Promise Keepers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Promise Keepers movement has to be understood as an adjustment in
Christian fundamentalist right-wing tactics in the context of the collapsed
Gingrich Revolution. Nowadays, a mass right-wing Christian-based movement
can not call for the sort of turbo-charged capitalism that Gingrich called
for. The reason for this is clear. The "born again" ranks include millions
of men and women who belong to the working-class and who are feeling the
pains of two decades of big business assaults on wages and the safety net.

The head of Promise Keepers is one Bill McCartney, who used to coach
football at the University of Colorado. The real prime mover, however, is
Reverend James Dobson, head of an outfit called Focus on the Family. In an
article in the July 1995 Focus on the Family Newsletter, Dobson writes: "We
have tried unsuccessfully, but valiantly, to keep President Clinton from
permitting homosexuals in the military and from assigning women to combat
situations. We have fought for the unborn child...." And, "Most recently we
have opposed the efforts of Haley Barbour, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, to move his party away from its historic moral
underpinnings and toward a 'ush middle' that stands for nothing."

The Promise Keepers, however, does not make such attacks a central part of
their activity. Rather they stress the need to build "strong families",
which of course implicitly repudiates homosexuality and abortion rights.
The need to build "strong families" dovetails neatly with the anxiety of
Christian working-class families, especially black families. Today's NY
Times reports that:

"Most of the attention to Promise Keepers focused on what the group has to
say about relationships between the sexes, but at Saturday's event the
leadership clearly signaled that what now tops their agenda is relations
between the races.

"At Saturday's rally, Bill McCartney, the former University of Colorado
football coach who founded Promise Keepers seven years ago, announced what
amounted to a deadline for Christian churches to end their own racism.
McCartney, who still goes by the nickname 'Coach,' told the crowd that his
goal was to gather a multiracial rally of Christian men on the steps of
every state capitol at noon on Jan. 1, 2000 to pronounce that the Christian
church has eradicated racism within its own ranks."

Much of the organizing in New York has been geared to Black and Latino
churches. This follows on the footsteps of recent attempts to win Black and
Latino schools to Christian fundamentalist opposition to the "Rainbow
Curriculum." Since one out of seven people at Saturday's rally were black
and since a number of minority local school board members have spoken out
against homosexuality, we should be cognizant that the right-wing *is*
making inroads into this progressive constituency. The goal, of course, is
to create something equivalent to Buthelezi's movement in South Africa or
Savimbi's in Angola.

The other big campaign of the Christian right is "defense of religious
liberties." This is about penalizing countries that try to rein in
Christian missionaries. When I have been listening to Dobson's show on NY's
WMCA all-Christian talk radio, I have noticed a big emphasis on this. There
are continual reports about how some Christian missionary or another was
murdered or jailed in some predominantly Moslem nation. Sudan seems to be
on Dobson's hit-list right now. Vietnam has also come under attack.
Legislation is pending in Congress to punish such nations through trade
sanctions. Since the missionaries are nothing but counter-revolutionaries,
it is clear that the political agenda of the legislation is anti-Communism
or anti-Islam rather than religious liberty.

Louis Proyect