Searching for the promised land.

Is there a place for gay men in Promise Keepers, the nation's biggest right-wing evangelical group?

When he came out publicly in Big Timber, Mont., four years ago, Dave Christensen found himself under siege. Rejected by the pastor of his local evangelical congregation, threatened with violence by a local militia group--and out of earshot of gay organizations--he sought refuge in an unlikely source: the local chapter of Promise Keepers, an evangelical men's group cofounded by Bill McCartney, who has called homosexuality an "abomination of Almighty God."

"My Promise Keepers brothers would fight for me in any situation," says Christensen, a divorced father of two who operates a leather-tanning business. "They could see how important it was for me to express myself openly in an evangelical setting. And once they got beyond the biblical arguments, they were able to see me as a person and love me for who I am. They know that McCartney is wrong."

To make his point, Christensen plans to be among the hundreds of thousands of men expected to attend the Promise Keepers' October 4 march on Washington, D.C. Known for its massive outdoor rallies at football stadiums across the country, the group has grown from a small clutch of 70 organized by McCartney in 1990 to, by 1996, a staff of 360 with an annual budget of $87 million. The group claims that 2.6 million men have attended the stadium events since 1991--making Promise Keepers one of the biggest national political or religious networks in the country.

With the theme "Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly for Men," the Washington rally will, according to organizers, steer clear of partisan politics. In the march's marketing materials, overtly political messages are conspicuous by their absence. Instead, attendees will be encouraged to "accept responsibility for the well-being of their families."

Yet as the group has experienced phenomenal growth in recent years, the partisan tone of its leaders has come under increasing scrutiny. "Whenever you have hundreds of thousands of evangelical men in one place, it's bound to be a political event," says William Martin, author of With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, which was the basis of a PBS documentary last year. "There's no secret that leaders of Promise Keepers have a conservative political agenda, but at this point it's too early to predict exactly what it will be or how closely the rank and file will follow it."

The antigay credentials of the group's leader, however, are well established. McCartney, the immensely popular and successful head coach of the University of Colorado football team when he founded Promise Keepers, made the abominatign comment at a 1992 press conference announcing his support of Amendment 2, a state ballot measure that proposed to ban gay rights ordinances. University president Judith Albino later rebuked McCartney for using his statement at the school as a platform for his political, agenda. McCartney fired back, calling gays and lesbians "stark raving mad."

McCartney is also an advocate for so-called muscular Christianity, which advocates a return to traditional male-female roles in the family and workplace. One of McCartney's "Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper" tells men to "take back" their rightful role as leaders of their family from their wives.

By his own reckoning, McCartney has not always practiced what he preaches. In interviews he has admitted to a hair-trigger temper, a history of alcohol abuse, and the neglect of his wife and children. While he served as head coach at the University of Colorado, his daughter allegedly engaged in highly publicized affairs with several of his players, bearing a child out of wedlock by the star defensive tackle. At Promise Keepers rallies McCartney is famous for telling his audience how much he regrets his family history.

Today McCartney has toned down his message, inviting gay men like Christensen to join Promise Keepers--as long as they check their sexual identity at the door. But critics remain skeptical. "There is no room for the gay movement in Promise Keepers," says Skipp Porteous, national director of the Institute for First Amendment Studies, a group that monitors the religious right. "But they would love to have any opportunity they can to convert gay men to heterosexuality, They lump homosexuality in with other sins like adultery that they want to help men avoid."

But what worries veteran religious-right watchers like Porteous more than McCartney is his little-known pastor, the Rev. James Ryle, a member of the Promise Keepers board of directors. In an interview with journalist Russ Bellant published in the newsletter "Eyes Right! Challenging the Right Wing Backlash," Ryle described what he saw as the march's revolutionary potential. "Never have 300,000 men come together throughout human history," he declared, "except for the purposes of war."

Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, says Ryle and McCartney share a biblically prophesied vision of the end of the world, in which "sinners and unbelievers are executed by people who are the agents of God. It certainly would be carnage for all those deemed homosexual. This is no casual ivory-tower discourse. They really believe this stuff."

McCartney declined repeated requests for comment, but Mark DeMoss, a spokesman for Promise Keepers, says his group renounces violence. "The attitude of Christian love can be seen at all Promise Keepers rallies," he says. "Men come to the Promise Keepers to share their sins with each other and seek support for overcoming them. Certainly love and support are not a substitute for the position that homosexuality is wrong."

Above the back-and-forth over the group's ultimate motives, Martin warns against viewing members of the Promise Keepers as little more than pawns in McCartney's biblical endgame. He says the group is such a mishmash of theologies and political ideologies that it poses little danger to gay men or lesbians or anyone else. "The key to the group's success is the ability of the leadership to keep the message away from politics, which automatically turns off a lot of people," he says. "This is a substantial movement that has a number of different strains yet to coalesce around a single cause."

Christensen goes even further, saying many gay men and lesbians he meets allow ideology to taint their view of Promise Keepers--an organization he calls "the best hope for gay people." Christensen adds that his Promise Keepers group is made up predominantly of Catholic men, many of whom take a more liberal stance toward homosexuality than does the national organization. In fact, Christensen says, the strength of the organization lies not in the ideology of its national leaders but in the quality of the relationships among the men in local groups across the nation. "The biggest problem facing men today is that they can't talk to each other, can't share their feelings about emotional issues," he says. "Men are fighting in bars, beating their wives, and picking on gays. When men learn to trust each other and open their hearts, the world will be a safer place for gays and lesbians."