Criticism
The National Organization for Women (NOW), an American feminist organization, has expressed the view that the Promise Keepers pose a threat to women's rights. NOW alleges that the group encourages inequality within marriages and teaches a doctrine of male superiority.
According to Amy Schindler, "the discourse of masculinity found within conservative religious movements, such as the Promise Keepers and the Victorian era movement 'muscular Christianity,' is inherently political. Any masculinity project aimed at restoring or reclaiming a 'traditional' male role for privileged white, heterosexual males has a political impact within the tapestry of class, race, and gender power." Academic Browyn Kara Conrad argues that the organization reproduces problematic sexual scripts such as the Madonna/whore view of female sexuality and a view of the male sex drive as uncontrollable.
The group was also criticized for doctrinal compromises and inconsistent doctrines. Dr. Raymond Hartwig, president of the South Dakota district of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, commented: "They use the Bible in a very simplistic form, as a springboard to jump into the law.'" The owner of the Tampa strip club 2001 Odyssey in Florida said that while attending a nearby conference several years prior, a number of Promise Keepers visited his club: "We had phenomenal numbers all weekend, and they walked in wearing badges and name tags and weren’t shy at all."
Read more about this topic: Promise Keepers
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)