Where have all the Promise Keepers gone, especially the 50,000 who filled Fresno’s Bulldog Stadium in 1997?
If you relished profoundly public spiritual revivals, the Nineties were your decade, capped off with a humdinger national event.
October will mark the 25th anniversary of the “Stand in the Gap” rally in which several hundred thousand Christian men engulfed the National Mall in Washington, DC, under the Promise Keepers’ banner.
In the shadow of the Capitol building, the men fell to their knees, flung up their arms and professed faith, confessed failure and pledged to reclaim moral leadership of their families, churches and nation.
The decade’s kickoff event occurred in 1993. Roman Catholic young people from around the globe gathered for five days of World Youth Day celebrations in Denver, concluding with a fainting-filled outdoor papal Mass celebrated by John Paul II.
There were no official headcounts, but estimates were a half million participants at each event. Some called them a Catholic Woodstock or Billy Graham on steroids.
Such gatherings seem unimaginable now. We’re either infected or affected by pandemic and incivility. We stay within our tribes lest we solidify as salt licks. Truth-telling and curiosity that benefit all of society are as welcomed as paying for gasoline with pennies.
Revivals enabled people to temporarily leave safe harbors. They thrust themselves into the company of strangers similarly striving to fill God-shaped holes in their hearts. I’m still struck by the memory of people out-loud promising to cease being self-centered jerks, name badges and all.
My long marriage had just unraveled. I craved the spiritual and emotional head-straightening every bit as much as others who jammed stadiums, parks and churches.
But I was a paid outsider, a religion reporter for the Fresno Bee and McClatchy Newspapers. Only years later did I grasp how full immersion in this assignment helped me regain personal footing.
I tracked religious mobilizations in Sacramento, Fresno, Seattle, Denver and DC.
If you needed lifting up, a hand wave would attract prayer counselors. There were sweaty hugs, steadying arms and the cement of tearful shared prayer.
Participants raised travel cash selling T-shirts and Portuguese pastries, holding car washes and stay-awake-a-thons. They fixed flats, scrubbed in public restrooms and danced barefoot in downtown Denver’s fountains.
They bantered chants of “JP2, we love you” and “I love Jesus, yes, I do. I love Jesus, how about you?” If you needed tribulation, you joined hours-long queues for water and outhouses.
The endurance, humility and harmony created a grand catharsis and ecstatic repurposing. The connectedness, while not universal or apolitical, was tangible and usually refreshing.
I wonder what’s become of World Youth Day and Promise Keepers participants, 25 to 30 years older, many at leadership position ages. What ecstatic promises have they made real? How do they reconcile lies blessed as truth in public discourse? Have they become leaders or misleaders?
My personal reformation was much informed by reporting the experiences of those engulfed in intense spiritual self-assessment. It was the start of a happy ending, a marriage that will celebrate 25 years not long after the Promise Keepers anniversary in October.
John G. Taylor is a former Fresno Bee journalist and retired California hospital system executive. He lives in El Dorado Hills, CA. A version of this appeared as an op-ed in the July 23, 2022 Fresno Bee.