Storm troopers in the culture war - Promise Keepers; includes related articles on the new Christian right and the pledges of of Promise Keeper - Cover Story

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1997 by John M. Swomley

The concept and language of war has been used by other right-wing leaders who helped PK get started, notably James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ. Bright has had a "military ministry" to the armed forces while Dobson, in his book Children at Risk, promotes the idea of a "civil war," saying, "Bloody battles are being fought on a thousand fronts, both inside and outside the government." Except for those of the organized right-wing militias, these have largely been culture wars fought at abortion clinics by violent groups such as Operation Rescue and Missionaries for the Pre-born or by the Christian Coalition for control of government or public schools or against the secular state or homosexuals.

Now, however, there is a mass movement -- Promise Keepers -- that not only speaks of organizing an army of men but has hired retired military officers to help it organize in the armed forces. One of those officers, Richard Abel, a retired air force brigadier general, has been conducting "wake-up calls" with hundreds of active duty soldiers. Another is Jim Pack, a retired Green Beret colonel who was a psychological warfare specialist at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and is now PK manager of the Texas region. A third officer, Chuck Stecker, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel, has been organizing PK within the military with the aid of some military chaplains. Addressing a 1996 conference of military chaplains in Atlanta, Stecker said:

I believe with all of my heart that the

military structure that we know and love so well is perfect for

the accountable relationship which God is calling us to in

Promise Keepers. That same structure, whether it be at

the squad level for the army and right up or whether it be

at the detachment level, squadron level, and so forth, is

exactly what we need. I believe that accountable relationships

build readiness. Quite frankly, and having served in

a Ranger battalion, if a squad leader did not know where

his soldiers were, his Rangers, he was not doing his job.

And in order to be able to know those things he had to be

in accountable relationships with them in order to

develop that.

McCartney has been relating this military approach to the thousands of PK accountability groups in churches. In a 1995 Promise Keepers video entitled The Next Step: From the Stadium to the Small Group, he said, "Many of you feel like you have been in a war for a long time, yet the fiercest fighting is just ahead. God has brought us here to prepare us. Let's proceed. It's wartime." He said the clergy must become "the commissioned officers," led in effect by Promise Keepers: "We have a great army that we are assembling. They're Christian men of this nation. However, our leadership, our clergy are not in uniform. Our clergy are divided.... There's no unity of command.... There is tremendous division in our clergy. We have to assume that responsibility."

A third major facet of Promise Keepers is evident in its immediate political target. Although PK leaders have consistently denied that it has a political agenda, their various public statements and their list of enemies clearly define them as the army of the far right. For example, the single most important issue for all the far-right-wing Catholic and Protestant groups is the legal right of women to reproductive freedom. That includes access to abortion, which the far right defines as including the use of any contraceptives after intercourse that prevent implantation in the uterus.