Promise Keepers blended militaristic and sports rhetoric within a conservative political agenda

Evidence

Militaristic rhetoric surfaced at times in PK literature, and despite the organization’s apolitical posture, this rhetoric inevitably found expression in a conservative political agenda. McCartney, for example, rallied the “men of the nation” to “go to war,” reminding them that they had “divine power” as their weapon: “We will not compromise. Whatever truth is at risk, in the schools or legislature, we are going to contend for it. We will win.” For the most part, however, PK speakers preferred sports metaphors to military ones. Rallies invariably took place in sports stadiums, and athletes often took center stage. The role of sports in fashioning Christian masculinity was nothing new. The apostle Paul, after all, urged disciples of Christ to run the race before them, and following in the tradition of Billy Sunday, twentieth-century religious leaders had frequently melded sport with Christianity in order to render the faith more masculine—and, ideally, bring men to Christ. In 1954, evangelicals founded the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, an organization that sought to leverage the popularity of sports for evangelistic purposes. (If sports celebrities could sell shaving cream and cigarettes, why couldn’t they sell Christianity?) In the Cold War era, sports had seemed an ideal domain in which to instill Christian values in young men. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 356

Categorization

• XREF: The line ‘if sports celebrities could sell shaving cream and cigarettes, why couldn’t they sell Christianity?’ captures the commercial-apparatus method central to Du Mez’s thesis — connects to the reader’s interest in consumer culture transmission. — connects to: Conservative voices dominate public-spirited rhetoric in America — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 165
• SEED: The Fellowship of Christian Athletes as a 1954 precursor to the muscular-Christianity merchandising apparatus is a concrete historical anchor for an essay on how evangelicalism built a parallel consumer/celebrity culture.
• SHARE: The Fellowship of Christian Athletes founding in 1954 and its ‘sell Christianity like shaving cream’ logic is worth sending to anyone interested in the commodification of American religion.