Crossroads -- Many reporters struggled to "get" Promise Keepers

Readers can see gaps in coverage of the death of Bill "Coach Mac" McCartney

The date was October 4, 1997, and the MSNBC producers on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., had a problem.

Actually, they had several problems. The main problem was that the million or so Promise Keepers men (D.C. crowd estimates were already a highly politicized affair) gathered for the Stand in the Gap rally keep singing, praying, reading their Bibles, listening to sermons and confessing their sins.

I bring this up, because this week’s “Crossroads” podcast focused on coverage — at The New York Times and Religion News Service — of the death of College Football Hall of Fame coach Bill McCartney, the founder of Promise Keepers.

But first, why bring up MSNBC? For starters, producers at the young cable network made the savvy decision to cover (along with C-SPAN) the entire Stand in the Gap event. A small CNN crew went live every now and then, primarily for interviews with small crowds of counter-demonstrators.

Through an interesting set of circumstances, I was there — in part because I had written national columns about coach McCartney and Promise Keepers (click here and search for “Promise Keepers”). Several of my Denver Seminary students were involved in starting this controversial (for many) men’s ministry.

Here’s part of a GetReligion.org post about that:

Once upon a time, I had one of the best seats at the famous "Stand in the Gap" rally on the National Mall in 1997 by the Promise Keepers organization, since I served as a kind of religion-news color commentator for MSNBC. …

At the end of the day, several things intrigued me.

First of all, it was obvious that hardly any of the journalists present gave a flip what anyone on the stage was saying. Everybody was there to cover the interactions that they hoped took place between the counter-demonstrators and the men, young and old, for what I called the "Woodstock of the charismatic renewal movement."

Alas, all the men wanted to do was sing and pray. Bummer.

Since hardly anyone in the press was listening, few people noticed that (a) many of the speakers were Democrats of color and (b) that hardly anyone was taking potshots at President Bill Clinton. In fact, most of the rhetoric that day stressed that the nation's most pressing problems were moral in nature and, thus, couldn't be solved with legislation. There was a profound sense of disappointment in the air that day with politics in general. If anyone needed to be worried, I said on the air, it was Newt Gingrich and the GOP leadership since many of the keepers sounded like they were upset with Beltway politicians — period.

Yes, it was crucial that the Promise Keeper speakers keep talking about religious issues — especially workaholism and absentee fathers — instead of politics. But journalists were also frustrated that half of more of the speakers on the program were African-Americans or Latinos.

Promise Keepers had already made a strong commitment to racial reconciliation and half of its board and leadership were men of color.

Also, journalists didn’t seem to grasp that they were listening to an all-star team of famous orators from a wide variety of evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal flocks and, no surprise, many of these pulpit superstars were Black. If you talked to the preachers, you found out that quite a few were moral and doctrinal conservatives who were still in the Democratic Party (and they knew their pews were full of Democrats).

In other words, Stand in the Gap was a conservative religious rally, but it was not a Republican rally. That didn’t fit the template.

However, the vast majority of the men who could afford to get on airplanes and fly to Washington, D.C., for the rally were from large, suburban white congregations (or highly interracial Pentecostal megachurches). At the end of the rally, Promise Keepers announced that it was going to move away from the huge rallies (a major source of revenue) and focus on work in smaller local and regional meetings — which would be more affordable for working-class men, especially Blacks and Latinos.

In my wrap-up remarks for MSNBC, I stressed that Promise Keepers was, rather bravely, risking the money stream that funded its staff and, thus, was risking its future. But the organization’s multiracial board was committing to reaching ordinary men in ordinary pews.

You can see many of these themes in the New York Times obituary for McCartney, a report that was much better than I expected. Here are two key chunks of that:

He founded the Promise Keepers in 1990. The group’s first meeting drew 4,200 men to a basketball court in Boulder.

He drew more attention, and criticism, in 1992, when he was a leading proponent of a Colorado ballot measure, passed by voters, that prevented the state from enacting protections for gay men and women against discrimination. Mr. McCartney was widely quoted calling homosexuality “an abomination of God.”

His popularity only grew. By September 1994, The Times reported, a typical Promise Keepers rally was attracting 52,000 people. That November, after 10 consecutive winning seasons, Mr. McCartney quit football to devote himself to the organization. The Promise Keepers did not pay him a salary; he described the group as his “calling.”

The news-media coverage of his “abomination” remarks consistently skipped over the fact that McCartney also applied the biblical “abomination” language to other issues, including racism, ignoring the poor and, yes, his own sins.

For the cultural left, that didn’t make his remarks about homosexual behavior any less offensive. But news consumers really needed to know the wider biblical context if they wanted to know what the coach was saying.

In other words, when quoting McCartney, elite reporters were — like some (not all!) of the MSNBC producers — looking for quotes that pushed hot-button “political” narratives. You can see that in this next Times passage:

Mr. McCartney made serious efforts to include Black Christians. “We don’t feel their pain,” he sermonized in 1993. “The white man is in a stupor.” …

His push for biracial fraternity did not change others’ perception of him as a misogynist and homophobe. In a 1997 letter to The Times, Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women at the time, described the Promise Keepers’ message as a “feel-good form of male supremacy.” In 2005, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center cited the group’s founding in a chronology of the anti-gay “crusade” of “the radical right.”

Readers seeking more content about the “religious” side of the “Coach Mac” story should dig into Bob Smietana’s obit at RNS.

In particular, note this passage:

The group’s prominence sparked a national debate about the role of faith in public life and the evolving relationship between men and women, especially in religious communities. During Promise Keepers gatherings, McCartney preached a mix of traditional Christian gender roles, known as complementarianism — with men as the spiritual leaders of their homes and societies — and a softer, kinder approach to masculinity, where men did the dishes, listened to their wives and were known for kindness rather than toughness. ….

McCartney’s message resonated with both evangelical men and women — as it portrayed what the movement hoped to be at its best — but often clashed with the broader culture, especially with those who saw the group’s message as an attack on women’s rights.

During the podcast, I stressed that the sin of workaholism was the thread that connected many Promise Keepers discussions of the changes that fathers need to make to heal wounds in Christian homes.

As time went by, it became clear that McCartney was talking about his own sins, both as a high-strung football coach and, ironically, as the leader of a national parachurch ministry. Thus, let me end this post with the full text of a 1997 column that I wrote focusing on Coach Mac’s wife, the late Lyndi McCartney. The headline: “Airing out the Promise Keepers hotel.”

Trigger warning: This column includes some of her brutal insights about (wait for it) workaholic pastors.

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Lyndi McCartney knows that legions of feminists rank her husband as public enemy No. 1, while scores of Christian conservatives consider the Promise Keepers leader a prophet.

But after 35 years of marriage, she thinks of Bill McCartney as a big hotel — with lots of rooms that needed to be unlocked and aired out.

"Bill has had to let God into those rooms one at a time," she said. "Just my luck, but my room was at the end of a long hall. Eventually Bill did let God into the room of our marriage. ... God still has some work to do, but it's been a blessing to get that door open."

The hotel had a room for his alcoholism and another for his coach's temper. There was one for his hot-and-cold approach to parenting their four children and another for his take-no-prisoners religious life, first as a hard-driving Catholic and later as an evangelical activist. One huge room was lined with trophy cases full of football obsessions, from his youth as an over-achieving linebacker to his workaholic life atop the college-football polls.

In the early 1990s, the hotel gained an impressive chapel. But the biggest irony in the story of Mr. and Mrs. Promise Keepers is that it was adding this last room that almost doomed their marriage. Lyndi McCartney realized that her husband was just as hooked on ministry as he was on coaching.

"As PK grew, every ounce of Bill's time was spent on this additional love in his life," she said, in one of her commentaries in "Sold Out," a spiritual autobiography by Bill McCartney and journalist David Halbrook. "Instead of his time being consumed during football season, it was consumed all year long — in the name of an organization that promotes being a godly husband and father. ... I grew to resent PK as just another thief that stole my husband away from me."

She hid in the empty nest of their home outside Boulder, Colo., fighting depression and bulimia with the aid of stacks of self-help books. She saw her only daughter deliver a second child out of wedlock — both fathered by football players. Lyndi McCartney lost 80 pounds and thought about suicide. About this time the coach confessed that, shortly before his 1974 "born again" conversion, he had committed adultery.

Bill McCartney's wife hit bottom and he finally heard the crash.

In the new book, he notes that he had once vowed to "forsake all others" and honor his wife. But, "the truth is, until the day I resigned as head football coach at the University of Colorado in November 1994, I usually forsook Lyndi in favor of all others. I can tell you their names: success, competition, career, FOOTBALL."

This was insane, and sinful, idolatry.

Today, Lyndi McCartney is quietly riding the roller coaster of her husband's work as leader of a controversial social movement, while urging him to walk his talk. She said she enjoys taking him to beaches and watching him attempt to unwind. She often times dinner conversations and they recently set a record — three hours. She also is sharing what she has learned.

"Back when I was just the coach's wife — quote, unquote — I thought that I had a unique perspective," she said. "I thought that the way coaching dominates a man's life was totally unique. ...But I have met so many women whose experiences are like mine."

This is especially true of the wives of workaholic ministers. In recent years, she said, she has learned about "this added little guilt thing" that unites them. It's hard to complain about your husband's boss when the boss is supposed to be God. It can be just as hard, or harder, for ministers to repent and keep their promises to their wives and children.

"You wouldn't believe what these guys say," she said, describing a meeting with one prominent pastor. "He came right out and said it: 'I have to do God's work. My family will just have to wait and try to understand.' ... That's just the same sinful human stuff, isn't it?"

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