worldly resources PK could generate—mailing lists, phone banks, voter lists, and the like—is a more troubling set of ideological resources: men who, in their eagerness to reform themselves, have declared a wi ingness to be commanded. If you listen closely, most PK speakers combine messages about healing and mutual aid with proclamations about a sacred chain of submission. "I desire to worship and obey," the 50,000 of us sing together, after Joseph Garlington has informed us that the Lord "created us with an innate desire to see somebody or something as superior to ourselves."
It is possible that the depth of emotion and loyalty created in the Promise Keepers could be used to fuel a right-wing movement. But the group's ethic of mutual responsibility and mutual support is perpetually at odds with its conviction that domination is ordained by God. It would be a mistake to assume that PK's religious-right leaders are somehow immune to the progressive ideals that they themselves are promoting through this organization. In creating Promise Keepers, they may have themselves been caught in a quasi-feminist whirlwind.
Even the group's "wolves" have wound up articulating a far more ambiguous message than can be expected from such quarters. It appears that as feminism has changed the entire culture's view of gender, even the Christian right has been affected. In an issue of the Promise Keepers' magazine, New Man, a woman writer attacks the "boys' club" mentality of men who belittle female colleagues in the workplace and shut them out of power. And in an interview with me after the conference, Promise Keepers board member Gary Oliver gave his own critique of sexism: "A lot of the perceived differences between men and women are actually social in origin. . . . We need to stop telling little boys that they should 'take it like a man.' . . . One of the few emotions men have been allowed to have is anger, and, unfortunately, many women, children, and other men have been the victims of that."
Of course, for every Promise Keepers speech saying "Jesus did not say, Blessed are the macho!," there will be another insisting that "the primary cause of [our] national crisis is the feminization of the American male." It must be reassuring to these men to hear that, even opening and changing as they are, they will still not lose their supremacy. It is scary to change, and scariest of all to give up power.
Some feminists may scoff at the Promise Keepers' emphasis on men's personal healing and self-growth. But I don't see how society can change in the ways we want it to if men have no support to start acting less like "men" and more like caring, loving, ethical, and nondominating human beings. The process by which men grow into cultural manhood is so repressive that enabling them to leave this state requires active healing—not just women's understandably impatient suggestion that they cease their misdeeds. But, apart from a few lonely male activists like John Stoltenberg, progressives have never been able to mobilize men for this sort of healing and change. The Promise Keepers have stepped into this vacuum.
Our best response may not be to attack PK's members as dupes or unmitigated reactionaries, but to understand the contradictory impulses that have brought them swarming to the stadiums. And to tap into the very needs Bill McCartney and his friends have mobilized.
Donna Minkowitz, a Brooklynite, frequently writes about the gay movement and the religious right.

70

Ms.   NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 Ms.

71