A promise of diversity and knowledge

I feel somewhat sheepish about writing a letter to the editor in response to one of your comic strips--not so much because it puts me in the company of the people who tried to get The Far Side cancelled every time Gary Larson cracked a joke about God, but because it puts me in the company of the people who actually read the Herald comics.

But the Promise Keepers get enough bad press around the country, and Ken Moon so completely butchered them in his strip last week, that I wanted to offer a more balanced picture...even if this amounts to a public confession that, yes, I read and enjoy Wide Gauge and Idiot's Tales.

Ken's beetles rather caustically described the Promise Keepers as "a bunch of white guys who don't think they're getting enough attention," accused them of aping the Million Man March, and ended up with a rant about white male pseudo-minority angst. I agree with Ken that majority self-pity is absurd and deserves all the satire it can get. Unfortunately, it's a completely inapt satire when applied to the PK movement--because few other mainstream religious organizations have so deliberately and consistently challenged the comfortable racial segregation of American Christianity. There are plenty of things about the Promise Keepers that merit criticism or parody, but its racial message isn't one of them.

I went to a PK rally back in 1994, the year the movement first started to enter the national consciousness. The array of guest speakers was (and is) impressively multiracial and multi-cultural. I still recall hearing 20,000 men squirm when Bill McCartney (the movement's founder) declared with characteristic bluntness that unless people of all ethnicities came to Promise Keepers, God wouldn't come either. Those "coliseums full of sensitive men" have been preached racial diversity and reconcilation summer after summer; if there's one trait Promise Keepers won't encourage, it's a sense of white vic-timization.

I also remember hearing the speakers' hopes of mustering one million men in Washington, D.C. the next summer. (This was fairly realistic; in '94, there were four or five separate PK rallies with 20,000 to 30,000 men apiece). A month later, they postponed it until after the '96 election season. The Promise Keepers are also noteworthy among Christian groups in their attempts to avoid political agendas, and they worried that the Christian Coalition would capitalize on a pre-election Washington rally. Claiming that Farrakhan stole their idea is probably unfair, but claiming that they copied his is pure anachronism.

And that's pretty much the extent of my gripe. I like Ken's strip; I enjoy watching the weekly results of his competition in tastelessness with Matt Wiegle and Dan Levy, and his competition in funniness with Matt Wiegle. But his criticism managed to miss all the weak points of the Promise Keepers and hit what is, in my opinion, one of their many strengths.

--Joel Hafvenstein, DC '98

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