Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
The History of Moral Re-Armament

The History of Moral Re-Armament

Last updated on: February 12, 2019 at 2:04 am by Chris Gehrz

The History of Moral Re-Armament 2019-02-11T23:58:22-04:00 Chris Gehrz

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Few religious figures were as loved and loathed in their own time — and as anonymous today — as Rev. Frank Buchman, the complicated founder of the mid-20th century movement known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Promoted by American presidents and consulted by the architects of European integration, Buchman struck the likes of Reinhold Niebuhr and Graham Greene as being hopelessly naïve. “In a materialistic sense, he is undoubtedly the most successful evangelist of this age,” decided one British observer in 1954, but “in a spiritual sense, his gains are less easy to calculate.” Buchman’s emphasis on surrender to a higher power inspired the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, but the MRA was something like a cult to its critics — including current Oscar nominee Glenn Close, whose father joined the movement in the mid-1950s and kept his family at MRA headquarters in Caux, Switzerland while he was doing medical work in Africa. “You basically weren’t allowed to do anything,” she told the Hollywood Reporter in 2014, “or you were made to feel guilty about any unnatural desire” — all thanks to “this wizened old man with little glasses and a hooked nose, in a wheelchair.”

Then there’s Charles Lindbergh‘s response to MRA…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Who was Frank Buchman?

Ordained as a Lutheran pastor in 1902, Buchman moved in ecumenical circles from the very beginning of his career, leading a campus revival at Penn State and then serving as a missionary in Asia at the invitation of Sherwood Eddy. He borrowed ideas from many sources, from German Pietism to the YMCA, but Buchman credited the Higher Life movement with inspiring the fundamental turn in his life, in 1908. After listening to a sermon at Keswick by the Welsh revivalist Jessie Penn-Lewis, Buchman had a “poignant vision of the Crucified” and surrendered his life to God. “I remember only one feeling very plainly,” he recalled. “It was to me as if a strong stream of life suddenly passed through me, at the same time as my surrender.”

Buchman’s fame grew in the 1920s, as his message of personal transformation through the power of the Holy Spirit attracted followers who called themselves the First Century Christian Fellowship. By the end of the decade, the expanding circle was more commonly known as the Oxford Group, after one of its early centers. (Not to be confused with the 19th century Oxford Movement that gave rise to Anglo-Catholicism.) In his 2013 study of Buchman, Philip Boobyer describes the Oxford Group as primarily being “concerned with helping people at an individual level. It was also practical rather than theological in orientation, placing emphasis, for example, on confession of sin, listening to God, and absolute moral standards” — namely, the “four absolutes” of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.

Perhaps the most distinctive practice of Buchman and his followers was seeking guidance from God through regular times of solitary silence. But the emphases on group confession and moral behavior attracted more public notoriety. An early critique came in 1926, when Time magazine reported that the “Buchman cult” at Princeton University was unduly preoccupied with ‘washing out’ sexual impurity — in particular, “autoerotism.”

(“Like young Buchmanites,” the reporter gossiped, “Mr. Buchman is a bachelor, though past 40. In what does his influence over them reside?”)

Nevertheless, the Oxford Group was significant enough that in 1938, with war clouds gathering over Europe, Buchman decided to refocus its efforts in service of world peace. Calling for “Moral Re-Armament,” Buchman sought, in Boobbyer’s summary, “to generate a worldwide movement of moral and spiritual renewal that would avert war and bring a new spirit into national and international life.” Individual change would have a cumulative effect, “felt at the global level in the creation of a moral and spiritual force powerful enough to ‘remake the world.'”

Reinhold Niebuhr found it “difficult to restrain the contempt which one feels for this dangerous childishness,” but MRA succeeded in gaining the public sympathies of the powerful and famous. In 1940 Daphne Du Maurier published Come Wind, Come Weather, an MRA-inspired collection of stories about Britons transformed by adopting “Christ’s absolute standards of honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love.” MRA rally-goers in those years received a pamphlet reprinting endorsements from industrialist Henry Ford, explorer Richard Byrd, dozens of artists, scientists, and labor leaders, and 34 of America’s 48 governors. “[If] you’re going to change the world,” MRA worker T. Willard Hunter explained later, “you need to change the people who run it. So we were out, among other things, to ‘make Christians out of Congressmen.'” Most famously, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt was persuaded to back MRA — at least, to the extent of asking then-Senator Harry Truman to read a statement on his behalf at a rally in Washington’s Constitution Hall. (The quotation from Hunter comes from his oral history interview in the Truman Presidential Library.)

All of which makes MRA’s biggest non-recruit so interesting: Ford’s friend and Roosevelt’s nemesis, Charles A. Lindbergh.

The conference center in Caux, Switzerland where Charles Lindbergh attended an MRA congress in 1961. It’s still used by Initiatives of Change, as MRA renamed itself in 2001 – CC BY 3.0

(Perhaps coincidentally, T. Willard Hunter went on to write books about both Buchman and Lindbergh, the latter a precursor to my own “spiritual, but not religious” biography of the famous Minnesotan.)

It’s a surprising animosity, in some ways. When Buchman went on the BBC in 1938 to declare that “the spiritual is more powerful than the material,” he might well have been describing the arc of Lindbergh’s own thought, as the apostle of aviation came under the influence of the French scientist and Catholic mystic Alexis Carrel. Both Lindbergh and Buchman were especially hostile to the materialistic worldview of Communism — and prone to musing about the value of Adolf Hitler’s government as a bulwark against Bolshevism.

“Cultist Buchman” — the cover of the April 20, 1936 issue of Time

But Lindbergh’s first impression of Buchman was extremely negative, and he never seems to have changed his opinion. The first sustained reference to the Oxford Group in Lindbergh’s papers is an odd letter to Carol Guggenheim, the wife of businessman and aviation backer Harry Guggenheim. Written in June 1936, it came two months after Time ran a cover photo of “Cultist Buchman”:

I hear disquieting rumors about your being seen reconnoitring [sic] in the neighborhood of an Oxford movement. Carol I do not see why you should want to join. I don’t think you have any sins of your own to confess and it would take much too long for you to confess Harry’s. Besides you have too much humor to be a Buchmanite…. Please write and tell us what the actual situation is. We will be extremely interested. Remember that you will always be welcome here, even if you join the Heathen.

But a year later, Alexis Carrel recommended to Lindbergh’s attention a young businessman named Jim Newton: “Although he is a member of the Oxford Group, he is not a fanatic. He understands, as we do, the necessity of a new orientation.” A protégé of Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone, Newton had experienced a religious conversion that led him into Buchman’s orbit. He befriended Lindbergh, and soon introduced him to some MRA colleagues. In his memoir, Newton recalled Lindbergh being impressed, but not interested:

Moral Re-Armament attracts a fine type of person. And it fires them with a great enthusiasm. You are all dedicated to important goals. But as for me, you know I am no joiner. I have the feeling your friends are trying to get me into a movement. I feel what is needed is the other way around—get movement into people but leave them free to move their own way.

Privately, Lindbergh was more caustic, lamenting that young men like Newton were wasting themselves on “a second-rate religious effort” that was superficial and naïve. But just before Christmas 1939, Lindbergh agreed to Newton’s attempt to arrange a dinner conversation with Buchman. “The arts of reconciliation have not kept pace with the arts of war,” the MRA leader told Lindbergh. “Our job is to demonstrate God’s power to heal divisions.” Lindbergh conceded to his journal that Buchman possessed “a certain magnetism and openness, and I felt that he was sincere and honest in all that he was doing.” Yet he still could “not understand what it is in his ‘movement’ that brings out such devotion and enthusiasm in his followers.”

Encouraged by Lindbergh’s post-WWII reflections on the need for religious wisdom to balance the ambitions of science, Jim Newton continued to nudge him to join MRA, which had claimed some success in resolving industrial conflicts and encouraging Franco-German reconciliation. (Both Konrad Adenauer and Robert Schuman consulted with Buchman.) In 1961 Newton convinced Lindbergh, a part-time resident of Switzerland in his later years, to take part in that year’s MRA congress at Caux.

It made no difference. In a strained but friendly letter, Lindbergh told Newton that “your viewpoint and mine toward MRA differ fundamentally and sincerely, and that neither the passage of time nor my visit to Caux have brought them closer together.” Once again, he was far harsher in private, jotting down in his notes that “MRA is made up largely of people who have been unable to solve their own problems, and who, therefore have gone out to solve the problems of mankind.” Calling arrogance the movement’s “fifth absolute,” Lindbergh likened MRA to “the Congress of the Soviets in Moscow” and called the affair “a psychiatrists [sic] paradise.”

But if he could not embrace “Buchmanism,” Lindbergh did thank Newton for arranging a different kind of religious encounter at Caux.

Buchman (who died later in the same congress Lindbergh attended) had always drawn a distinction between the overt Christianity of the Oxford Group and the broader orientation of MRA, which increasingly became a multi-religious movement after World War II. (Boobbyer notes that Christianity Today accused MRA of syncretism in a 1958 editorial.) In 1961 Newton arranged for Lindbergh to meet a Masai delegate to MRA from Kenya, a “lion-hunter” who told the Americans that his tribe “had their own God—to which they prayed—a god not in the form of a man, not in any form — but a God — their God.” For Lindbergh it was the beginning of a fascination with primitive societies and their religions that he would pursue until his death in 1974. More on that in a future post…

Previous Post

February 11, 2019

Karma Quandary

Next Post

February 13, 2019 Yun Ch’iho Meets Jim Crow

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abolitionism Abortion Abraham Joshua Heschel Abraham Kuyper Abraham Lincoln Academia Activism Adam Renberg Advent Adventist africa African American Religion Agnes Howard Albert Camus American History American Religious History American Revolution American West Anabaptists Ancient History Andrea Turpin Andrei Tarkovsky Anglicanism Annales Ansley Lillian Quiros anti-Catholicism Antisemitism Anxious Bench apologetics Apparitions Arash Azizi Archaeology archives art Artificial Intelligence Asia Asian Americans Augustine Authors Bad Bunny Baptism Baptists Barack Obama Battle of Hastings Benjamin Franklin Bernard-Henri Levy Beth Allison Barr Beth Moore Bethany Mannon Bible Bill Cunningham Billy Graham Black Music Bob Dylan Body Boenhoffer Books Breastfeeding Bruce Springsteen C.S. Lewis Calvinism Cancel Culture Capitalism Carmelites Catholicism Cedric Robinson Cesar Chavez Charismaticism charity Charles Dickens Charles Lindbergh Che Guevara Chicago Children Chinese Christianity Chris Gehrz Christ Christian death Christian Higher Education Christian life Christian Nation Christian Nationalism Christianity Today Christmas Church life Church Practice cinema Civil Religion Civil Rights Movement Civil War civility Classics Climate Change Cold War Colonial Mexico colonialism Comer Communism community complementarianism Conference on Faith and History Congregationalism Conspiracies Conspiracy Conversion Narratives Coronavirus Costa Rica Council of Nicaea Covid-19 Creation Critical Race Theory Crusades Culture culture wars Daniel K. Williams David Barton David Swartz Death Ways death with dignity DEI democracy Democratic Party Devotion Digital Age Diplomacy discipleship diversity Donald Trump Drama Dua Lipa Early Church early modern Early modern Catholicism Easter Eastern Christianity economic exploitation Education elections Elie Wiesel Elizabeth II Elizabeth Taylor emotions Empire Engineering England enslavement Entertainment Episcopal Church Erica Ramirez eschatology Eurocentrism Evangelicalism Evangelicals Exegesis Family Feminism Film Flannery O'Connor folk music Food Foreign Policy founding fathers Franciscans Franciscus Junius fundamentalism Funerals G.K. Chesterton Gender Genocide genre geography George W. Bush George Washington George Whitefield Global Christianity Global church Grief Guadalupe guest post Guest Post gun control gun violence Gustavo Gutierrez Hamid Dabashi Harold John Ockenga Harvest Hate Hawaiian Christianity Healing health care Heather Cox Richardson Hell Heresy Hermeneutics Higher Education Hinduism Hippocratic oath Historical Fiction Historical Methodology Historical Profession Historical Profession Historical Theology Historical Thinking historiography Holidays Holocaust horror movies Human rights Humanitarian Work humanities Hummingbirds Hungary hymns Imago Dei Immigration Injustice Interviews Iran Islam Islamophobia Israel Ivan's Childhood Jacob Randolph James Bratt Janine Giordano Drake Japanese history Japanese Literature Jean Paul Sartre Jesse Miranda Jesus Jesus Christ Jimmy Carter Joan Baez Joan Didion Joanne Freeman João B. Chaves Joao Chaves Joey Cochran John Calvin John Fea John Tillotson John Turner Johnny Cash Jonathan Edwards Jonathan Tran Joseph Smith Josh Howerton Journalism Jr. Judaism Jürgen Moltmann Just War Justice Justin Brierley Karl Barth Katelyn Beaty koi ponds Kris Kristofferson Kristin Kobes Du Mez Latin American Religious History Latino Americans Lectio Divina Leisure Lent Leonard Cohen liberal arts liberalism Liberation Theology Linda Ronstadt Lisa Clark Diller Literature Lou Reed Lynchings Lynneth Miller Renberg Mainline Protestantism Malcolm Foley Marilyn Monroe Maritime history Mark Noll Marriage Martin Luther Martin Luther King Martyrdom Marxism Mary Masih Alinejad mass shootings material culture medieval Christianity Medieval Ethiopia Melissa Borja memory Mennonites Mental Health Mental Illness Methodism Mexican Americans Mexicans Mike Madrid Miles Mullin Min Jin Lee Miscarriage Missionaries Mister Rogers Mitt Romney modernity Monasticism Mormonism Motherhood Mothers of the Church Moving Music Musicals Nadya Williams Nahua Christianity Native Americans Natsume Sōseki New Contributor New England New Year New York Nico Non-Violent Protest Orthodoxy pacifism Paleo Evangelicals Palestinians Parenting Patti Smith Paul Kingsnorth Pedro Calderón de la Barca Pentecostalism Philip Jenkins Phillis Wheatley physician-assisted suicide pilgrimage Pilgrims pluralism Plutocracy Poetry Politics Pope Francis Pope Leo XIV post-modernism prayer preaching Presbyterians prosperity gospel Protest Public history Publishing Puritans purity culture Quakers race Race Massacres Racial Capitalism racial reconciliation racialization Racism Raha Bahloulipour Re-Enchantment reading Reformation Refugees religion and the university religion and war Religious Freedom Religious Nones Religious Pluralism Religious Symbols religious violence Republican Party Revival Rita Coolidge Ritual Roger Williams Roman Catholic church Royalty Russell Moore same-sex marriage Sarah Irving-Stonebraker Scandinavia Science Science and Technology Scopes trial Scriptural Interpretation secularism Selena Quintanilla seminary Seventh-Day Adventists sexual morality Sexuality Sikhs Silence slaveholders theology Slavery Slavoj Zizek social justice Social Media Southern Baptist Convention Southern Religion Spain Spiritual Autobiography Spiritual but not religious Spiritual Discipline Sports Stanley Hauerwas Suffering Summer Camps Sunday Night Odds and Ends Supernatural Supreme Court Syriac Christianity Tal Howard Taylor Swift Teaching Technology Television Thanksgiving The Beatles The Mission theater TheoBros Theology Thomas Dixon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Kidd Thomas Merton Tim Gloege Tim Walz Tom Holland Tourism tradition Tragedy Translation Transnationalism Travel Trump Ukraine Uncategorized Unitarians United Methodist Church US History Vanessa Chan Velvet Underground Verónica A. Gutiérrez Veronica Gutierrez Vikings Violence Virgin Mary Virtue Virtue ethics Visions Voting War WCTU Wendell Berry Westminster Assembly White Evangelicalism Wildfires Winnie the Pooh Witches women Women in Ministry Women's and Gender Studies Work Worship writing Yasunari Kawabata Zena Hitz

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What city’s walls fell after the Israelites marched around them?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Jericho Babylon Nineveh Jerusalem