Christian Soldiers
The Promise Keepers Come to Fort Bragg

By Barry Yeoman

Originally published in The Independent, April 10, 1996


WITHIN MOMENTS OF MY ENTRANCE into the Lee Field House, a middle-aged man with a "Repent now, oh sinner" sweatshirt bounds up to greet me. "How are you today?" he says, extending his arm for a handshake. When I offer my hand, he pulls me into a full-body embrace. "Praise the Lord," he says, pulling back and looking me in the eye. "Jesus. Jesus."

There's a lot of hugging going on in this gymnasium tonight—not a common occurrence on the Fort Bragg army base outside Fayetteville, North Carolina. "It's the first time I've ever seen it happen," says Captain Doug Lax, a chaplain for the 82nd Airborne Division. But tonight, the Promise Keepers have come to Fort Bragg for a four-hour "Wake Up Call," and men who crave the embraces of Jesus and of one another are streaming in by the hundreds.

The Promise Keepers is one of the fastest growing phenomena in modern American religion: an organization of evangelical Christian men who come together in stadiums across the United States for raucous, prayerful rallies that reaffirm the role of males as spiritual leaders of their families. Founded by former University of Colorado head football coach Bill McCartney in 1990, it has ballooned from a local fellowship into a $64 million organization with three hundred employees. Last year, the Promise Keepers drew more than 720,000 men to 13 rallies across the country.

The Fort Bragg event is one of seven smaller gatherings in North Carolina, including on in Raleigh April 20, kicking off the fellowship's biggest year ever. By the end of 1996, Promise Keepers hopes to fill Charlotte Motor Speedway, New York's Shea Stadium, Atlanta's Georgia Dome and at least 19 other facilities. (Four midwestern rallies have already sold out, at $60 a ticket.) And this year's gatherings are just preludes to the big event: In 1997 Promise Keepers plans to draw a million men to Washington, D.C., for a gargantuan display of Christian masculinity.

If any place in America needs an infusion of spirituality, it's Fort Bragg. The base, which has a long history of hate-group activity, was stunned late last year by two savage racial incidents. In the more recent case, three white soldiers went out drinking at a local strip bar—and allegedly ended their night shooting up a black neighborhood of small wood-frame houses and brick public-housing units, killing two African Americans. Officials found a large Nazi flag and white-supremacist literature in the mobile home rented by one of the suspects.

What better place for Promise Keepers to preach its messages of racial reconciliation and male responsibility—and to encourage men to reach out in deep, loving friendships across racial lines?

Sounds like an event worth celebrating—until you learn the rest of Promise Keepers' message. In Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, a collection of essays, evangelist Tony Evans urges Christian men to sit down with their wives "and say something like this: 'Honey, I've made a terrible mistake. I've given you my rule. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that rule.' Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm not suggesting that you ask for your rule back. I'm urging you to take it back. "

And McCartney, the founder, has himself added to Promise Keepers' reputation as a purveyor of backward-looking sexual values. Besides opposing abortion rights, McCartney campaigned for Colorado's Amendment 2, which, if upheld by the Supreme Court, would prohibit local governments from granting civil rights to lesbians and gay men. "[A homosexual has] internal upheavals that literally drive a person stark raving mad," he said during the Amendment 2 campaign. "That torment makes him the most miserable of all people."


THE BASKETBALL GOALS HAVE BEEN CRANKED toward the ceiling in Lee Field House, and the court has been covered by metal folding chairs. A Christian pop band-flute, drums, electric piano—plays an instrumental version of Rise Up O Men of God. It gives the room a First-Baptist-Church-meets-Windham-Hill kind of feel.

I take a seat near three young men, each sitting with his own Bible. They seem so relieved to be here. Male bonding for most of Fort Bragg's soldiers consists of getting drunk in Fayetteville's many bars (for a while, midget tossing was the recreation of choice). "My buddies criticize me for being a Christian," says Pfc. Eric Scheidt, the most talkative of the three. "They ridicule me." He's a gum-chewing 23-year-old with close-cropped hair, a tie around his neck, and a cellular phone at his feet. "If I should pass away on post, I don't think anyone would try to help my wife." Scheidt says he's been looking for an "accountability partner": a Christian brother who will listen when he confesses his deepest fears and temptations. "I'm looking for a guy," he says. "Looking for him everywhere."

And here, in this room, are 2,000 of those guys, one-fifth of them African American. They sing their hearts out: "Face to face, brother to brother.... Growing together, we're building the Kingdom of God." They wave their hands in the air. Occasionally one breaks into the sort of fist-pumping fervor that seems more fitting at a Duke-Carolina basketball game than at a worship service. And they listen to a sermon by Al Whittinghill, minister-at-large for Ambassadors for Christ International—a colorful oration on the power of the cross. "Some of you in here are in prison—not a prison made of bars and bricks, mortar. You live in hiding. You live in loneliness. Maybe you dread what each new day may bring." At the evening's climactic moment, he offers to set the prisoners free—by helping them shed their old lives and commit themselves fully to Christ. "I'm asking you to have a funeral and a coronation," he says, inviting the men forward.

First one, then tens, then hundreds of men leave their seats and walk toward the stage, as the preacher implores yet more to come. "Oh brothers, don't be afraid of the breaking up—the deep, deep breaking up," he says gently. The men squeeze in tight together. Musk fills the air. Arms wrap around shoulders. Some hold back tears. Whittinghill blesses the newly saved—"make me a man of God for my wife, my children"—and then the men retire behind the bleachers for an even deeper catharsis. Soldiers hold one another, their entire bodies sobbing. Black and white men grip shoulders, forehead to forehead, praying together. Knots of men form interracial group hugs. It would take a hardened cynic to deny the deep faith and brotherly love present.

Up in the bleachers, two soldiers forego the group scene; instead, they sit alone. One tells the other about his broken heart: his divorce from his wife, his struggle to maintain a relationship with his children, his drift from Christianity. The other, Lt. John Roper, a 26-year-old Midwesterner wearing an Army Rugby T-shirt, takes his hand, and they pray together. For Roper, this chance to minister to another man, to hold his hand in public, is one of the most freeing experiences imaginable. "If we can't express our love in a way that's physical, that's really limiting our expression," he says. "We're brothers. We all have that need for physical touch."

The night ends with another sermon by Bishop Wellington Boone, president of New Generation Campus Ministries. His preachment wanders off in some unexpected directions—as when he compares Christ to a manly cowboy and the church to a "sniveling woman"—but mostly he talks of racial healing. "God wants to build you up so that racism is smaller than the giant in you," says Wellington, who is black. "You're telling me a redneck is my brother? If God is my father, he is my brother."


LISTENING TO THE SPOKEN MESSAGE at Fort Bragg, Promise Keepers hardly seems the monstrous movement its critics describe. If I heard any political message at all, it was about struggling against racism, living an ethical life, loving other men.

But the devil's in the subtext. Talking to the men in Lee Field House, it's clear that Bill McCartney's worldview has come through, even without overt preaching. For North Carolina's Christian soldiers, Promise Keepers offers the possibility of a kinder, gentler male supremacy, one that allows them to maintain their power without being brutes.

Early in the evening, I sit next to Darry Whitaker, a 29-year-old former soldier who now works in the prison system. When I ask him what he finds most appealing about the organization, he points to Promise Number Four: "A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection, and biblical values." What are those values? "As men, we have been ordained by the Lord that we have to be the spiritual head," says Whitaker, one of the 400 or so African Americans present. "In the spiritual world and the churches, the women have taken the ram by the head—and it should not be that way. We should be the heads. If the man is in the forefront—oh man, great, wonderful things happen."

I hear that line over and over in different forms. "Biblically, the woman was created as a suitable helpmate for men," says Steve Rich, a lanky 26-year-old soldier. "Women are called upon to submit to their husband, not in a slave-like manner, but to follow behind in his leadership." At Fort Bragg tonight, submission consists of a handful of wives and girlfriends sitting in a circle in the bathroom, praying for the men—until the break, when the women suspend their worship to serve coffee and lemonade.

And apparently, brotherly love stops at the border of sexual orientation. "Homosexuality, in my opinion and God's opinion, is wrong," declares Eric Scheidt, who so deeply wants closer male friendships. "I will love the person. But I will hate the thing. Anytime I see it on TV, it makes me sick to my stomach." Indeed, aversion to gay men and lesbians seems to be the unwritten eighth promise. The organization has welcomed some outspoken bigots into its fold, including Tony Evans, known for hounding a gay associate pastor who resigned from his Dallas church; televangelist James Robison, who led anti-gay attacks on a Dallas political candidate and tried to shut down a national drag pageant; and Chuck Colson, the Watergate figure who helped Anita's Bryant's crusade in the late 1970s. In 1994, according to author Russ Bellant, Promise Keepers board member James Ryle addressed a secret anti-gay planning meeting in Colorado, declaring that homosexuality "has poised our nation precariously on the brink of moral chaos."

So what to make of these contradictions? Is Promise Keepers teaching some of America's conservative Christian men to shed their racism and their machismo? Or is it using touchy-feely language to legitimize a reactionary message about straight-male dominance? It's tempting to look for an either-or answer, but that denies the complexity—and power—of the phenomenon. Whether or not it's intentional, Promise Keepers has scrambled the paradigm, made it difficult to keep track of the players. For me, the sight of two straight men of different races, arms wrapped around each other, tears streaming down their faces, hearts lost in earnest and soulful prayer, is a deeply moving spectacle. But I can't help but think that some of those tears come from the humbling, dawning knowledge that they're still in charge.

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