Every set of man was represented in this vast throng, from the well-groomed banker to the North End fisherman with his time-worn clothing. Any racial differences that may have existed were dispelled, as colored and white man, American and foreigner, stood shoulder to shoulder and accepted Christ as their Saviour.1

It was high time that something should be done to bring men and religion into closer relation. Men needed religion and religion needed men. It was getting to be too much the business of women. This movement has done much to redress the lost balance and to restore to the Church the element of masculinity which it sadly needed.2

Do these two descriptions sound vaguely familiar? If you have followed press reports of Promise Keepers rallies, only a few linguistic oddities and the reference to class-based dress seem out of keeping with that movement's image. However, these two quotations date back to 1909 and 1912 respectively, the first referring to a mass meeting during evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman's 1909 Boston Crusade,3 and the second to the Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-12.4 They remind us that at the beginning of the twentieth century, as at its end, parachurch movements with a gender-based focus sprang up regularly. This has led various scholars to ponder the similarities and differences between these two periods of social and religious upheaval.

Consider these events of the past decade in Protestant America: in 1988, the newly formed Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood issued its "Danvers Statement" in defense of distinct gender roles and male headship in church and home.5 The following year, another recently formed evangelical organization, Christians for Biblical Equality, issued a counterstatement arguing on exegetical grounds for mutual submission between the sexes and the full use of women's gifts in society, church, and home.6 In 1991, the revivalist, male-focused Promise Keepers movement began with a single gathering of 4,200, but by 1996 it was attracting over a million men to 22 summer rallies.7 In 1993, the first of the ongoing "Re-Imagining" conferences was organized, funded in part by mainline Protestant women's groups. Based on the premise that Christianity as we know it has been almost completely "imagined" into existence by patriarchal males, the architects of this movement assert that the church must now be "re-imagined" in all its aspects by women.8 And in the fall of 1997, partly in response to the perceived heterodoxy of the Re-Imagining movement, a newly formed group known as the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society issued its "Christian Women's Declaration," which affirmed the equality of women with men and the positive contributions of mainstream feminism, but decried the excesses of radical feminism in both its secular and religious incarnations.9

What is causing this proliferation of gender-focused religious groups? To get some perspective on this question it may help to go back to the turn of the century, to see how that social and religious setting emerged from what went before, and how it compares to our present situation.

J. Wilbur Chapman's crusade was a local event centered in Boston for two months in 1909, while the Men and Religion Forward Movement (M&RFM) was a national effort that was most active from 1911 to 1912. Religious historians such as Margaret Bendroth and Gail Bederman agree that common social anxieties helped motivate both. The stated concern in each case was the skewed gender ratio in Protestant churches. Women members outnumbered men by about three to two, and this was perceived to be a crisis of major proportions, despite the fact that this ratio has remained more or less the same since colonial days without generating much anxiety or even comment.

So why the sudden sense of alarm in the early 1900s? In Bendroth's succinct summary, "greater awareness of the consistently lopsided gender ratios is often the iceberg tip of deeper, often well-justified fears of spiritual vulnerability and the churches' cultural irrelevance."10

Then, as now, what was happening was a sea change in the interaction of gender relations with religious and economic forces. From the colonial period up through about 1800, American life had more organic unity. Workplace (almost always a subsistence farm), living space, and child-rearing space existed together for married couples, and religion permeated all three. Fathers, as ever-present heads of households, took the role of spiritual and moral teachers to children of both sexes.

As owners of farms to be inherited by the sons they taught, fathers had much greater power and visibility in the lives of their children than would be the case later in the century. This made for intense but understated emotional ties since the colonialists believed that too much overt affection would spoil a child's character. Another reason for fathers' intensely didactic role within the family was the belief that men could control their emotions better than women and thus more effectively model disciplined character and work habits to their children.11

Nevertheless, the labor-intensive economic productivity of colonial-era farms and businesses was shared by all family members, with due regard for limitations based on age, strength, and child-bearing burdens. But after the American Revolution, farms became efficient enough to generate an agricultural surplus, and the resulting growth of markets produced a new middle class of competitive, free-enterprise businessmen. While welcoming the raised living standard this portended, white Protestant Americans were also uneasy about the possible effects on society of untrammeled economic competition. Their solution was to reconfigure gender relations: in the words of Bederman, during the early Republic "middle class Americans used gender to marry morality to productivity—literally."12

In a reversal of colonial-period assumptions, women were now defined as both "naturally" more moral and religious than men, and thus "naturally" more fitted for childrearing, while men were defined as "natural" producers and entrepreneurs, given to unrestrained and aggressive competition. Thus, "pious women would keep their husbands and sons moral; productive men would work to become successful entrepreneurs in order to provide for their wives and children; and together they would forge godly homes, the epitome of Christian progress."13

Under this Victorian construction of gender relations, the greater number of women than men in church was occasionally considered noteworthy, but it still reflected exactly the division of labor that was seen as right and natural. Women, and their allies among the male clergy, would provide the moral and emotional ballast that kept fathers and grown sons from succumbing to the worst impulses of laissez-faire capitalism. This generally meant that women were now to be "angels of the home" rather than subsistence producers alongside their husbands, as their foremothers had been. But it also led many middle-class women to embrace "domestic feminism": the extension of women's supposedly superior moral reach into the public sphere in order to "clean up" the immoral results (such as prostitution and drunkenness) of men's self-centered individualism.14

Around 1880, this gendered division of labor between morality and productivity began to falter as America entered yet another economic phase, that of corporate (as opposed to individual) capitalism. Fewer and fewer men owned their own farms or small businesses; instead, they increasingly worked for growing corporations in offices and factories. Although still primary breadwinners, they had begun to lose their sense of masculine independence in a web of corporate bureaucracy. In addition, the early Republican emphasis on thrift and productivity, buttressed by a Protestant doctrine of self-denial, gave way to an ethos of consumerism and the enjoyment of leisure. Together these forces began to make the previous era's "feminization of piety" seem narrow and outdated.

At the same time, church leaders were concerned that, as more and more men became anonymous workers in corporations, they were losing the character traits of honesty and reliability that had been essential to the success of individual small-business owners in precorporate days. The male-directed religious campaigns of the early 1900s were thus a frank attempt to inject a counterdose of masculinity, suitably redefined for a corporate age, into a church life now perceived as overly effeminate and woman dominated.

The Chapman Crusade in Boston and the M&RFM were among the first to make use of corporate organizing and advertising techniques for religious purposes, which no doubt helps account for the attention each campaign received in both audience numbers and press coverage. For example, Chapman pioneered the use of "simultaneous evangelism," leading daily noon meetings in Boston's Tremont Temple while his 25 trained evangelists conducted parallel meetings in the churches of greater Boston. A veritable army of trained laypeople helped organize other church meetings, salon gatherings among the Boston wealthy, and more populist songfests at local rescue missions. At the noon meetings, women were relegated to the Temple's gallery, while at other times, their presence was tolerated grudgingly, even (sometimes especially) when they outnumbered the men. Chapman appealed to males by continually deconstructing the Victorian barrier between "feminine" religion and "masculine" commerce. His campaign slogan, "The King's Business," appeared on thousands of lapel pins and meeting tickets, and his noon-hour Temple gatherings stressed the theme that "a man can succeed in business and be a Christian."15

A similar combination of commercial, religious, and masculine themes characterized the nationwide M&RFM of 1911-12. Lighted billboards directed people to the churches of New York City and to larger venues, like the Hippodrome or Carnegie Hall, where meetings were underwritten in part by business titans such as John D. Rockefeller and J. Pierpont Morgan. Draped with banners announcing the movement's slogan--"More Men for Religion; More Religion for Men"--these spaces, with very few exceptions, were off-limits to women, making the M&RFM "the only widespread religious revival in American history which explicitly excluded women."16 It did not explicitly exclude men other than white, middle-class, native-born Protestants, but in practice it was directed to—and attracted—almost entirely the latter. The same was true of the Chapman Crusade, despite emotional press reports (like the one quoted earlier) that spoke of races and classes rubbing shoulders at evangelistic meetings.

The Chapman Crusade retained some vestiges of Victorian family sentimentalism, particularly in its portrayal of devoted and prayerful mothers as a means of softening up young men for an altar call. But the M&RFM leaders studiously avoided emotional appeals and references to home life in their determination to show that religion was no longer part of the domestic sphere, and that religious men were powerful, logical, and well controlled. One much-repeated description of the movement went as follows:

There is one thing that should be clearly understood: there will not be a trace of emotionalism or sensationalism in this entire campaign. The gospel of Jesus of Nazareth—and its practical application to our practical daily life—is presented calmly, sanely, logically, so that it will convince the average man, who is a man of sane, logical, common sense. Women have no part in this movement, the reason being that [its leaders] believe that the manly gospel of Christ should be presented to men by men.17

In its M&RFM recasting, church work was part of the modern corporate world, and thus to be the province of assertively businesslike men. The movement's fivefold program included Bible study, evangelism, missions, boys' work, and social service, with the last of these a source of particular appeal to ordinary men since it involved nitty-gritty urban work among saloons, dance halls, and prisons. Although domestic feminist women had also taken up such urban projects, men now claimed them as their own, arguably in an attempt to find a "virile moralism" to compensate for the loss of male independence that accompanied the corporatization of American life.

This campaign to "masculinize" church operations and church outreach succeeded, but at a price. By the mid-1920s, men were joining Protestant churches in greater numbers, drawn in part by churches' sponsorship of men's clubs, bowling leagues, billiard games, baseball teams, and Boy Scout troops. At the same time, women's previously independent missionary and charitable organizations were being unilaterally disbanded by all-male church assemblies, and women's spiritual authority was greatly curtailed. In the words of one unusually blunt woman journalist in the mid-1920s, "Nobody was bothering about the women and girls. They were safely within the fold, and there was no other place for them to go. Anyway, there was more joy over one man who joined the church than over a dozen women. [The Men and Religion Forward] campaign is now bearing fruit."18

Do today's gender-focused revivalist movements, such as Promise Keepers, represent a recapitulation of the gendered anxieties of those early twentieth-century years? In some ways, yes.

Today, as at the beginning of the century, we are undergoing massive changes in the economy.

The insecurity and uncertainty such changes bring are hard on all men in a society that has identified masculinity with breadwinning, but middle-aged, middle-class white men are particularly vulnerable since they have been led for many decades to expect a steadily rising standard of living. So perhaps we should not be surprised that 84 percent of attendees at Promise Keepers rallies are white, and that their median age is 38. In this respect, PK is not unlike the secular, mythopoeic men's movement spearheaded by Robert Bly, whose "weekend warriors" (so named by men's-studies scholars Michael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman) are over 90 percent white with a median age of 40. Both movements represent, at least in part, a "cry for certainty about the meaning of manhood in a society where both men's power and rigid gender definitions are being challenged."19

Nor should we be surprised that the organizing and advertising techniques pioneered by the earlier men-centered movements have been elevated to a high art by Promise Keepers: whatever else they accomplish, the stadium venues, giant video screens, and speakers wearing striped coaching shirts reassure men that they are in a male space. PK conferencegoers may be "weekend weepers" rather than "weekend warriors"--but it's also the case that many men find it safer to weep in sports stadiums surrounded by other men than they might elsewhere.

The current challenge to "rigid gender definitions" began, of course, with the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, while the revivalist men's movements at the beginning of the century interacted with the first wave and its mounting campaign to get women the vote. But whereas the M&RFM avoided "feminine" emotion and tried to distance itself from domesticity, PK has appropriated the feminist critique of stereotypical masculinity and reclothed it in a biblical theology of true manhood. Thus Promise Keepers are enjoined to reject the profile of the "friendless American male" (self-reliant, unfeeling, competitive, distant from women, children, and other men) and instead to practice the biblical virtues of encouragement, forgiveness, mutual confession, and mutual aid.20 PK publications urge men to admit their shortcomings and fears to family members, and to express tenderness and accessibility to children of both sexes rather than stereotypical male remoteness and authoritarianism. By contrast, Bederman notes of the M&RFM activists,

They never, ever spoke about their wives. They never spoke about domesticity at all … . And they never, ever, blamed men for failing with their families … [or] concede[d] that masculinity was anything but masterful, powerful and in constant control. In contrast, [the] very name Promise Keepers refers to the idea that men have broken their promises to their wives and are treating them poorly. Indeed, sense of husbandly failure is evidently the source of much of the emotion at Promise Keepers events. Nothing could be more unlike the Men and Religion Forward Movement.21

Thus, while PK, like the M&RFM , is concerned to emphasize a "masculine" form of Christianity, the content of that masculinity is quite different. The M&RFM and the Chapman Crusade were promoting a kind of muscular, individualistic Christianity in response to men's loss of independence and accountability in the corporate world. PK, in addition to making men more family-conscious, is trying to help them find some kind of moral compass in a sea of relativistic hedonism that has surrounded them for the past three decades. Far from being a source of personal liberation, many men are finding that materialism, recreational drugs, and the uncontrolled pursuit of eros—whether via pornography consumption or multiple sex partners—are traps from which they desperately need deliverance.

Such temptations, of course, are not new, as Chapman realized when he preached about the sins of greed, intemperance, and adultery to his Boston audiences in 1909. But whereas Chapman and other revivalists of this time urged men, with the help of God, to exercise rugged self-discipline, PK leaders have added things like psychological self-understanding and ongoing accountability to male friends as ways of dealing with sexual and substance addictions. In this way they have plundered what is useful from the therapeutic culture of the late twentieth century, even as they preach against its individualistic excesses.

The male-directed religious campaigns

of the early 1900s were thus a frank

attempt to inject a counterdose of

masculinity, suitably redefined for a

corporate age, into a church life now

perceived as overly effeminate and

woman dominated.

The Chapman Crusade, unlike the M&RFM , allowed women at its meetings, and even had Eva Booth of the Salvation Army preach several evenings to receptive audiences. But while they urged wayward men to dwell on their tearful, praying mothers, crusade leaders marginalized the women in their midst. On one occasion, women were reproached for attending repeated meetings instead of making it possible for others to attend—something that was never said to men, even though press accounts noted the same men sitting in front-row seats at Tremont Temple day after day. And their voices were regularly pitted in meetings against the men's, to see who could sing the loudest. "The result," writes Bendroth, "was an audible as well as visible denial of religious feminization."22

Ambiguity about gender relations also characterizes the Promise Keepers movement. There are women on PK's paid staff, and women are not, in fact, barred from attending PK rallies (the complications of antidiscrimination law make it difficult to restrict a public event to one demographic group only). But they are not encouraged to come, except as volunteer helpers working the food-service and sales areas (where, to be fair, many male volunteers are also active). The stated rationale for discouraging women from attending is that the conferences deal specifically with men's issues, that men are more apt to hear and receive PK teaching in an all-male setting, and that this is in no way misogynist because a primary goal of the rallies is "to deepen the commitment of men to respect and honor women."23

But PK leaders equivocate on the meaning of gender reconciliation in a way that they do not on another of their central issues—namely, race relations. At press conferences, PK media representatives assert that the organization has no position on the subject of male headship, because it is not a confessional issue and therefore not part of their statement of faith. As a result, their platform speakers include an unpredictable mix of men defending, by turns, husbandly headship and mutual submission between spouses (which, at the very least, is bound to be confusing to the men's wives back home). There is an inconsistency here, for neither is racial reconciliation part of PK's statement of faith—it only appears in the "Seven Promises" document to which men are invited to commit themselves after having responded to a basic gospel message. Yet although some white Christians, especially in the deep South, are still hostile to the message of racial equality, PK does not equivocate on its importance, or change the ethnic mix of its platform speakers to accommodate differences in geography or racial views.

Moreover, PK leaders would not dream of trying to teach about improved race relations without having speakers of various ethnic groups represented—yet they seem to believe that they can teach about improved gender relations without ever (except for a couple of early rallies) having any women speakers on their platform. In the absence of any systematic evaluation research, we have no way of knowing how PK wives in general feel about such mixed messages. Nor is it clear whether PK's equivocation on the subject of male headship represents a "patriarchy of the last gasp,"24 en route to the kind of mutuality embraced by Christians for Biblical Equality, or a "patriarchy of the first backlash," en route to a formal alliance with groups such as the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which publicly claims kinship with PK.25

What seems indisputably clear is that PK has issued a wake-up call to men who have majored too little on responsibility and too much on self-indulgence. Evangelical women, if anything, have taken their responsibilities too seriously—a residue of the Victorian feminization of piety, whereby women were expected to keep both home and church running smoothly, and now (for many) full-time waged work as well. Despite its equivocation on the issue of gender equality, PK sends its male members a strong message about pulling their weight in all three of these areas.

One of the most unfortunate legacies of the Victorian period was the doctrine of separate spheres, which in effect divided the cultural mandate by gender by telling women to be fruitful and multiply at home while men went off to subdue the earth. Not only does this fly in the face of Genesis 1:26-28, in which both mandates are clearly given to both members of the primal pair, it also contradicts most of human history; for as my earlier summary of the colonial period indicates, the truly "traditional" family is one in which economic productivity and hands-on child rearing are shared by both parents in a single location. Sincere Christians are still struggling, in this postmodern era, to recover that balance even as they continue to differ on the scope of men's and women's roles in the church. To the extent that organizations like Promise Keepers participate in this exercise, they have not merely repeated, but transcended the narrow agenda of revivalist men's groups of the early 1900s, and thus deserve our support.

Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of psychology and philosophy and resident scholar at the Center for Christian Women in Leadership at Eastern College. With Anne Carr, she is the editor of Religion, Feminism, and the Family (Westminster John Knox).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. "3000 Men at Temple," Boston Post, February 1, 1909, p. 2, as quoted in Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, "Men, Masculinity, and Urban Revivalism: J. Wilbur Chapman's Boston Crusade, 1909," Journal of Presbyterian History, in press.

2. Washington Glidden, "Men and Religion Forward Movement: A Personal Conviction," Christian Advocate (Boston), Vol. 87, 1912, p. 369. Quoted in Gail Bederman, "'The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough': The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism," American Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sept. 1989), pp. 432-65 (quotation from p. 452).

3. For a more complete description of the Chapman revival, see Bendroth, "Men, Masculinity, and Urban Revivalism."

4. See Bederman, "The Men and Religion Forward Movement" for a more complete analysis.

5. The "Danvers Statement" is published as appendix 2 in John Piper and Wayne Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (Crossway, 1991), pp. 469-72. An accompanying note states, "The 'Danvers Statement' was prepared by several evangelical leaders at a cbmw in Wheaton, Ill., in November 1988." The statement also appeared, among other places, as a two-page advertisement in Christianity Today, Jan. 13, 1989, pp. 40-41.

6. "Men, Women and Biblical Equality," published by Christians for Biblical Equality, 122 W. Franklin Ave., Suite 218, Minneapolis, MN 55404-2541.

7. For a more detailed analysis, see Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, "Servanthood or Soft Patriarchy? A Christian Feminist Looks at the Promise Keepers Movement," Journal of Men's Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Feb. 1997), pp. 233-61.

8. For a detailed account of the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference, see James R. Edwards, "Earthquake in the Mainline," Christianity Today, Nov. 14, 1994, pp. 39-43. It should be noted that, due to the volume of grassroots protest over the funding to the 1993 conference by Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) agencies, the Re-Imagining movement is now an independent, nonprofit organization supported by individual donations.

9. "A Christian Women's Declaration," by the Ecumenical Coalition of Women and Society, Janice Shaw Crouse, Project Director: A Project of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1521 16th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. The ird is an umbrella organization supporting church renewal efforts in the American Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian (U.S.A.) churches.

10. Bendroth, "Men, Masculinity, and Urban Revivalism." See also her Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press, 1993).

11. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood (Basic Books, 1993).

12. Bederman, "The Men and Religion Forward Movement," p. 436.

13. Bederman, "The Men and Religion Forward Movement," p. 436.

14. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (Yale University Press, 1977).

15. "Intense Fervor, Big Crowds," Boston Globe, February 1, 1909, p. 6 (quoted in Bendroth, "Men, Masculinity, and Urban Revivalism").

16. Bederman, "The Men and Religion Forward Movement," p. 434. (Bederman wrote this article in 1989, before the rise of Promise Keepers.)

17. Henry Rood, "Men and Religion," The Independent, Vol. 71 (1911), p. 1364, as quoted in Bederman, "The Men and Religion Forward Movement," p. 441.

18. Martha Bamsley Bruere, "Are Women Losing Their Religion?" Collier's, Feb. 7, 1925, p. 42, as quoted in Bederman, "The Men and Religion Forward Movement," p. 457.

19. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael Kaufman, "Weekend Warriors: The New Men's Movement," in Michael Kimmel, ed. The Politics of Manhood (Temple University Press, 1995), p. 19.

20. See, for example, E. Glenn Wagner, "Strong Mentoring Relationships," in The Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper (Focus on the Family, 1994), pp. 57-66.

21. Gail Bederman, "Response to Panel on Religion, Sports and Manhood," American Academy of Religion, New Orleans, LA, November 1996, pp. 4-5.

22. Bendroth, "Men, Masculinity, and Urban Revivalism."

23. "Why For Men Only?" in the PK brochure Break Down the Walls: 1996 Promise Keepers Men's Conferences, p. 29.

24. The phrase is from sociologist Judith Stacy's Brave New Families: Stories of Domestic Upheaval in Late Twentieth Century America (Basic Books, 1990).

25. One early woman speaker, Holly Faith Phillips (wife of PK founding president Randy Phillips), has recently written What Does She Want From Me Anyway? Honest Answers to the Questions Men Ask About Women (Zondervan, 1997). In it she defends a "soft" version of male family headship, but otherwise shows a liberal feminist sense of justice regarding gender relations in the workplace, and stays surprisingly free of appeal to simplistic gender stereotypes.

Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@booksandculture.com.

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