Promise Keepers Research Articles

“The One Who Did Not Break His Promises”

This article examines Native peoples within the race reconciliation movement in evangelical Christianity. Native evangelicals have become increasingly prominent within New Charismatic movements, particularly through the work of the Promise Keepers movement. This presence promotes male dominance, political quietism, and Christian imperialism within Native communities. At the same time, however, Native peoples have used race reconciliation as an opportunity to promote treaty rights and sovereignty struggles within White evangelical communities. Thus, it is unclear if the race reconciliation movement will ultimately push people of color to the Right or White evangelicals to the Left.

John P Bartkowski, . The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 184 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewJohn P Bartkowski, . The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers, and Godly Men. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 184 pp. $60.00 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).Danielle Du Bois GottwigDanielle Du Bois GottwigSouth Bend, Indiana. Search for more articles by this author South Bend, Indiana.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 86, Number 4October 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/509670 Views: 11Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Neo-Institutionalism, Social Movements, and the Cultural Reproduction of A Mentalité: Promise Keepers Reconstruct the Madonna/Whore Complex

Theorizing the linkages between culture and social movements has proven elusive, as available theories are ill-equipped to move beyond agent-centered producerist accounts of culture-movement dynamics. In a departure from the popular framing perspective, which treats culture as a “repertoire of resources,” this research draws upon neo-institutionalism and the notion of a mentalité to demonstrate that Promise Keepers' leadership reproduces a “culturally ascendant” sexual script, one that juxtaposes a bipolar Madonna/Whore image of female sexuality against a biologically driven, uncontrollable male sexual drive, without resorting to the strategic claims-making that characterizes much of the rest of their gender discourse.

Prophetic Politics: Christian Social Movements and American Democracy

Prophetic Politics: Christian Social Movements and American Democracy David S. Gutterman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. I began reading this book with radio reports on Hurricane Katrina in the background. I paused to listen for an interview with a weary pilgrim from New Having escaped from Superdome hell, he had arrived in Houston with nothing more than his MacDonald's uniform as a badge of his earnestness. After resting a few hours, he wanted to search immediately for a job. Framing himself within an Exodus-shaped story of crisis escaped through wandering, he felt that he had struggled through to redemption: This here is the Promised Land. I ain't gom' back to New Orleans. At that very moment, David Gutterman was pulling my attention to the social level of biblical Exodus narratives that surface as themes of evangelically inspired political movements. For me, and probably for you, his persuasive analysis will change your estimate of the Bible's flexible vitality as a source of calls to transformation. Gutterman, a political scientist at Linfield College with an ethical bent, is concerned about the compatibility between religious discourse and democratic practice -and this defines his book's timely relevance. Since the presidential elections of 2000 and especially 2004, many Democratic party members have felt a dilemma. Sensing that they have been defeated by the religiously motivated who scorn secular indifference to spiritual matters, they wonder how to recover political power. But pretending to be religious would be dishonest. And even when they possess religious beliefs, they are so wedded to the wall of separation First Amendment interpretation that they feel constitutional inhibitions against bringing them to discourse about public issues-preferring to shun any alliance predicated on faith. Without being a political handbook for such Democrats, this book will clarify many issues for them. Gutterman's interdisciplinary analysis derives its theory and democratic norms from cultural studies and its conceptual orientations from Sacvan Bercovitch's American Jeremiad (1978), and the diverse writings of Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur. He gains primary guidance from Arendt's notion of a democratic story telling in which participants offer their visions as opinion rather than certitude; it invites perspectives from other stories told in the same spirit of search for sensus communis-that condition in which we are drawn out of private perspectives into contemplating things as others see them. The democratic mentality, so understood, is a state of doubt about what we personally believe while we entertain options suggested by others. Apart from developing this interesting conception of how democratic citizens would create a distinctive story culture, Gutterman focuses on the Hebrew Bible's Exodus and selected American evangelical movements that have emphasized it in prescribing for America's ills. Gutterman follows Bercovitch in mapping a recurrent Exodus paradigm in social polemics: identification of failures in the wilderness, threat of divine punishment, and promise of redemption after self transformation (9). Biblical Exodus moves from hellish bondage, to a covenant for release, a period of journey and test of worthiness as God's covenant partner, and redemption through delivery to Canaan, the promised land. Gutterman's impressive ingenuity lies in showing how four separate evangelical movements accept this narrative scaffolding of Exodus to imagine their situation in the American wilderness as they tell the new stories of Mosaic redemption. Those movements are sketched through the twentieth-century prophets Billy Sunday (1862-1935) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), and two significant formally organized contemporary groups, Promise Keepers and Call to Renewal. How the Exodus story is retold among them is used as a measure of their compatibility with democratic politics. …

Beyond Big Bucks and Media Savvy: An Interview with Jean Hardisty and Esther Kaplan on the Rise of the Conservative Movement in the U.S. and Jewish Social Justice Work Today

Beyond Big Bucks and Media Savvy:An Interview with Jean Hardisty and Esther Kaplan on the Rise of the Conservative Movement in the U.S. and Jewish Social Justice Work Today Cole Krawitz (bio), Jean V. Hardisty, and Esther Kaplan Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Photomontage by Lisa Link Forever Free Text from White House website news releases: President Participates in Social Security Conversation in New York Greece Athena Middle and High School, Athena Performing Arts Center, Greece, New York http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/05/20050524-3.html; photo of my pen at the Gallery of Social and Political Art in Boston, MA, September, 2005 during the "What is Freedom Exhibition?" in which I participated. [End Page 76] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Introduction If the shofar hadn't blasted loudly enough, a recent article in The Nation (November 7, 2005), "Wrong About the Right" by Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bhargava, has sent necessary shock waves through progressive circles and organizations, challenging the dominant narrative of how the right has risen to power. In my position at a national public policy organization,1 I often meet policy wonks and advocates who confidently describe the rise of the conservative movement as a result of big bucks and media savvy. In a joint interview with Hardisty, who has spent the last thirty years monitoring the rise of the Christian right,2 and Esther Kaplan, author of With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right,3 both confirmed the hazards of this perspective. "The idea that money and a good PR machine are all the progressive movement needs doesn't recognize that the conservative mood in the country is real and widespread," said Hardisty. "We have to understand [End Page 77] what left people open to the conservative message." Both Hardisty and Kaplan report on the extensive grassroots organizing and mobilization that have galvanized the electoral and political power of the right. In Mobilizing Resentment: Conservative Resurgence from the John Birch Society to the Promise Keepers,4 Hardisty details the formation and nuances of right-wing movements as they built upon strong social and political opposition to the expansion of rights for women, people of color and LGBT people over the last thirty years. Documenting the historical proliferation of conservatism, and how the right used specific campaign strategies to win the hearts of the nation, Hardisty's work has become a cornerstone for liberals and leftists. Kaplan's work in With God on Their Side focuses on the Bush administration's rise to power in the larger context of the nation's swing and embrace of the heavily-coded "moral values" issues. In her introduction, Kaplan highlights voting statistics from the 2000 presidential election to demonstrate the political base behind the Bush administration—evangelical conservatives. "Though white evangelicals constitute only about 25 percent of the national population, this highly motivated voting bloc made up 40 percent of Bush's electorate in 2000, an amount he hopes to boost in 2004. When that number is combined with the most religiously observant Catholics, the total comes to 51 percent of all Bush votes in 2000. The Christian right is not just another special interest group, like the NRA. This is Bush's base." In the afterword, Kaplan commented on this continuing trend in the 2004 elections "On November 2… Bush [won] both the election and the popular vote, with a historically high evangelical turnout and a plurality of Americans saying that 'moral values' had guided their decision. That 22 percent swath of American voters chose Bush by an 85 to 14 margin and beat out those who were most concerned with jobs and the economy, terrorism, and Iraq….Bush increased his total votes by around 9 million over 2000—and 7 million of those were Catholic and evangelical conservatives." As many of us struggle with our yearning for what Hardisty called the "magic bullet" to fix this problem, there is still a strong need for the progressive movement to stop shrugging off the deep political base and power of the right as mere manipulation, or expressing arrogant disregard for people...

Do real men pray?: images of the Christian man and male spirituality in white Protestant America

Spirituality has long been regarded as a haven of the female gender?and a componentequally deficient in men?particularly among the white male Protestant population.So, it was with much surprise that the American media greeted the seeminglysudden explosion of the Promise Keepers movement with its emotional stadium ralliesand vivid images of praying men openly recommitting to their faith. The shatteringof a long-held stereotype brought into question the veracity behind long-held perceptions of men and the depth and nature of their piety.In Do Real Men Pray?, author Charles H. Lippy argues that, in fact, American menhave always exhibited a deep and profound spirituality. He challenges the popular beliefthat men somehow cannot match the profundity found in female spirituality. Instead, Lippy lays out a convincing counterargument that the United States has a long and pronounced history of male spirituality.Do Real Men Pray? takes the reader through a chronological history of male spiritualityfrom the colonial period to the present day. Along the way, Lippy introduces readers tosix distinct, powerful images that manifested themselves as the ideal of American Protestant identity at different periods in history: the dutiful patriarch, the gentleman entrepreneur, the courageous adventurer, the efficient businessman, the positive thinker (inspired by the ubiquitous Norman Vincent Peale), and the modern-day faithful leader. From the piety of Cotton Mather to the ?muscular Christianity? of the early twentieth century, this book reveals a clear understanding of the obvious effect spirituality had on men.This book is the first to address thematically the history of male spirituality in theUnited States and is a rich, well-documented addition to the field of religious studies.Do Real Men Pray? will appeal to anyone with an interest in religious history in theUnited States as well as anyone interested in gender studies.

From Panthers to Promise Keepers: rethinking the men's movement

Chapter 1 Introduction: Close Encounters Chapter 2 Men, Masculinity, and Mourning on the Mall: National Manhood and Male Romance Chapter 3 Revolutionary Men: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Reconfiguration of Black Masculine Ideals Chapter 4 A Circle of Loving Companions: Radically Gay Chapter 5 Reenchanting (White) Masculinity: The Profeminist Heritage of Men's Liberation Chapter 6 Iron and Ironing Johns: Being Born Again in the Mythopoetic Movement Chapter 7 Fathers of Themselves Chapter 8 Reinventing the Husband Chapter 9 Doing The Work of Love: Promise Keepers on Work, Marriage, and Fathering Chapter 10 Beyond a Focus on the Family: Love Work As Race Reconciliation Chapter 11 The Politics of Feeling

The Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers and Godly Men. By John P. Bartkowski. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Pp. 184.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewThe Promise Keepers: Servants, Soldiers and Godly Men. By John P. Bartkowski. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Pp. 184.Anna GavanasAnna GavanasUniversity of Leeds Search for more articles by this author University of LeedsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 111, Number 1July 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/491762 Views: 15Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Godly Manhood Going Wild?: Transformations in Conservative Protestant Masculinity

This article assesses shifting ideals of masculinity among conservative Protestants focused on the current best seller, Wild at heart, by John Eldredge (2001). First, we compare Eldredges notion of manhood as essentially heroic, dangerous, alive and free with the ideals of responsible manhood central to much Promise Keepers literature. Second, we explore the salience of this shift for men's relationships with each other, their wives and female friends. Analysis of interview data with a sample of married men and women in two churches and one para-church campus ministry highlight the active and selective reading of religious texts across gender and age. Overall, Eldredges slightly dangerous masculinity represents a re-articulation of the nineteenth century myth of the self-made man and is both a reaction against the rationalized nature of paid employment, as well as the responsible and feminized expectations of Promise Keepers' ideal of servant leadership and involved fatherhood.

Rise Up, O Men of God: The “Men and Religion Forward Movement” and the “Promise Keepers.” By L. Dean Allen. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002. ix + 312 pp. $45.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

Rise Up, O Men of God: The “Men and Religion Forward Movement” and the “Promise Keepers.” By L. Dean Allen. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002. ix + 312 pp. $45.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

The promise keepers: servants, soldiers, and godly men

book is about much more than just Promise Keepers. It offers critical insight into shifting ideas about masculinity, family, multiculturalism, fraternal associations, men and sports, subcultural boundary work, and grassroots social movements.--Sally K. Gallagher, author of Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life The evangelical men's movement widely known as the Promise Keepers--PK for short--captured America's imagination and generated intense controversy during the 1990s. PK promoted adherence to a strict code of conduct that masculinized conservative religious and social values. However, the movement now evokes little more than a hazy memory of football stadiums teeming with tear-stained faces and clasped arms that signaled spiritual transformation. What factors contributed to their demise, and what broader insights can be gleaned from the rapid rise and fall of the movement? This is the first book to consider the turbulent forces that contributed to the group's wild popularity, declining fortunes, and subsequent efforts to reinvent itself. John P. Bartkowski provides a broad and balanced portrait of the movement while evaluating its impact on the landscape of American religion. He argues that there is much to be learned about the changing contours of religion, culture, and social life through a study of the Promise Keepers. By carefully examining the character and contagious appeal of the movement, he sheds new light on evangelicalism, gender, family, therapeutic culture, sport, and multiculturalism. John P. Bartkowski is an associate professor of sociology at Mississippi State University. He is the author of Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiations in Evangelical Families and the co-author of Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era.

After whiteness: unmaking an American majority

View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction. Beautifully written and rigorously argued, After Whiteness is the most important theoretical statement on white racial formation since 'whiteness studies' began its current academic sojourn. By reading debates about multiculturalism, ethnicity, and the desire for difference as part of the material practices of the U.S. university system, it engages questions of race, humanistic inquiry, intellectual labor, and the democratic function of critical thought. The result is a critically nuanced analysis that promises to solidify Hill's reputation as one of the finest thinkers of his generation. --Robyn Wiegman, Duke University Mike Hill's After Whiteness is an important, provocative and timely book. --Against the Current lucid, fiercely argued, brilliantly conceived, richly provocative work in an emergent and growing area of cultural studies. After Whiteness sets new directions in American literary and cultural studies, and will become a landmark in the field. --Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Americanists across the disciplines will find Hill's analysis insightful and brilliant. A must for any scholar who wishes to, in Ralph Ellison's words, 'go to the territory.' --Sharon Holland, University of Illinois at Chicago As each new census bears out, the rise of multiracialism in the United States will inevitably result in a white minority. In spite of the recent proliferation of academic studies and popular discourse on whiteness, however, there has been little discussion of the future: what comes after whiteness? On the brink of what many are now imagining as a post-white American future, it remains a matter of both popular and academic uncertainty as to what will emerge in its place. After Whiteness aims to address just that, exploring the remnants of white identity to ask how an emergent post-white national imaginary figure into public policy issues, into the habits of sexual intimacy, and into changes within public higher education. Through discussions of the 2000 census and debates over multiracial identity, the volatile psychic investments that white heterosexual men have in men of color--as illustrated by the Christian men's group the Promise Keepers and the neo-fascist organization the National Alliance--and the rise of identity studies and diversity within the contemporary public research university, Hill surveys race among the ruins of white America. At this crucial moment, when white racial change has made its ambivalent cultural debut, Hill demonstrates that the prospect of an end to whiteness haunts progressive scholarship on race as much as it haunts the paranoid visions of racists.

Qualitative data: an introduction to coding and analysis

Preface AcknowledgmentsPart I: Getting into Qualitative Research1. Introducing Qualitative Hypothesis-Generating Research: The Yeshiva University Fatherhood ProjectPart II: Planning Your First Research Study2. Designing Hypothesis-Generating Research: The Haitian Fathers Study3. Qualitative and Quantitative Research as Complementary Strategies Part III: Analyzing Your First Research Study4. Coding 1: The Basic Ideas 5. Coding 2: The Mechanics, Phase 1: Making the Text Manageable 6. Coding 2: The Mechanics, Phase 2: Hearing What Was Said 7. Coding 2: The Mechanics, Phase 3: Developing Theory 8. Convincing Other People: The Issues Formerly Known as Reliability, Validity, and Generalizability Part IV: Designing and Analyzing Your Next Research Study9. Designing Your Next Study Using Theoretical Sampling: The Promise Keeper Fathers 10. Analyzing Your Next Study Using Elaborative Coding: The Promise Keeper Fathers Part V: Final Thoughts11. The Why of Qualitative Research: A Personal View Appendix A: Simplifying the Bookkeeping with Qualitative Data Analysis Programs Appendix B: The Haitian Fathers Study Appendix C: The Promise Keepers Study References Index About the Authors

Just Married? Adversarial Divorce and the Conjugal Body Politic

Fault does not figure in Australian divorce law. The Family Law Act 1975 regulates divorce, allowing a decree nisi to be issued where a marriage has irretrievably broken down. Australian regulations do not inquire into the cause of breakdown, but simply seek evidence that the divorcing spouses have lived separately and apart for at least 12 months. However, it has not always been so and, if the backlash against womens interests accelerates, it may not remain so. Recently, mens rights groups such as the ‘Blackshirts’ and ‘Promise Keepers’ have added their weight to the backlash push for a return to those ‘family values’ epitomized by an earlier, ostensibly pre-feminist era. These groups trumpet the desirability of truly lifelong marriage and an end to ‘easy’ divorce. They favour marriage laws harking back to obsolete, fault-based judgements. This article revisits divorce premised on matrimonial offence. With the benefit of hindsight, the Acts adversarial operations and effects are re-examined to expose the vestiges of coverture inhering therein.

Word about Recent Book: II. Historical-Theological Studies: Rise Up, O Men of God: The “Men and Religion Forward Movement” and the “Promise Keepers

Word about Recent Book: II. Historical-Theological Studies: Rise Up, O Men of God: The “Men and Religion Forward Movement” and the “Promise Keepers

Evangelical identity and gendered family life

Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life provides a sociological and historical analysis of gender, family, and work among evangelical Protestants. In this innovative study, Sally Gallagher traces two lines of gender ideals - one of husbands' authority and leadership, the other of mutuality and partnership in marriage - from the Puritans to the Promise Keepers into the lives of ordinary evangelicals today. Rather than simply reacting against or accommodating themselves to secular society, Gallagher argues that both traditional and egalitarian evangelicals draw on longstanding beliefs about gender, human nature, and the person of God. The author bases her arguments on an analysis of evangelical family advice literature, data from a large national survey and personal interviews with over three hundred evangelicals nationwide. No other work in this area draws on such a range of data and methodological resources. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life establishes a standard for future research by locating the sources, strategies, and meaning of gender within evangelical Protestantism.

Soft-Boiled Masculinity

This article examines the tensions in the identities of men who belong to the Promise Keepers (PK) movement by uncovering the social conditions that lead men to rethink gender and racial ideologies. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, the author draws on gender and social movement scholarship to reveal how contradictory gender and racial ideologies shape PKs' identities. Furthermore, the PKs' impact on gender and race relations is also contradictory. PK fosters men's growth on an interactional level, allowing men to embrace a more expressive and caring masculinity that includes cross-racial bonding. Simultaneously, however, PK ignores, and indirectly reinforces, the structural conditions that underpin gender and racial privilege among white men.

Remaking the Godly Marriage: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families

Remaking the Godly Marriage provides a careful and insightful portrait of gender in contemporary conservative evangelicalism that would serve as an accessible text for seminars on gender and religion or contemporary evangelicalism. Most significantly, Bartkowski's focus on how identity and responsibilities are carefully negotiated between men and women takes seriously the sociological claim that gender is relational and thereby fills a gap in the literature on gender in conservative evangelical families.-Journal of Religion This book is beautifully written and highly engaging. uses finely chosen family- and organizational-level examples to illustrate theoretical points.-Gender & Society Bartkowski draws from a treasure trove of stories to make evangelicals understandable and alive. Like everyone else, they struggle to create workable ways of being men, women, and families in a changing world. -Nancy Tatom Ammerman, author of Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World Bartkowski very nicely mixes methods--combining an analysis of evangelical advice manuals, an ethnography of an evangelical congregation, and in-depth interviews with married evangelical couples--to produce an important contribution to our growing understanding of the complexity, ambivalence, and diversity within American evangelicalism.-Christian Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Using a deft combination of historical material, textual analysis, interviews and ethnographic observation, unpacks the multiple discourses about, and practices within, marriage and families among evangelical Protestants.-Rhys H. Williams, editor of Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality John P. investigates the debates over gender and the family as they are manifested within contemporary evangelicalism. The author asks: Have debates over relations between husband and wife been altered by the emergence of new evangelical movements such as the Promise Keepers? And given the fact that leading evangelicals advance competing visions of godly family life, how do conservative religious spouses make sense of their own family relationships and gender identities? Through in-depth interviews with evangelical married couples, reveals how these men and women jointly negotiate gender roles within their families and selectively appropriate values of the larger culture even as they attempt to cope with the conflicting messages of their own faith. John P. is an assistant professor in the department of sociology, anthropology, and social work at Mississippi State University.

Gender politics in conservative men's movements: Beyond complexity, ambiguity and pragmatism

The article examines different attempts to analyse the Christian men's movement, Promise Keepers, and the fatherhood responsibility movement. Complexity used as an argument to abandon the search for a gender ideology in the movements is criticized. Despite the presence of complex features, for example, regarding Promise Keepers' view on gender roles in the family, there are common assumptions of gender. These assumptions are found in the very conception of the movements: in the "society-in-a-moral-crisis" argument. Here, men are actors and women are passively dependent on men. Promise Keepers' "soft" pragmatism and use of feminist rhetoric disguise this gender politics within the movement.

Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality

Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality