David Belden’s preface to the on-line edition of his 1976 doctoral thesis

Re-reading this thesis I am both glad and sad to realize it is still one of the best things written about one of the most interesting movements of the 20th century. Glad, because I think most of my judgments have worn well. Sad, because long before now there should have been a considerable academic industry analyzing the Oxford Group / Moral Re-Armament. This thesis would then be seen as an early attempt, which left out major areas worth studying, and made assessments that have been effectively challenged elsewhere. I’m sad this thesis has not been challenged.

Brief intro for newcomers to the Oxford Group / MRA

The Oxford Group is best known in the US today as the movement in which Alcoholics Anonymous began. AA left it in the late 1930s. Within AA itself, it is often thought that the Oxford Group disappeared. In its January 2011 cover story on AA, Harper’s, a national US highbrow magazine, described AA’s parent the Oxford Group as ‘a defunct 1920s evangelical movement’. Harper’s no doubt got the ‘defunct’ idea from AA itself, though five minutes on Google would have revealed a different story.

Although the Oxford Group launched its Moral Re-Armament (MRA) campaign in London in 1938 and over the next few years changed its name to MRA, and eventually in 2001 to Initiatives of Change (IofC), it is still the same movement. In Britain that is even legally true: to find its financial report on the UK Charity Commissioners website to this day you have to look under ‘The Oxford Group’.

But what was it? I see things through historical lenses, so my one-paragraph summary goes like this, at least today:

The Oxford Group / MRA was an experientialist Christian movement. For its founders the experience of being transformed and guided by the Holy Spirit, Jesus, and God the Father was so powerful that it appeared to be the answer to the problems of a world riven by war and poverty; so powerful that theological differences and even such a central Christian formulation as the Trinity took a distant back seat as people of other religions and none joined the movement: anyone could follow the promptings of the inner voice, make amends, reconcile with enemies, and become part of “the answer” brought by MRA. MRA specialized in embedding personal change in strategies to bring resolution to conflicts, whether in the home, in industry or between nations. Its optimistic vision stood out in contrast to a realpolitik response to world events and to the rival optimisms of socialism, Communism, or capitalism.  This thesis shows that this vision evolved from the expansionist, colonialist optimism of pre-WWI American student evangelism, the kind expressed in the book title Strategic Points in the World’s Conquest: The Universities and Colleges as Related to the Progress of Christianity, by evangelical organizer John R Mott in 1897. Frank Buchman, a protégé of Mott’s and founder of the Oxford Group, managed to maintain and reinterpret that optimism in the era of the World Wars and the Great Depression, when few if any others managed to do so. He attempted to make it available to all, including to leaders of anti-colonial movements. Indeed on the basis of this experience and vision he built a thriving movement, that by 1960 had about 3,000 full time unsalaried workers, some 4-7,000 more militant adherents, and perhaps 100,000 or more followers. The movement built a track record of conflict resolution successes that were attested to in many case by key players and witnesses, but have rarely been studied academically. Despite its desire to be neither an organization nor a formula for life-changing, the attempt to hold together as a strategic “force”, along with other more common pressures towards institutionalization, drove MRA down a path that struck many outsiders as cultic. In recent decades great efforts have been made by the movement to move beyond that cultism, efforts that took place after this thesis was written, and with which I am not familiar enough to say anything useful.

Is it relevant today?

Why should the Oxford Group /MRA be both well known to the public and discussed with scholarly acuity today? Here are five reasons I find convincing:

1. Recovery Movement: The Recovery Movement is one of the most successful personal change movements of the last century, and still today. Even so, it is not the only method of treating addictions. The religious nature of its origin—not just in the Oxford Group but in the Christian movements from which the Group descended—is highly relevant in understanding it. Furthermore, Recovery Movement people sometimes talk about how their methodology could issue in more social change or political reconciliation than it has. That was one of the differences that led to the split. Willard Hunter, an associate of Buchman’s, wrote in his 2002 memoir that when Bill Wilson took the ‘alcohol squad’ out of the Oxford Group in 1937, “Bill was quoted as wanting to deal only with the alcohol problem. Frank, who himself had an impressive record of helping alcoholics, said, ‘But we have drunken nations on our hands, too.’” Buchman’s approach to doing that would interest many Recovery Movement people.
2. Reconciliation: In the history of warfare and its aftermath, is there any more remarkable example of reconciliation and generosity than the creation of the European Community and the Marshall Plan? MRA was credited by key players (e.g., Truman, Schumann, Adenauer) with a significant role in enabling both to happen. Think about this: After centuries of warfare and two world wars, European rivals voluntarily unified their armament industries so they could not go to war with each other again—with financing from but without conquest by the dominant power of the age. Other reconciliations of note happened through MRA’s work, mostly before the current conflict resolution profession began. These reconciliations deserve more serious study than they have yet received.
3. Experientialism: Frank Buchman, MRA’s founder, has been described by a current American religious scholar, Jeff Sharlet, as ‘the gnome of early twentieth-century fundamentalism’[1] and by actress Glenn Close, raised in MRA, as ‘a violently anti-intellectual and possibly homophobic evangelical fundamentalist.’[2]  But the last four presidents of the movement he founded have been an Egyptian-British Muslim woman, and three men: an Indian Hindu, an Algerian Muslim, and a Swiss Catholic. How many gnomes of US fundamentalism have a legacy like that? If Buchman was a fundamentalist, is there a kind of fundamentalism that is curiously similar to those today who claim to be ‘spiritual but not religious’? I believe a more useful word than ‘fundamentalist’ for Buchman is ‘experientialist’. I think study of this may hold possibilities for bridging the believer/unbeliever divides in the modern world. 
4. Sects and Cultism: Most (perhaps all?) previous Christian movements like Buchman’s that attempted to breathe vigorous new life into the churches either remained in their church (e.g., the Franciscans, Pietists, Oxford Movement) or were expelled and formed their own sect, denomination or church (e.g., Lutherans, Methodists). MRA’s ability to avoid either course says much about Buchman’s skill and perhaps more about the churches’ greater tolerance in the 20th Century, as their power declined. MRA never became a sect or church—in fact it tried very hard not to—but it did suffer internally from cultic pressures that rigidified it and arguably led to its decline and to its eclipse in public memory. As a case study in what groups who wish not to become cults can do to avoid that fate, it can be instructive.
5. Bridging personal and socio-political change. Today climate change threatens our civilization. People are asking if humanity is even a viable species, given our materialistic talents and our lack of self-restraint, spiritual depth and biophilia. For remedies we all too often split into two camps, or siloes. One silo includes all ideas and practices concerning personal change and growth, whether secular or spiritual. The focus is individualistic and emphasizes personal responsibility. In a rival silo we find all ideas that reveal the limitations of personal choice, including analyses that uncover the effects of culture, socialization, social structure, the economy, and systemic forces like racism and sexism. In that silo we find political organizers and all those trying to change “the system.” The most successful movements find ways to combine both: e.g., the Civil Rights Movement in the US that combined church and nonviolent resistance; feminist consciousness-raising that enabled women to see how patriarchy had colonized their personal lives; and the courageous coming out of LGBTQ people that has led to legal rights.

MRA tried much harder than most personal change modalities to effect Buchman’s vision that “MRA believes in the full dimension of change, economic change, social change, national change and international change, all based on personal change”. [3] MRA’s successes in this realm are fascinating and deserve serious study. Given those successes, its failures are even more fascinating. It was largely because of those failures that I left MRA and returned to Oxford to research and write this thesis. I tell that story in an afterword, along with a sketch of what I left out of the thesis, which included both those successes and failures! This thesis was a preparatory work to doing those studies, so that scholars would have a better idea of just what kind of work Buchman’s was.  

So there is something worth studying in this movement!

Strange then, that around the year 2000, when a friend of mine wanted to do her own sociology doctorate on MRA at an American university, she was told by her supervisor that she could not, because if the movement was important enough he would have heard of it. That sums up the obscurity into which MRA had fallen.

Luckily for me, Oxford University did think it was important enough in 1971, when I applied to do this thesis.

Some Conclusions

I hope the wider distribution of this thesis will encourage those already studying MRA history to go deeper and publish, and those who are looking for thesis topics to consider MRA as a source of vitally interesting experience.

I don’t of course know if any academic consensus may emerge around how to characterize the Oxford Group/MRA. Let’s imagine that after much study a consensus does cohere around describing it in terms something like these:

• An experientialist Christian movement, heir to a long tradition of such movements, that broke free of confining theology to a greater degree than most previous such movements, as befits a globalizing era when world religions were rubbing shoulders with each other more than previously.
• A movement that made powerful transformative experiences available to people from many different classes and backgrounds.
• An outgrowth of the religious side of triumphalist late 19th Century American expansionism that strove to become universal, to be as available to those oppressed by white supremacy and imperialism as to those purveying it: how successful it was in that endeavour being a matter for debate.
• A sustained attempt to found strategies for conflict resolution, from family dynamics to international conflicts, on experiences of personal transformation and divine guidance.
• A movement so given to telling only the good news about its successes that it strained credulity, especially in an era sceptical of religious influence in affairs of state. And yet independent study reveals that there were significant elements of truth in many of these stories. This compels us to revisit analysis of those events and to reconsider the potential of personal transformation in conflict resolution, even if “personal transformation” today may mean something more universal than MRA’s insistence on the four standards and the debatable idea that “adequate, accurate information can be passed from the mind of God to the mind of man”.
• An attempt to present a moral challenge to the “powers that be”, whether capitalist or Communist, an effort that was perhaps least successful in its country of origin, such that it was taken over there by its offshoot, Up With People, which became fully identified with corporate America and support for the Vietnam War. The awe that Frank Buchman, as a Pennsylvania-Dutch small-town boy, felt for the rich, powerful and aristocratic, flavoured his movement in ways that helped and hindered his mission and contributed to this failure in the US.
• A movement that resisted being institutionalized but that acquired cult-like aspects, notably arising from Buchman’s attempt to control the strategies and direction of “his” work, but that encompassed other traits of enforced uniformity of thought and deed , including around its very strict interpretations of sexual purity. This contributed to the split with Up With People and to MRA’s reduced ability to appeal to new generations in the universities after WWII.
• A movement both marred by and reproducing the homophobia of its era, which is thought to have had harsh impact on its putatively homosexual founder, whose homophobia became a significant flashpoint in arousing the ire of the intelligentsia in an era when LGBTQ individuals were striving for liberation.

There is much more to say, of course, including MRA’s use of theatre and film, its internal “gift economy”, the extent and limitations of its appeal to people of colour, and other topics, quite apart from what IofC has made of its heritage.

But if some consensus similar to that above were to appear in academia, then it can in turn become a significant element in a critique of the secularized, anti-spiritual or anti-religious spirit of academia and of the Western intelligentsia in the twentieth century. It can contribute to a critique of the Enlightenment itself, which elevated reason and science above emotion and spiritual insight, rather than unifying them. Yes, the rationalists, socialists, feminists, LGBTQ, and anti-colonial movements, had much to teach the Oxford Group/MRA; but it had much to teach them as well. In many ways, if MRA’s sins can be understood and forgiven, it still does. It may be that at present IofC has learned more from them that they have learned from it. Perhaps in retrospect that conversation can be more fruitful than was possible at the time.

Today, with psychology reckoning more deeply with the effects of trauma and the limitations of purely cognitive approaches to it, with feminist and anti-colonial movements revealing how deeply oppressive patterns are lodged in our emotions and bodies as well as our minds, with restorative justice demonstrating how facilitated encounters between harmer and harmed can lead to empathy and transformation, we can begin to see the Oxford Group as a movement far ahead of its time: a movement that attempted with the limited tools at its disposal, acquired from its time and place, to heal the deep hurts of human beings that contribute to the conflicts and oppressions that bedevil us. While we may choose to replace or refine their tools and add a large dose of structural analysis and prescription to their overly individualistic, Western cultural worldview, we can nonetheless find inspiration and hope from their demonstration of the power of personal transformation and spiritual insight in affairs of state.

David Belden, November 2018

[1] The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, by Jeff Sharlet. Harper Perennial, 2008, p 126

[2] New York Daily News, October 16, 2014. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/glenn-close-reveals-spe…

[3] Quoted in Never to lose my vision : the story of Bill Jaeger by Clara Jaeger, Grosvenor, London, 1995 p 98