Promise Keepers’ most lasting influence was the men’s Christian retail market

Evidence

The proliferation of men’s groups sparked “a minor revolution in the Christian publishing and retailing industry.” At PK events one could find “a virtual messianic mini-mall, hawking books, T-shirts,” souvenirs and baseball caps. Christian retailers, too, began stocking shelves with men’s products. As the president of the Christian Booksellers Association explained, more men started shopping in Christian bookstores because there was more there for them to buy; in 1996, nearly one-quarter of customers were men, up from one in six fifteen years earlier. The most lasting influence of the Promise Keepers movement may well have been the market it spawned. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 363

Categorization

• XREF: Core evidence for Du Mez’s key method: consumer culture, not theology, transmitting religious identity. This is the commercial artifact pipeline that her whole book rests on.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the market as the hidden engine of religious movements — retail infrastructure outliving the movement that spawned it.