Who Are the Promise Keepers?

It's a familiar image: some 50,000 men are packed in a football stadium crying, holding hands, praying and chanting, ""We love Jesus, yes we do!"" They're the Promise Keepers, members of a Christian men's group that drew more than one million men to its events in 1996. Understandably, millions of other Americans ask the question Abraham poses in this book. The coauthor of televangelist Jim Bakker's I Was Wrong, Abraham traces the organization's development from its founding in 1990 by former University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, and he explains the organization's primary purpose: to exhort men to pledge, in the form of seven promises, to become godly leaders at home and church and to develop sexual purity and racial harmony. Abraham acknowledges the controversy that Promise Keepers has stirred with its opposition to homosexuality and abortion and by the support it has received from conservative religious leaders, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, with outspoken political views. But his intent is to open minds to the organization, and he emphasizes how effectively it accomplishes its goals. Whether or not readers agree with him, then, will more than likely depend upon how sympathetic they are to the views of Evangelical Christianity. (June)