Last Call: Enemies of Promise
Rocca, Francis X.
by Francis X. Rocca Enemies of Promise I N MY LATE TEENS AND EARLY TWENTIES, I was active in an all-male organization whose activities I swore never to reveal. Suffice it to say that they had...
...Another particularly guileless young fellow literally thumped his bible as he urged the atheists to repent...
...How about a few more for your friends...
...The Christian ignored him, concentrating on another atheist with whom he was attempting to have an argument...
...The more vociferous of the protesters were men...
...Because He speaks to me...
...As I DREW NEARER TO THE MALL, every few feet somebody offered me a free New Testament...
...one of them cried...
...No, but it might have been the 1970's...
...Hey, I agree with you...
...All of the members seemed to have beautiful and charming girlfriends, so I figured that the same specially striped tie would make me just as eligible...
...I agree with you...
...he assured them...
...One old-timer simply raised his gnarled middle finger—a rather un-Christian and perfectly understandable gesture...
...Across the street a few dozen members of American Atheists Inc...
...You know they have medications for that...
...We don't believe in superstitions...
...You're nothing but a part of the Great Chain of Being...
...But I did learn to sing some old-fashioned ribald songs, and to play a decent game of nine-ball...
...Read some history books...
...Most of the Keepers ignored the taunts, though a few stopped for a rendition of "Amazing Grace...
...This is not the seventeenth century...
...they shouted...
...Cult...
...The sign holder, one of the NOW contingent, looked shocked by this burst of friendly fire...
...Cult...
...The group chanted, "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, born-again bigots, go away...
...Then it left me feeling detached, the way I feel about anything I see on television...
...They were united by their conviction that it mattered whether or not God existed...
...OF COURSE THAT POWER WAS LOST ON the atheists...
...Anyway, the Promise Keepers showed their famous media savvy...
...Both of them were smiling—the atheist sarcastically, the believer patiently—yet there was something like kinship between them...
...A dozen Jumbotron screens, at regular intervals along the Mall and beyond, displayed the events on stage to the assembled throng...
...86 November 1997 The American Spectator...
...There was something quaintly naive about people who could still feel that the non-existence of God was a cause for hope...
...When a twentysomething man drew near with a hand-lettered sign that read, "Pray to God, Don't Play God," several of them stepped in front of him...
...The groovy curved letters of the NOW logo looked at least two decades out of date, especially compared to the slick graphics of the Promise Keepers' baseball caps and brochures...
...they demanded, and laughed...
...Perhaps the organizers had overdone it by printing a million copies of a special commemorative edition...
...It was strange to hear it sung by people who actually meant the words...
...The atheists were not mollified...
...One of the main reasons I joined was to improve my chances with women...
...The Promise Keepers came to Washington vowing to be more attentive to their wives and children—to spend more time at home, to share the household chores...
...Local radio stations broadcast simultaneous translations in Spanish and Korean...
...YOU NEED INFORMATION...
...he insisted, but quickly moved, on...
...Cult...
...seemed even more of an anachronism...
...Fight the Radical Right," read the signs at the NOW protest a few blocks away...
...Why do you believe in Jesus...
...You are part of a cult...
...Suffice it to say that they had mostly to do with drinking...
...Perhaps this, too, was overdoing things...
...In all ages, I suppose, bigotry looks pretty much the same...
...Down on your knees...
...Yet when all those men—their number approached the 550,000 of D.C.'s permanent population—huddled together in clusters of three or four to pray in silence, it was a powerful sight...
...SHOUTED ONE of the feminists, a tubby, bespectacled man with a shaved head and a beard...
...I'm not a Promise Keeper...
...I smiled and held up the one I had already taken...
...The first time I saw a sweeping overhead shot of the crowd in which I stood, overflowing the space between the Capitol and the Washington monument, it was a thrill...
...after all, this was the one book which everybody there was certain to own...
...Down on your knees...
...The scene recalled the "Mocking of Christ" in its many artistic representations—not because the man (who reveled in the ridicule) was like Christ, but because the faces of the mockers were as twisted by hatred as any ever painted by Giotto or Fra Angelico...
...There must have been something I missed...
...Yet some women were having none of it...
...Two of them stood behind him, making the rabbit-ear gesture over his head and finger-looping motions beside it, while their cohorts with video cameras taped the spectacle...
...One of their number, a young man with a bad complexion and a handycam, shouted at a Promise Keeper who had wandered into their midst: "I'm a history major...
...THE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF MEN who rallied at the National Mall on October 4 were also seeking the favor of women...
Vol. 30 • November 1997 • No. 11
