Servant leadership rhetoric obscured a reassertion of male authority in Promise Keepers

Evidence

Despite talk of sacrifice, tenderness, and servanthood, however, it was hard to ignore language like that of Tony Evans in Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, the organization’s best-selling book. Men shouldn’t ask for their leadership role back, Evans insisted, they needed to take it back: “There can be no compromise here.” Men must lead for the sake of families, “and the survival of our culture.” (On the very rare occasion when a woman was invited to address a Promise Keepers event, Holly Phillips, wife of president Randy Phillips, asked men to forgive women for their lack of respect, for “the demeaning and belittling words we have uttered,” and “for the ways we have coddled and smothered you with our protectiveness, thereby emasculating you.”) To critics, Promise Keepers simply marketed “male supremacy with a beatific smile.” In their view, servant leadership helped salvage a patriarchal order even as men no longer maintained their role as providers. By promising intimacy in exchange for power, servant leadership passed off authority as humility, ensuring that patriarchal authority would endure even in the midst of changing times. As far as critics were concerned, this was more insidious than a straightforward power grab. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 354

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how ‘servant leadership’ functioned as the key rhetorical device of the soft patriarchy era — intimacy traded for power.
• QUESTION: The critics cited (‘male supremacy with a beatific smile’) are unnamed here — whose analysis is Du Mez drawing on?