Promise Keepers: An Introduction 

Orientation to Object of Investigation

Populist religious movements trace a rich and significant heritage across the rhetorical landscape that is the Euro-American evangelical tradition. Beginning with the Protestant Reformation, such movements may be understood historically, in their rhetorical dimensions, as constituting fitting responses to compelling religious and sociocultural exigencies. For it is in the context of perceived disequilibrium and disintegration that the pressing questions of identity and purpose, -- "Who are we?" "How ought we to live?" -- are given salient status. Insofar as these questions derive from, or are historically adapted to, religious values and practices, it is not surprising that religious movements should contribute significantly to the ebb and flow of discourse responding to such questions.

The advent of the Promise Keepers represents the latest, in a postmodern wave of evangelical religious orders, laying claim to the spiritual, social, cultural, and political destiny of America. A self-described, multi-cultural Christian men's movement, Promise Keepers constitutes an ambitious attempt at conjoining a racially, ethnically, and ecclesiastically diverse group of voices under a rubric of religious unity. Theirs is a rhetoric which synthesizes sacred and secular vocabularies, interweaving them into a unifying vision constitutive of religious motive, purpose, and action.

Promise Keepers traces its origins to a conversation between then Colorado head football coach Bill McCartney and friend Dave Wardell while the two were driving to a meeting of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in Pueblo, Colorado. During the conversation McCartney stated his desire to see large gatherings of men come together "in the name of Jesus, worshipping and celebrating their faith together" (McCartney, 1995 p. 286). Encouraged by McCartney's pastor and the diligent prayer and discussion activity of a select group of some seventy-two men, the idea flowered into a full-scale evangelical movement (McCartney, 1995).

Initial support for the movement was moderate at best. Its first official conference, held in 1991 at Colorado University's Event Center, gathered 4,200 men. Subsequent conferences, held in 1992 and 1993, at Colorado University's Folsom stadium, however, drew 22,000 and 50,000 men respectively. The following year Promise Keepers went national, holding a half-dozen two-day stadium events across the nation, and drawing over 278,000 in 1994 and more than 727,000 in 1995. In 1996, twenty-two conferences were held which drew an estimated 1.1 million men. By all accounts, the growth of Promise Keepers has been nothing short of phenomenal.

Promise Keepers' rhetoric, discretely situated, has moved well beyond the mass rally to include regional and local leadership seminars ("wake-up calls" and "breakout sessions"), pastor's conferences, and various lay group meetings. While stadium events continue to be its most visible rhetorical manifestation, Promise Keepers has also disseminated an array of rhetorical artifacts including an official three volume trilogy, numerous video and audio tapes, radio spots on local Christian radio stations, and an official website. Its staging of a mass rally in Washington D.C., on October 4th, 1997 -- broadcast over satellite television -- may well have marked the largest religious gathering in the history of the United States.

Promise Keepers is an uninstitutionalized, large collectivity, comprised of leaders and followers, which has emerged to bring about a program of change over a sustained period of time. It offers prescriptions for what must be done, who must do it, and how it must be accomplished. In these respects, Promise Keepers clearly qualifies as a movement (Stewart et al., 1994); and as a movement, Promise Keepers relies extensively on persuasion to achieve its aims.

With the rapid expansion of its audience base at the grass roots level, Promise Keepers has further developed into a highly centralized, yet very efficient organization. Located in Denver, Colorado, Promise Keepers' central office has maintained a staff of over four hundred employees and has overseen a budget exceeding one hundred million dollars. The organization is decidedly bureaucratic in structure. Divisions of labor are hierarchically organized and managed. Upper level positions generally require advanced education and relatively sophisticated levels of technical expertise. Its bureaucracy extends well-beyond Denver into fifty-two state offices and several international affiliates in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand which serve supplemental bureaucratic roles in brokering the flow of information between Promise Keeper central offices and local churches. With a view toward its movement and organization dimensions, Promise Keepers may be conceptualized as a movement-organization.

A final dimension of Promise Keepers concerns its ideology. The ideology of Promise Keepers is most readily discerned as evangelical in character. This dimension is clearly evidenced in its affiliation with historical evangelical movements and leaders ranging from Charles G. Finney and the "Second Great Awakening" to Billy Graham. It is also evidenced in its economic and ideological affiliation with current evangelical leaders, among whom can be counted James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and Charles Colson. Finally, Promise Keepers' evangelical identity is evidenced in its membership in the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), a group in which membership is contingent upon express conformity to strict ethical and financial guidelines consistent with an evangelical Christian faith (ECFA, 1997). Taken together, then, Promise Keepers is an evangelical movement-organization.

The terms evangelical, movement, and organization may be centrally organized under the term religious order. In this dissertation, the term signifies Promise Keepers as an evangelical movement-organization. In addition, however, the term also connotes the notion of purpose. In its official Mission Statement (1997, online), Promise Keepers declares its purpose as:

a Christ-centered ministry dedicated to uniting men through vital relationships to become godly influences in their world...a spark in His hand to ignite a nationwide movement calling men from all denominational, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds to reconciliation, discipleship, and godliness.

As a religious order, then, Promise Keepers constitutes a hierarchically organized, collective response to the problem of social fragmentation in general, and of religious fragmentation in particular. It employs numerous rhetors and variegated rhetorical strategies and messages through a prodigous array of multi-media resources all of which are centrally directed by a core group of leaders and financed by a multi-million dollar organizational unit.

Justification for the Investigation

What significance does Promise Keepers hold such that it can be held up as an object of scholarly inquiry? Simply put, Promise Keepers is worthy of investigation because it has achieved a remarkable degree of influence in a relatively short period of time among audiences historically divided by religious doctrine, practice, and custom. Compared with Catholicism's institutional status, religious orders of the Protestant variety have, since the Reformation, seemingly built a tradition out of dis-unity. The first, second, and third Great Awakenings, the Churches of Christ, the Jesus People Movement, Southern Baptists, and Neo-Pentacostals -- to name just a few -- are each the result of intra-order division. Among Protestant orders, there neither is, nor ever has there been, the kind of global, tradition-steeped, institutional hierarchy present in Catholicism. It is from this angle that the expeditious growth and widespread influence of the Promise Keepers appears nothing short of remarkable.

Of what significance is Promise Keepers to rhetorical scholarship? In any order, religious or otherwise, relationships among leaders and followers, followers and followers, outsiders and insiders are guided by implicit and explicit principles governing motive, purpose, and action. Always and necessarily these principles are both a process and product of rhetoric. As Cheney (1991) argues, in examining specific cases of organized collectives, it is important to assess the interrelationships between identity, organization, and rhetoric. The nature of the organization -- its structure, values, practices, and categories -- reveals important features of its persuasive strategies and possibilities. Conversely, from the rhetoric of an organization, features of the organization can be inferred or "read" (Cheney, 1991, p.3).

There is ample precedent in the literature for exploring the role that rhetoric plays in creating and sustaining the ideological commitment of large, organized, orders. Whether understood as operating according to necessary factors (Gerlach & Hine, 1968) or to functional categories, religious orders are structured by and around pressing exigencies. By exigency, I mean a problem crucial to an order's success or failure, capable of being ameliorated by persuasion, and requiring strategic rhetorical choices among competing alternatives (Bitzer, 1968).

For the rhetorical critic, it is important to determine the pressing exigencies which confront particular cases of religious orders and to investigate rhetoric's role in responding to them. My specific argument in this dissertation is that Promise Keepers is a religious order predicated on the rhetorical management of the exigencies of identity, recruitment, and opposition along differential tiers of its hierarchy. It is a process whose negotiation stands to reveal much about the nature and function of contemporary evangelicalism and its rhetoric in a postmodern, fragmented society.

Statement of the Problem

As a religious order operating within, across, and outside divergent interest communities -- and representing an ostensibly global religious body -- Promise Keepers faces complex rhetorical problems. First, any religious order which attempts to compete in the open marketplace that is the American religious infrastructure faces the important task of establishing a legitimate and viable identity for its followers. This is to say that in order for Promise Keepers to be successful it must address the question of "Who 'we' are" if it is to provide a viable target toward which individuals may direct their interests and allegiances.

In the case of the Promise Keepers, the problem of identity is exacerbated by two further concerns. Since it is relatively young, Promise Keepers does not have an easily recognizable set of symbols which mark off its identity from that of other religious orders. Unlike the Catholic Church, for instance, which may draw from a pool of time-honored, institutionalized symbols of identity and authority, Promise Keepers must, relatively speaking, build identity from the ground up.

On the other hand, the absence of clearly designated symbols of identity and authority may be Promise Keepers' greatest rhetorical asset. As Cheney (1985) argues in his examination of the U.S. Catholic Bishops, the institutionalization of identity places important constraints on the extent to which individuals may speak and act in any given situation. Thus, in addressing the problem of the cold war nuclear threat, the U.S. Catholic Bishops, acting within the authoritative parameters of their identity as moral agents, were limited by this very identity in speaking authoritatively in the realm of politics. Venturing too far into the latter realm would not only raise questions regarding their political authority, but would also call into question their identity as Catholic bishops (Cheney, 1985). Relatively free from these constraints, Promise Keepers must, nevertheless, construct a unique and readily discernible identity among numerous and varied competitors in order to accomplish its purposes. The means by which Promise Keepers constructs identity, and the symbols which authorize (grant authority to) that identity are significant rhetorical concerns.

Second, Promise Keepers must attract, mold, and maintain followers. Courses of action must be prescribed and justified according to the religious sensibilities of a wide variety of audience types (Stewart et al., 1994). Promise Keepers' initial recruitment efforts were limited to the area in and around Boulder, Colorado. As Gerlach and Hine (1968) have observed, religious movements of the evangelical variety, especially in their incipient stages, are tied to particular geographies and often built along a pre-existing network of interpersonal relationships. Thus, it will be important to explore the role that the local evangelical subculture in and around Boulder, Colorado, played in the development of Promise Keepers.

Later, however, Promise Keepers' recruitment efforts succeeded in attracting millions of individuals from across the nation and even other countries to local, regional, and national gatherings. That Promise Keepers succeeded in gathering recruits beyond its initial locality in a relatively brief period of time is a matter of historical record. The means by which Promise Keepers accomplished this is a matter worthy of scholarly investigation.

Finally, Promise Keepers must contend with opposition. Stewart et. al., (1994) contend that social movements by their very nature encounter institutionalized forms of opposition. In the case of the Promise Keepers, opposition arises both from within and outside of its evangelical milieu. Evangelical interest communities have been particularly critical of Promise Keepers for their unbiblical ecumenicalism (or inclusivism). In a booklet entitled Promise Keepers and the Forgotten Promise (1995), published by the Baptist World Mission, Ernest Pickering writes:

Promise Keepers is as serious an attack upon biblical separatism and fundamentalism as the [churches have] seen since the rise of Billy Graham and his ecumenical evangelism a generation ago. It is going to cause major problems for pastors who are trying to maintain a biblical position (p. 3).

Other critics observe that Promise Keepers reaches across traditional evangelical borders to embrace individuals of various religious persuasion -- including Roman Catholics -- who disagree on basic issues such as how a person is spiritually saved (Hagopian & Wilson, 1996). These authors maintain that Promise Keepers deliberately frames descriptions of Christian belief in inordinately broad terms, thereby opening the way for any number of heretical beliefs to abide in fellowship with sound doctrine. The scriptural mandate for unity, these critics maintain, is not what is believed about ethnicity or skin color, but what is believed about Christ. While Promise Keepers has apparently been successful in sensitizing audiences to racial prejudice and divisive religious separatism, the perception persists among (some) evangelical critics that such sensitivity has been purchased at the price of sound spiritual discernment over what constitutes true biblical unity and true biblical separation.

Feminist interest communities, on the other hand, argue that Promise Keepers represents a threat to social progress generally and to female independence in particular. The National Organization for Women, for instance, has argued that Promise Keepers advocates a patriarchal view of male-female relations which, however ostensibly benevolent, can only result in the systematic subordination of women.

Whatever merit such criticisms may have in illuminating Promise Keepers' strengths and weaknesses, they offer little insight into how this particular religious order has managed to keep its critics at bay. Passing diatribes concerning Promise Keepers' dangerous ecumenicalism and female oppression do little to describe and explain the rhetorical conditions in and strategies by which Promise Keepers has negotiated the important exigence of opposition.

The general problem in this study concerns how Promise Keepers was able to move from the status of "mere idea" to a full-blown religious order. In view of the aforementioned exigencies, the specific questions under investigation are: What role does rhetoric play in Promise Keepers' attempts at managing the exigencies of identity, recruitment, and opposition? And, what do the answers to these questions reveal about the nature of evangelical rhetoric in a postmodern, fragmented society?

Framework for the Investigation

In the Rhetoric of Motives (1969), Kenneth Burke defines rhetoric as "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (p. 43). Burke also recognizes that persuasion arises amidst a plethora of divergent and competing interests. Such conflict is endemic to the nature of language use and to the nature of man in relation to society. Language is, by its very nature, divisive (Burke, 1969). Its use leads to categorical abstractions, divisions, and separations which are naturally inclusive of some elements in society and, therefore, exclusive of others (Burke, 1969). Paradoxically, out of this divisiveness comes the necessary prerequisite for the aim of rhetoric. Rhetoric arises as a communicative, cooperative response to the problem of social division. It is the means of achieving social unity, of adjoining divided interests to bring together a divided people into substantial communion (Burke, 1969). It is through a sharing of substantial interests that a community is formed. By extension then, rhetoric is the process by which various interest communities are formed, negotiated, and maintained.

Burke's theory of persuasion is closely related to his central concept of identification. Identification may be viewed as both state and product of rhetoric's capacity to make communal connections (Cheney, 1983). As Burke (1969) explains:

A is not identical with his colleague B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so (p. 20).

If identification is both state and product, it is also process. That is, identification is a process or method by which divided interests become adjoined. Paradoxically, it is also a method by which interests adjoined become divided. This is the paradox of language manifested in the process of identification: "Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division." Identification is compensatory to division" (Burke, 1969, p.22).

Identification is the primary means by which identity is constructed and negotiated. At the individual level, a person acts to eliminate the divisions of society by identifying with some target(s); i.e., persons, families, groups, and collectivities; and to a lesser extent, values, goals, knowledge, activities, and objects (Cheney, 1983). The process of identification, however, occurs on both individual and corporate levels. That is, identification by the individual always necessarily occurs within concentric and conflicting bodies of larger corporate identities (Cheney, 1983). A person comes to "think of himself as 'belonging' to some special body more or less clearly defined...or to various combinations of these" (Burke, 1973, p. 268). Thus, for instance, one may identify himself as a member of a racially mixed church while still seeing himself as a member of a particular race.

Crucial to the forming and performing of individual and corporate identities is the naming or labeling function of rhetoric (Burke, 1973). A person can be at once a Southern Baptist and an African-American. In this way, names, labels, and titles become the foci for larger corporate identities. They carry with them other identifying "baggage" in the form of values, interests, and so forth (Cheney, 1983, p.146). Moreover, the linking of our personal with our corporate identities results in an increased sense of personal status and even prestige. As one identifies with some corporate unit, be it a church, company, city, or nation, s/he comes to have an increased sense of self-worth in proportion to the positive appraisal of the unit (Cheney, 1983).

Rhetorically considered, the process of identification can be viewed as a strategy by which an interest community attempts to secure the allegiance of a prospective Other. One oft-cited strategy is that by which a rhetor seeks to find common ground with an audience, as when an urban politician speaks of her "country roots" to her rural interest community. Such strategies may work on conscious or unconscious levels. For the rhetorical critic it is important to discover the ways in which identification works at levels not immediately apparent. Negative strategies of identification, as when the Israelites are associated with the Philistines, work to create an attitude of disrepair at an unconscious level, even while other, perhaps positive, identifications are being made at a conscious level. What this suggests is that identification is a multi-tiered rather than uni-dimensional process. Whether working between individuals, or between individuals and a collective, or even between the individual and his/her self, identification persuades by uniting disparate entities into a common whole, providing a framework of motives further conducive of action.

The impetus for this study follows from the assumption that the rhetoric of religious orders is strategic in design and implementation. Consequently, this study is concerned to discover the rhetorical strategies used by Promise Keepers to accomplishes its purposes. Specific attention will be given to the identificational and metaphoric strategies used by Promise Keepers in their efforts to manage the exigencies of identity, recruitment, and opposition.

Data for this study were selected from a comprehensive range of sources. These include published literature, audio and video tapes, and Internet materials produced by Promise Keepers. Telephone interviews with Promise Keepers' leaders who occupy national and regional positions of authority provided additional insight into the (rhetorical) nature of this religious order.

The remainder of this study is composed of six chapters. Chapter Two provides a review of the literature relevant to the study of evangelical movement-organizations. Chapter Two also includes a discussion of rhetoric's role in relation to social order. Chapter Three contains a systematic treatment of this study's methodological approach. Chapters Four, Five, and Six explore the role that rhetoric plays in Promise Keepers' attempts at managing the exigencies of identity, recruitment, and opposition. Chapter Seven concludes this study with a review of its findings and a discussion of their implications for the future of evangelicalism and its rhetoric.

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