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Bill McCartney, Coach Who Led a Movement for ‘Godly’ Men, Dies at 84
After transforming the University of Colorado’s football team, he founded the Promise Keepers, a masculine revivalist group that drew millions of supporters.
Bill McCartney, a football coach who in the 1980s took the University of Colorado from perennial losers to national champions, but who later left behind his $350,000 annual salary to refashion his locker-room message about prayer and sacrifice into a sprawling men’s evangelical movement, died on Friday in Boulder, Colo. He was 84.
The cause was complications of dementia, his family announced in a statement released by the university.
As the founder of the Promise Keepers, a men-only Christian group based in Denver, Mr. McCartney reached his greatest influence in 1997, when an event he staged in Washington drew an estimated half-million men to the National Mall. They sang, hugged, knelt and repented for their sins.
Historians described the movement as “one of the fastest-growing religious revivals in American history,” The New York Times reported afterward on its front page.
The group then lost momentum — but regained it in recent years, when new leaders relaunched it as a vehicle for supporters of Donald J. Trump to express a newly assertive Christian masculinity.
The Promise Keepers asked their adherents to commit to seven promises, all of which linked manliness with virtue. Among them were promises to honor Jesus Christ, establish brotherly bonds with several men, build strong marriages and practice sexual “purity.”