Religion: The Moral Re-Armer

“God-guidance” was his touchstone—a phrase so often on his lips that it seemed to many that he had invented the idea. God guided Frank Buchman to seek out the company of the rich and famous—an improbable prophet, ovoid and owlish, with a piping voice and a slangy sweetness-and-light that in the past four decades won him an earnest following. At first these followers were known as Oxford Groupers or Buchmanites, but in 1938. as the nations of the world rearmed for war. Dr. Buchman was inspired to christen his movement Moral Re-Armament. Stumping the world, he gathered testimonials—sometimes heartfelt, sometimes diplomatically polite—from kings, labor leaders. Oriental potentates, Mau-Mau leaders.

During recent years. Pennsylvania-born Frank Buchman lived part of the time in a luxurious Shangri-La at Caux, Switzerland, where two former hotels and a cluster of chalets, overlooking the French Alps and Lake Geneva, had become M.R.A.’s international headquarters. Last week, having lately finished a strenuous session with 850 Moral Re-Armers from all over, he was vacationing at the Black Forest resort town of Freudenstadt. There, one night Frank Buchman suffered a heart attack and died. He was 83.

The Oxford Group. Frank Buchman’s special magnetism was not evident early in his life; one of his teachers in his home town of Pennsburg. Pa., remembered him as “not outstanding in any respect.” A bachelor all his life, he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1902, and soon found that his special interest was working with young men; for seven years he was secretary of the Y.M.C.A. at Pennsylvania State College. After that, missionary work and evangelism among prisoners in World War I took him to the Near and Far East. and to Europe. It was not until 1921 that he hit his stride by forming the Oxford Group at England’s Oxford University.

Imported to America, the Oxford Group went well for a time among Ivy League undergraduates, who responded to the shiny-eyed intensity of the group’s weekend “house parties” in well-staffed mansions, with their morning “quiet times” and their public confessions of sins. The four tenets of Frank Buchman’s version of Oxford Group Christianity were “absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love,” and so much absolutism was bound occasionally to end in tears; at Princeton, for instance, President John Hibben summarily banned Frank Buchman from the campus.

God-Guided Elite. Buchman meant M.R.A. to be a “God-guided campaign to prevent war by moral and spiritual awakening.” It failed to prevent war, and it earned considerable censure for seeming to rely heavily on “changing” dictators; Buchman had the misfortune to exclaim publicly: “I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler.” After World War II, M.R.A. turned to attacking Communism.

The M.R.A. technique for fighting the Reds is still that of changing the world by a “God-guided” elite—a program that has little endorsement these days from the clergy. Reinhold Niebuhr has called the movement “socially vicious” and “religiously vapid,” and six years ago the Church of England’s Social and Industrial Council condemned M.R.A.’s “hectic heartiness, its mass gaiety, and its reiterated slogans as a colossal drive of escapism from . . . responsible living.” The movement has been repeatedly attacked by Roman Catholic leaders as a kind of fake religion.

Such attacks did not keep M.R.A. from prospering. For a U.S. headquarters, it built a multimillion-dollar establishment on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, with room for 1,000 visitors. And from Caux to London’s Berkeley Square to New York’s Westchester County layouts, Buchman and his followers have always had nothing but the best. This luxury, too, brought criticism, but Frank Buchman had an answer. “Isn’t God a millionaire?” he would ask.