Chapter 9

TENDER WARRIORS

IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, AROUND 700,000 CHRISTIAN men streamed into the nation’s capital to “stand in the gap,” to step up as men of God, to keep their promises to honor and obey God, protect their families, pursue virtue, and influence their world. Six years earlier, 4200 men had attended the first Promise Keepers rally, the brainchild of Bill McCartney, then head football coach at the University of Colorado. McCartney had experienced a personal and religious crisis after his daughter had given birth to a child fathered by one of his players. Realizing that he had failed to prioritize his family, he ended up leaving his Catholic church for the evangelical Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Thinking he wasn’t alone in his struggles, he decided to issue a call for the renewal of Christian manhood. The next year, James Dobson promoted Promise Keepers on his radio program, helping to ignite a national movement. By 1994, 278,000 men were attending PK events held in stadiums around the country. The next year 700,000 participated, and the year after that an estimated 1.2 million. By 1997, the evangelical men’s movement had become impossible to ignore.¹

Many observers were alarmed by the throng of Christian men on the National Mall. Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, saw the movement as a threat to women’s rights: “The Promise Keepers seem to think women will be so thrilled that men are promising to take ‘responsibility’ in their families that we will take a back seat in this and every other area of our lives.” Though Promise Keepers billed itself as an apolitical organization, Ireland was skeptical; when she saw the men gathered in Washington, DC, she saw “hundreds and thousands of names on direct mail lists.” To Ireland, evangelical men’s ministries were nothing more than “stealth political cells.” Though she conceded that many of the men gathering in stadiums across the country had little awareness of the group’s larger political agenda, she identified a “religious right pantheon behind Promise Keepers,” and to suggest they were “all about Godly male bonding and not about political organizing” was simply indefensible. To critics like Ireland, Promise Keepers was the next iteration of the Religious Right, more dangerous than the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition precisely because of their outwardly apolitical stance.²

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.³

However, Promise Keepers was not merely the Christian Coalition in disguise. Organizers instituted policies against lobbying and political endorsements and focused instead on reaching across religious and denominational divides, bringing together charismatics and Pentecostals with Southern Baptists, Methodists, and the growing contingent of nondenominational evangelicals, along with Catholics, liberal Protestants, and Mormons. Many liberal critics failed to realize that Promise Keepers had vocal critics on the Right as well as the Left. Some conservatives felt the movement was too ecumenical, and a threat to the authority of the institutional church, while others worried that it was influenced by “new age” teachings, wasn’t “conservative enough,” or didn’t adequately promote biblical literalism.⁴

Reflecting the unsettled times, no singular notion of masculinity dominated the evangelical men’s movement of the 1990s. Following Ed Cole’s lead, many evangelicals sought a middle path between an outmoded “macho” masculinity and the “softer” modern one they found lacking. They found the answer in “soft patriarchy.” Yet many other Promise Keepers speakers and writers hewed toward a more expressive and sometimes even egalitarian model. This is most clearly seen in Gary Oliver’s Real Men Have Feelings Too (1993), sold by the PK organization and championed by McCartney. Unlike Cole, Oliver rejected stark gender difference. He argued that traditional “masculine” traits (“bravery, strength, stoicism, an insatiable sex drive, a preoccupation with achievement”) were nothing more than “myths of masculinity.” Likewise, “gentleness, compassion, tenderness, meekness, sensitivity” were not essentially feminine characteristics, but rather healthy human ones—traits modeled by Jesus Christ himself. Oliver urged men to get in touch with their emotions and he rejected the patriarchal chain of command, instead endorsing egalitarian marriage.⁵

Both Cole and Oliver were popular writers and speakers within the movement, suggesting that Promise Keepers encompassed varied and even contradictory models of manhood. Cole, for example, favored masculine “toughness,” but he also critiqued men who wielded their domestic authority in unbending or abusive ways, and he gave a nod to female equality by suggesting that women were “joint heirs” in the home. Oliver, meanwhile, hedged on his egalitarianism by calling out the “‘lunacy’ and ‘ridiculous assumption[s]’ of those who have ‘jumped on the gender-same bandwagon.’” In this way, men could find within Promise Keepers both a justification for traditional masculine authority and a defense of an emotive, egalitarian, reconstructed Christian manhood.⁶

For a time, both coexisted in creative tension, thanks in part to the idea of “servant leadership.” Less abrasive than “male headship,” servant leadership framed male authority as obligation, sacrifice, and service. Men were urged to accept their responsibilities, to work hard, to serve their wives and families, to eschew alcohol, gambling, and pornography, to step up around the home, and to be present in their children’s lives. The notion of “servant leadership” had originated in the business world. With the decline of production in the 1970s and 1980s, service work took over a larger share of the labor market, and servant leadership helped redefine masculine authority in a way that didn’t conflict with men’s role in a service economy. No longer producers in a traditional sense, men could still be leaders. Within Christian circles, the concept of servant leadership similarly enabled men to maintain their authority in the home even as they no longer maintained breadwinner status. By the 1990s, the male breadwinner economy was largely a thing of the past. Since the 1960s, male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing, and agriculture had been in decline, shrinking from approximately half of the workforce to less than 30 percent at the end of the 1990s. Over that same period, sectors that employed pink-and white-collar women—areas such as health care, retail, education, finance, and food service—expanded to well over half of the workforce; by 1994, 75 percent of working-age women worked for pay. Despite their rhetoric, evangelicals were not immune to these economic trends; among conservative Protestants, rates of dual-income households began to approach the national average. Nevertheless, women who worked outside the home still shouldered the burden of housework, and for some of these women, “servant leadership” appeared to offer a way to incentivize men to reinvest on the home front.⁷

For women who found this patriarchal bargain attractive, the harsh critique leveled by feminists was alienating and confusing. Here was a group of men confessing their shortcomings, promising to be better husbands, to be more attentive to their families, more respectful of women. What could be wrong with that? Although studies show that conservative Protestant men did less household labor than men in nonevangelical homes, they were more likely to express affection for their wives and appreciation for the housework women did. They also spent more time than other men with their kids, even if they tended to administer harsher discipline. Moreover, depending on where any given man was coming from, “soft patriarchy” and “servant leadership” might be a significant improvement over harsher authoritarian tendencies, whether religious or secular in origin. In some families, these concepts functioned in a way that could “reform machismo” by reattaching men to their families.⁸

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.⁹

Promise Keepers praying at the Seattle Kingdome in May 1997. AP PHOTO / LOREN CALLAHAN.

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.¹⁰

At a time when evangelicals were striving for greater respectability and relevance, mixing religion with sports made sense. Few had excelled in this endeavor more than Jerry Falwell. At Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church, sports served both as training ground and as metaphor for the spiritual life. While talk of sports was ubiquitous, for Falwell and his followers it wasn’t about how you played the game. It was about winning. Upon visiting Thomas Road, Frances FitzGerald remarked that “sports, the oldest of Anglo-Saxon prescriptions for the sublimation of male violence and male sexual energies, might stand as a metaphor for the whole social enterprise of the church.” In Falwell’s words, “God wants you to be a champion.”¹¹

In the 1970s and 1980s, Falwell used military and sports analogies interchangeably. By the 1990s, however, as some evangelicals began to back away from militaristic rhetoric, sports offered a more palatable alternative. In 1996, for instance, Ralph Reed sent a memo instructing grassroots leaders of the Christian Coalition to “avoid military rhetoric and to use sports metaphors instead.” Still, sports and military metaphors could function in similar ways, critics pointed out. In a world destabilized by modern feminism, sports offered disaffected men a masculine haven. Like military metaphors, sports called to mind a world in which men, by virtue of their superior physical strength, still dominated. Both sports and the military, too, reinforced a dualistic view of the world. In athletics, as in battle, there were winners and losers. In this way, sports-infused rhetoric and pageantry allowed Promise Keepers to address male anxieties while maintaining the semblance of benevolent patriarchy.¹²

It was when the evangelical men’s movement elevated sports as the preferred metaphor for Christian manhood that “racial reconciliation” emerged as a guiding purpose. Under McCartney’s leadership, Promise Keepers was one of the few white Christian organizations in the country willing to take on racism. Critics viewed Promise Keepers’ focus on racial reconciliation with skepticism. Some accused leaders of “jumping on the racial reconciliation bandwagon, in part because it allows them to sound supportive of people of color, without actually having to support any of the political and social policies that would benefit people of color.” Framing racism as a personal failing, at times even as a mutual problem, PK speakers routinely failed to address structural inequalities. In this way, the pursuit of racial reconciliation could end up serving as a ritual of self-redemption, absolving white men of complicity and justifying the continuation of white patriarchy in the home and the nation. Several African American pastors critiqued this unwillingness to address deeper structural questions and called out the organization for racial tokenism. Yet, far more than other evangelical organizations, Promise Keepers provided a platform for African American voices. Black pastors like Tony Evans, Wellington Boone, and E. V. Hill, and sports stars like Reggie White frequently appeared at PK rallies.¹³

Promise Keepers’ pursuit of racial reconciliation did amount to more than mere posturing. Its 1996 book Go the Distance: The Making of a Promise Keeper (published by Focus on the Family) included chapters by Charles Colson, Bill McCartney, Stu Weber, and other white evangelicals, but it also included an unsparing critique of white Christianity penned by African American pastor and civil rights activist John Perkins. How much this commitment to racial reconciliation trickled down to the rank and file is difficult to gauge. The movement remained overwhelmingly white; a 1998 questionnaire revealed that whites made up 90 percent of its membership. Moreover, some observers link the decline of the Promise Keepers movement to its pursuit of racial reconciliation. McCartney himself conceded that the focus on race was “a major factor in the significant fall-off” in attendance—it was “simply a hard teaching for many.” In 1996, for instance, 40 percent of complaints registered by conference participants were negative responses to the theme of racial reconciliation. The falloff in attendance caused a significant decline in revenue, and in the summer of 1997 Promise Keepers laid off more than one hundred employees; the next two years witnessed successive waves of restructuring and downsizing.¹⁴

Other factors also contributed to the organization’s decline. The high attendance at the Stand in the Gap rally in Washington, DC, probably meant men were less likely to spend money to attend local and regional gatherings. The novelty was also wearing off; without new content it was harder to entice men to attend conferences. But there was also a shift within evangelicalism that would begin to render the “soft patriarchy” that Promise Keepers espoused less appealing. By the end of the decade, the emotional timbre of the events had started to feel too “soft.”¹⁵

Promise Keepers as a movement began to wane, but by spawning dozens of smaller denominational ministries and parachurch groups, its influence persisted. The Southern Baptist Convention entered cooperative agreements with Promise Keepers and developed its own men’s ministry. The Assemblies of God appointed a “men’s ministries secretary” to work with Promise Keepers, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) developed its own men’s Bible study series. Catholics, too, organized two new men’s ministries, the Saint Joseph’s Covenant Keepers and a Ministry to Black Catholic Men.¹⁶

The proliferation of men’s groups sparked “a minor revolution in the Christian publishing and retailing industry.” At PK events one could find “a virtual messianic mini-mall, hawking books, T-shirts,” souvenirs and baseball caps. Christian retailers, too, began stocking shelves with men’s products. As the president of the Christian Booksellers Association explained, more men started shopping in Christian bookstores because there was more there for them to buy; in 1996, nearly one-quarter of customers were men, up from one in six fifteen years earlier. The most lasting influence of the Promise Keepers movement may well have been the market it spawned.¹⁷

THANKS TO THE EVANGELICAL men’s movement, books on Christian masculinity began to roll off the presses. Drawing on charismatic and therapeutic traditions, prosperity teachings, Christian Reconstructionism, conservative Southern Baptist theology, and neo-Calvinism, authors ended up crafting visions of Christian masculinity that looked remarkably similar. In the 1990s, the most popular “blueprint for Christian manhood” to emerge was that of the “tender warrior.”

Setting the stage for the genre was Gordon Dalbey’s Healing the Masculine Soul. It was published in 1988, but Dalbey had been struggling to come to terms with masculinity since the 1970s. In 1983, he had come across a newspaper article by Robert Bly. Influenced by Carl Jung, Bly was concerned that fathers no longer initiated sons into proper manhood; drawing on fairy tales and myths, he pointed to the role of a heroic quest in preparing young men to assume roles as productive members of society. Lacking this proper male development, society would be left with “soft males” unable to fulfill their roles. Dalbey also read Leanne Payne’s 1986 Crisis in Masculinity. Payne, a Christian psychologist, identified the roots of this “crisis” in men’s failure to separate themselves from their mothers’ femininity. Only a father could affirm a son’s masculinity and a daughter’s femininity, according to Payne, but with absent or overly authoritarian fathers (and overbearing mothers), a generation of men had become separated from their own masculinity. The results were devastating: “homosexual neurosis,” addiction to pornography, the proliferation of androgynous gender roles, widespread confusion and despair. Dalbey found inspiration in both Payne’s and Bly’s “explorations on the frontiers of masculinity,” but wondered why “a secular man and a Christian woman” should be paving the way. “Was there no Christian man to pioneer the journey?”¹⁸

Dalbey took up the challenge, but securing a publisher was no easy task. In 1987, when he was shopping his manuscript, “the unique needs of men had not yet appeared on the church’s radar screen.” Editors at Word Publishing were intrigued enough to bring him to Dallas so that he could explain in person why men would be interested in such a book, and Dalbey succeeded in convincing them to take a gamble on the project. Initially spreading through word of mouth, the book eventually ended up in the hands of Shirley Dobson, who brought it to her husband James, who then invited Dalbey on his Focus on the Family radio show. His 1991 appearance sparked a listener response that ranked in the top 10 percent of the program’s history, Dalbey later recalled. By then, evangelical men across the country were awakening to the problem of masculinity.¹⁹

In Healing the Masculine Soul, Dalbey introduced themes that would animate what soon became a cottage industry of books on Christian masculinity. First and foremost, Dalbey looked to the Vietnam War as the source of masculine identity. The son of a naval officer, Dalbey described how the image of the war hero served as his blueprint for manhood. He’d grown up playing “sandlot soldier” in his white suburban neighborhood, and he’d learned to march in military drills and fire a rifle in his Boy Scout “patrol.” Fascinated with John Wayne’s WWII movies, he imagined war “only as a glorious adventure in manhood.” As he got older, he “passed beyond simply admiring the war hero to desiring a war” in which to demonstrate his manhood.²⁰

By the time he came of age, however, he’d become sidetracked. Instead of demonstrating his manhood on the battlefields of Vietnam, he became “part of a generation of men who actively rejected our childhood macho image of manhood—which seemed to us the cornerstone of racism, sexism, and militarism.” Exhorted to make love, not war, he became “an enthusiastic supporter of civil rights, women’s liberation, and the antiwar movement,” and he joined the Peace Corps in Africa. But in opting out of the military he would discover that “something required of manhood seemed to have been bypassed, overlooked, even dodged.” Left “confused and frustrated,” Dalbey eventually conceded that “manhood requires the warrior.”²¹

Dalbey agreed with Bly that an unbalanced masculinity had led to the nation’s “unbalanced pursuit” of the Vietnam War, but an over-correction had resulted in a different problem: Having rejected war making as a model of masculine strength, men had essentially abdicated that strength to women. As far as Dalbey was concerned, the 1970s offered no viable model of manhood to supplant “the boyhood image in our hearts,” and his generation had ended up rejecting manhood itself. If the warrior spirit was indeed intrinsic to males, then attempts to eliminate the warrior image were “intrinsically emasculating.” Women were “crying out” for men to recover their manly strength, Dalbey insisted. They were begging men to toughen up and take charge, longing for a prince who was strong and bold enough to restore their “authentic femininity.”²²

Unfortunately, the church was part of the problem. Failing to present the true Jesus, it instead depicted him “as a meek and gentle milk-toast character”—a man who never could have inspired “brawny fishermen like Peter to follow him.” It was time to replace this “Sunday school Jesus” with a warrior Jesus. Citing “significant parallels” between serving Christ and serving in the military, Dalbey suggested that a “redeemed image of the warrior” could reinvigorate the church’s ministry to men: “What if we told men up front that to join the church of Jesus Christ is . . . to enlist in God’s army and to place their lives on the line? This approach would be based on the warrior spirit in every man, and so would offer the greatest hope for restoring authentic Christian manhood to the Body of Christ.” Writing before the Gulf War had restored faith in American power and the strength of the military, Dalbey’s preoccupation with Vietnam is understandable, yet the pattern he established would endure long after an easy victory in the latter conflict supposedly brought an end to “Vietnam syndrome.” American evangelicals would continue to be haunted by Vietnam.²³

There was one point on which Dalbey was more perceptive than many of his later imitators, and that was social class. The occasion that prompted this reflection was a midlife crisis of sorts that manifested in a failed attempt to buy a pair of cowboy boots. Finding himself too ashamed to admit to the salesman that he didn’t drive a truck or work in construction (he was a minister, a writer!), Dalbey left the store empty-handed. But he recognized that he wasn’t alone in his feeling of inadequacy. Only a generation or two removed from “the so-called ‘working class,’” professional men of his generation found themselves “caught between an image of our physically hardworking grandfathers in farms and factories, and the white-collar professionals in antiseptic office buildings.” Despite pressure for men to achieve higher socioeconomic status, and despite the nascent popularity of “servant leadership,” American culture still associated masculinity with working-class jobs. Times were confusing, indeed.²⁴

Reaching more than 250,000 copies in print, Dalbey’s book clearly struck a chord. It was soon joined by two other best-selling books that would refine and further popularize Christian warrior masculinity: Steve Farrar’s Point Man: How a Man Can Lead His Family (1990) and Stu Weber’s Tender Warrior: God’s Intention for a Man (1993). Farrar and Weber both addressed the “confusion” Christian men experienced in discerning God’s will for men, and both sought to navigate a course between an overly “macho” masculinity on the one hand and a disturbingly “effeminate” one on the other. Significantly, both also opened with Vietnam combat stories.

Farrar never fought in Vietnam, but he talked to men who had. He asked readers to imagine being elected “point man”—the leader of a combat patrol. He then described a bloody ambush in vivid detail. It was up to the point man to lead his men out of the jungle and back to safety: “If your plan works, you may get out alive with half your men. If it doesn’t, they’ll be lucky to find your dogtags. . . .” Farrar then abruptly transitioned to a different scenario. The reader was still a point man, but now he was leading his family: a tearful little girl, brave little boy, and a wife, who was caring for a baby. There was nothing imaginary about this scenario: “If you are a husband/father, then you are in a war. War has been declared upon the family, on your family and mine. Leading a family through the chaos of American culture is like leading a small patrol through enemy-occupied territory. And the casualties in this war are as real as the names etched on the Vietnam Memorial.” Farrar provided a litany of evidence: divorce, single mothers, prostitution, drug addiction, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, abortion, suicide, homosexuality, sexual abuse, and “social awkwardness.” If a man was going to keep his children off the casualty list, he would need to prepare them “to defend themselves against the snipers, ambushes, and booby traps of this silent war.”²⁵

For Farrar, gender confusion was at the root of the war on families. In stressing equality, people had minimized the differences between women and men, and this was taking a tremendous toll on the younger generation. It was up to fathers to help boys “find the correct path to masculinity,” and for this reason the father’s role was “more critical now than at any time in history.” In this respect, Farrar agreed with Dobson that “our very survival as a people will depend upon the presence or absence of masculine leadership in millions of homes,” but in the decade since Dobson had characterized the Western world as standing at a “great crossroads in its history,” things hadn’t improved. If anything, they’d gotten worse. As “point man,” the father needed to protect sons from feminization. Boys, he explained, were naturally aggressive due to their higher levels of testosterone; aggression was “part of being male.” Little boys were prone to doing reckless things like jumping off slides and swinging like Tarzan, splitting their heads open on occasion. But this was just part of being a boy. “They will survive the scars and broken bones of boyhood,” Farrar wrote, “but they cannot survive being feminized.” Boys who were overprotected, particularly by mothers, were in danger of having their masculinity “warped.” Homosexuals, Farrar believed, were made, not born. Satan’s strategy in the war against the family was to “neutralize the man,” but the solution was clear: “God made boys to be aggressive. We are to accept it and channel it.” Farrar’s Point Man was a training manual for culture warriors.²⁶

Stu Weber, too, opened his Tender Warrior in the “heat and terror” of Vietnam, but he wrote from personal experience. A 1967 graduate of Wheaton College, Weber had strayed from his spiritual roots during “the social and intellectual turmoil of the sixties,” but as a Green Beret in Vietnam he had come face to face with death, drawing him back to his faith. His was a book about manliness, “real, God-made, down-in-the-bedrock masculinity,” something that men were “scrambling to understand.” The confusion was everywhere evident. Were men tender or tough? Strong or sensitive? All this confusion left men frustrated, but also determined: “Determined to discover our manhood and live it to the hilt.”²⁷

Weber, too, believed that “a gender war” was being waged, and it was necessary to look culture’s confusion “straight in the eye.” Channeling Dobson and Elisabeth Elliot, Weber insisted that men and women were profoundly different. Here Weber turned to the ancient Hebrew word for man, Ish, which means “piercer,” and the Hebrew word for woman, Isha, or “pierced one,” insisting that the distinction went beyond the obvious “anatomical or sexual elements.” In this case, the physical was “a parable of the spiritual.” Man, at his core, was tough and strong, a risk taker, “an initiator—a piercer, one who penetrates, moves forward, advances toward the horizon, leads.” Women, on the other hand, preferred security and order; they were gentle responders, tender companions, “aloneness fighters.” These differences were woven through all of Scripture, and nothing was more pitiful “than a man forfeiting his masculinity or a woman her femininity by transgressing the created order.”²⁸

For models of masculinity Weber looked to the Western, and, like Dalbey, to the mythopoetic men’s movement pioneered by men like Robert Bly, author of the popular Iron John (1990). Weber thought Bly had journeyed far in his search for manhood, but not far enough. Instead, Weber directed men to the “Genesis spring,” to the biblical source of masculinity. In Scripture, one learned that man was given dominion to rule “with all power and authority,” to defend, guard, and protect. A man’s most critical function was that of warrior. According to Weber, “warrior tendencies” were evident even in little boys: “It doesn’t matter if you never give your little guy a gun; he’ll use his finger.” As for its “unmistakable” presence in Scripture, no one could debate the warrior imagery of the Old Testament, but Weber insisted that God was the warrior of both testaments. The apostle Paul, after all, was an “ancient warrior,” a “never-say-die kind of guy” who withstood “imprisonment, torture, betrayal, and beatings that left him an inch from death.” Rambo had nothing on him, and he “would have done Louis L’Amour proud.” And then there was Jesus, the “ultimate man,” the “complete Hero.” Tragically, images of Jesus had been grossly disfigured by “a media that either hates and distorts Him or vastly misunderstands Him.” Too many men had become victims of a “demasculinized” portrait of Christ, making it difficult for them to follow Jesus and leaving them looking elsewhere for models of manhood. In the final chapter of the Bible, Weber reminded readers, Jesus “closes the Book on a white war horse, in a blood-spattered robe, with a sword in His mouth and a rod of iron in His hand.” The Bible ended in a roar, not a whimper.²⁹

At the same time, a true warrior had a tender heart. For Weber, the “tender warrior” was the perfect solution for navigating a path between an outmoded “macho” masculinity and an unacceptable, effeminate one. Here, even John Wayne as masculine icon came up short. It was hard to imagine John Wayne diapering a baby, and that’s because Hollywood didn’t understand the tender warrior. Better to look to a real-life hero like General Norman Schwarzkopf, the “conquering commander of Desert Storm,” who wasn’t afraid to get a little misty-eyed on occasion. “Now don’t get me wrong,” Weber quickly clarified. “There is a difference between ‘tender’ and soft.” Weber wanted tender warriors, not soft males. Weber’s tender warrior motif was perfectly suited to the soft patriarchy of the evangelical men’s movement, and Weber was a popular speaker at Promise Keepers events and a regular contributor to PK publications.³⁰ Like the larger Promise Keepers movement, Weber emphasized male companionship: “every fighter pilot needs a wing man.” Here, again, John Wayne’s model of masculinity needed tweaking. “As much as we love John Wayne,” Weber acknowledged, “all you ever saw was the steel.” John Wayne left the impression that real men stand alone, and they do, when necessary. But it was important to realize that real men also stand together.³¹

Within the evangelical men’s movement, men did stand together, citing each other—sometimes even bordering on plagiarism—sharing platforms, and promoting each other’s work. The pursuit of warrior masculinity helped forge a larger community across the evangelical subculture. Books on evangelical masculinity were marketed to suburban megachurch men’s groups, denominational and nondenominational men’s ministries, and homeschool networks, binding disparate strands of American evangelicalism together in a shared cultural identity. At first glance, these books didn’t appear to be about politics; they were merely helpful handbooks on family and child-rearing. Yet they were both subtly and profoundly political. Farrar liked to cite the bogus Tocqueville line that had appealed to Reagan, too: “America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” They were, after all, in the midst of a war for the soul of America. For America to be good—and great—the warrior must be awakened.³²

WITH ITS MASSIVE PUBLIC RALLIES and the enthusiastic participation of men across the nation, Promise Keepers captured the attention of the larger public. Yet, within evangelicalism two parallel movements would also play key roles in shaping understandings of Christian masculinity. One was the “complementarian” theology espoused by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW). The other was the sexual purity movement.

Whereas the popular arm of the evangelical men’s movement often rested on somewhat shaky theological footing, CBMW marshaled the power of conservative theologians to fashion a scriptural defense of patriarchy. With close ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, CBMW helped ensure that gender would remain firmly embedded at the center of evangelical identity.

In 1986, in an address before the Evangelical Theological Society, theologian Wayne Grudem had called for a new organization to uphold biblical manhood and womanhood. The next year an informal group gathered to discuss the rise of “unbiblical teaching” about women and men, and in December of that year they convened more formally, this time in Danvers, Massachusetts. There, under the leadership of Grudem and fellow Reformed evangelical John Piper, they crafted a statement affirming what would come to be known as “complementarianism”: God created men and women “equal before God” yet “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.” The statement attested that God had established male headship as part of the order of creation and closed the door to women in church leadership. In 1989, CBMW published this “Danvers Statement” in a full-page advertisement in Christianity Today, drawing “a huge response.”³³

The Danvers Statement was a response both to an alleged “gender confusion” ushered in by the 1960s and to the “evangelical feminism” that had emerged in the 1970s. It was not, however, a call to an aggressive, militant masculinity. It dictated that a husband’s headship be humble and loving rather than domineering, and it stipulated that “husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives.” Yet in asserting female submission as the will of God, it foregrounded a biblical defense of patriarchy and gender difference that would come to serve as the bedrock of a militaristic Christian masculinity.³⁴

In 1991, Piper and Grudem published the 500-page Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a manifesto in defense of God-given gender difference. “Mature masculinity” convicted a man of his responsibility “to accept danger to protect women,” and a mature woman accepted this protection: “She is glad when he is not passive. She feels herself enhanced and honored and freed by his caring strength and servant-leadership.” Unfortunately, the “devastating sin” of men’s failure to lead at home and in the church had destabilized this God-given order. By spreading the idea that male leadership was “born of pride and fallenness,” Satan had achieved a major tactical victory. In fact, pride was precisely what prevented spiritual leadership. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was Christianity Today’s “Book of the Year” in 1992.³⁵

CBMW was concerned with church and home but also with the fate of the nation. In 1996, in response to what it saw as President Clinton’s meddling with the military, CBMW promoted a “Resolution on women in combat,” which they recommended “to all interested denominations.” Alarmed that “Biblical norms for the exclusively male vocation of warfare” were being ignored, CBMW noted that the whole purpose of combat was “to kill, slay and destroy,” a purpose and essence that aligned with masculinity, not femininity. Moreover, the moral justification for war involved the protection of vital national interests, most essentially the security and welfare of families. In other words, moral justification for combat was derived from and thus linked to self-sacrificial male headship. On a practical level, integrating women into combat weakened unit cohesion and threatened military order by “escalating sexual tensions,” straining the marital fidelity of “male warriors,” and subjecting “female warriors” to rape and abuse when taken as POWs. In short, it threatened national security and fundamentally controverted the will of God.³⁶

Together with conservatives in the SBC, CBMW worked to promote patriarchal authority as a nonnegotiable requirement of the orthodox Christian faith. Functioning as theological think tanks, CBMW and SBC seminaries provided resources for denominations, organizations, and local churches, helping to build a network of evangelicals committed to advancing a patriarchal version of Christianity. They worked in close cooperation; in the mid-1990s CBMW took up residence at the SBC’s Southern Seminary, and the council endorsed the seminary’s resolution to hire only faculty members who were opposed to the ordination of women—over the opposition of students and faculty. Meanwhile, the conservative takeover of the SBC continued apace. The fact that Bill Clinton was a moderate Southern Baptist only furthered the aims of conservatives. The SBC became increasingly political during his administration, endorsing capital punishment and affirming Americans’ right to bear arms.³⁷

In 1998, conservative Southern Baptists revised their Baptist Faith and Message, for the first time since 1963, to add a section calling men “to provide for, to protect, and to lead” their families, and wives to submit themselves “graciously to the servant leadership of her husband.” Paige Patterson’s wife Dorothy helped author the amendment, which was closely based, in many cases word for word, on the Danvers Statement. Like the Danvers Statement, this new position rooted the submission of women in the pre-Fall creation, not as a result of the Fall—overturning previous characterizations of submission issued in 1984. When moderates proposed a motion to replace “women’s submission” with “mutual submission,” it quickly went down in defeat, and the original proposal passed to a chorus of “amens” and thunderous applause.³⁸

A CBMW conference in Dallas in the spring of 2000 illustrated the expanding complementarian network. Participants included Grudem, Piper, and SBC president Paige Patterson; Richard Land, president of the SBC Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; Randy Stinson, newly appointed executive director of CBMW; and Al Mohler, president of the Southern Seminary and member of the council. Among complementarians, other doctrinal commitments seemed to pale in comparison to beliefs about gender, and ideas about male authority and the subordination of women increasingly came to distinguish “true evangelicals from pseudo evangelicals.” The already mature market for resources on Christian masculinity meant that distribution channels were in place to disseminate conservative teachings on “biblical manhood” far and wide, works that would further orient American evangelicalism around the gender divide.³⁹

IN TANDEM WITH EFFORTS to promote “biblical manhood and womanhood,” an elaborate “purity culture” was taking hold across American evangelicalism. Purity culture emerged as a cohesive movement in the 1990s, but it drew on teachings long championed by conservative evangelicals accustomed to upholding stringent standards of female sexual “purity” while assigning men the responsibility of “protecting” women and their chastity. Female modesty was a key component of purity culture. If men were created with nearly irrepressible, God-given sex drives, it was up to women to rein in men’s libidos. Wives were tasked with meeting husbands’ every sexual need, but it was the responsibility of women and girls to avoid leading men who were not their husbands into temptation.

What counted as appropriate modesty depended on one’s location in the evangelical subculture. In certain homeschool circles, women wore dresses that fell below the knee and fashioned their hair in long, unadorned styles. Other evangelicals defined modesty more liberally. But wherever evangelicals drew the line, women were judged for their failure to uphold the ideal. Evangelicals had far less to say about male modesty. Instead, they emphasized the rewards that awaited boys who waited. A message of delayed gratification was at the heart of purity teachings for adolescent boys. Since wives served to gratify male desire, men only needed to wait until marriage to be rewarded with “mind-blowing” sex. Such promises were the stock-in-trade of evangelical youth pastors in the 1990s. In the words of purity evangelist Josh McDowell, God was not a “cosmic killjoy.” After all, God created sex.⁴⁰

McDowell, an evangelical pseudo-intellectual who first made a name for himself writing popular books on Christian apologetics, helped launch the purity movement. In 1987 he published Why Wait? What You Need to Know about the Teen Sexuality Crisis, and he followed this purity primer with a VHS video series. In the early 1990s he joined with Christian rock band Petra to promote his purity message. It was an odd pairing, the middle-aged father figure who appeared onstage at rock concerts mixing in dad jokes with frank talk of sex and venereal disease. But it all made sense within the larger evangelical culture.⁴¹

A decade after McDowell’s book appeared, Josh Harris helped transform the purity message into something cool for the younger set. Harris was the son of pioneering Christian homeschoolers—his parents helped establish the Christian homeschooling movement, and his father’s 1988 book, The Christian Home School, was a Christian Booksellers Association bestseller. Harris got his start as a teenager publishing a magazine for fellow homeschoolers, and in 1997, at age twenty-one, he published his magnum opus, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Influenced by the writings of Elisabeth Elliot, Harris introduced a generation of young Christians to “biblical courtship,” the idea that fathers were charged with ensuring their daughters’ purity until their wedding day, at which point they handed unsullied daughters over to husbands who assumed the burden of protection, provision, and supervision. The book became the bible of the purity movement, selling more than one million copies.

The purity movement received strong support from evangelical institutions and organizations. The Christian homeschool community helped fuel its popularity, and the Southern Baptist Convention was home to True Love Waits, one of the most influential purity organizations. (Three years before Promise Keepers rallied at the National Mall, 20,000 evangelical teenagers showed up to pledge their sexual purity as part of the True Love Waits campaign.) Countless local churches promoted purity teachings, and purity culture found expression in an array of consumer products. Families purchased silver “purity rings” to provide girls with a constant reminder of the value of their virginity, and of their obligation to guard it vigilantly. “Purity balls” started popping up across the country, offering families opportunities to enact their commitment to sexual purity through public ceremony. At these events, fathers provided a model of masculine headship by “dating” their daughters, and girls pledged their sexual purity before their families and communities. Like “servant leadership” and complementarian theology, the purity movement enabled evangelicals to reassert patriarchal authority in the face of economic, political, and social change. The widespread popularity of the purity movement was fueled in part by an injection of federal funds. As early as 1981, President Reagan began directing government funding to abstinence-only sex education, and this funding continued through the 1990s, reaching its peak under the George W. Bush administration; by 2005, more than 100 abstinence-based groups would receive more than $104 million in federal funding. Here was a case of government intrusion into the most intimate of matters, yet evangelicals didn’t seem to mind.⁴²

THE EVANGELICAL MEN’S MOVEMENT of the 1990s was marked by experimentation and laden with contradictions. “Soft patriarchy” papered over tensions between a harsher, authoritarian masculinity and a more egalitarian posture; the motif of the tender warrior reconciled militancy with a kinder, gentler, more emotive bearing. Inconsistencies within the evangelical men’s movement reflected those within evangelicalism as a whole in the post–Cold War years. Earlier in the decade, it might have appeared that the more egalitarian and emotive impulses had the upper hand. It was a new era for America, and for American evangelicals. Rhetoric of culture wars persisted, but evangelicals’ interests had expanded to include a broader array of issues, including racial reconciliation, antitrafficking activism, and addressing the persecution of the global church. At the end of the decade, however, the more militant movement would begin to reassert itself. When it did, this resurgent militancy would become intertwined both with the sexual purity movement and with the assertion of complementarianism within evangelical circles. In time it would become clear that the combination of all three could produce toxic outcomes.