Promise Keepers was operationally embedded in the Religious Right while projecting ideological openness

Evidence

Ireland had a point. Dobson’s Focus on the Family provided critical ongoing support for the organization, and Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ lent Promise Keepers eighty-five full-time employees. Bright’s book The Coming Revival, in which he railed against abortion, divorce, race riots, sexual promiscuity, the removal of God from public schools, the teaching of evolution, and the “homosexual ‘explosion,’” was sold at all PK rallies. Mark DeMoss, the organization’s national spokesperson, had worked for Jerry Falwell and had served on Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign. Frequent speakers included Ed Cole, author of Maximized Manhood, and Charles Colson, the disgraced Nixon aide who, after converting to evangelicalism, had gone on to found Prison Fellowship Ministries and establish himself as a power broker in the Religious Right. Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America heartily endorsed the organization, and McCartney himself was a member of Colorado for Family Values and an advocate for Amendment 2, the effort to prohibit granting “special rights” to homosexuals. Promise Keepers avoided taking positions on theological issues in order to maintain their “big-tent” coalition, but they did declare their pro-life stance on the issue of abortion, and they issued a statement asserting that “the Bible clearly teaches that homosexuality violates God’s creative design for a husband and a wife and that it is a sin”—though they also addressed “homosexuals” as “recipients of God’s mercy, grace, and forgiveness,” and invited them to be “included and welcomed” at all PK events. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 348

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s contestation of Du Mez’s method: this is exactly the kind of embedded-religious-right evidence that supports both the continuity thesis and possible criticism that PK was not purely grassroots. — connects to: The Religious Right includes more than fundamentalists — Randall Balmer, Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the…, 36