The Origins and Development of the Oxford Group (Moral Re-Armament)

The Origins and Development of the Oxford Group (Moral Re-Armament) By David C. Belden St Edmund Hall, Oxford Submission for D. Phil Thesis, January 1976 i Preface to the 2018 Online Edition by Andrew Stallybrass A lifetime ago, David Belden wrote a thesis on ‘The Origins and Development of the Oxford Group (Moral Re-Armament)’ for his doctorate at Oxford. He had grown up in ‘an MRA family’, his parents both ‘worked full-time’, as he had too, before deciding to take a little distance. His doctorate is a precious blend of proximity and distance. Years later, it was scanned and passed around in digital form, a kind of samizdat among those trying to understand the history of MRA and now IofC. For a long time, it sat on my hard disk un-read. Then I finally got round to reading it and I was rivetted. I learnt a great deal about Frank Buchman and his origins, where his ideas came from, the evangelical ‘milieu’ of the pre-First World War years. Rather to my surprise, I found that I shared most of David’s tentative conclusions, but I also found many fresh insights. David was not settling scores, but trying to understand, an honest search by an honest searcher. His thesis was written and submitted in 1976. So he was able to interview many of the founding generation who worked closely with Frank Buchman, including his own father. Of course, most of them have since died. Decades later, for some years, David ‘animated’ a forum, an irregular ‘underground’ newsletter publication trying to further discussion and dialogue between those who had left the movement, as he had, and some still on the ‘inside’. Some had been, have been, deeply hurt. And for some, simply to express the hurt may have helped towards healing. Who in life is unhurt? Who is not the victim of others’ mistakes, as well as their own? May at least some of those we have wittingly and unwittingly hurt find the grace to forgive us! As a movement that talked (and practised, at least to some extent) ‘change’, we have been slow to examine critically our collective behaviour as a movement, to see and understand that any and every group of people, collective, create something of a culture, a mould, with pressures to conform. Which is, of course, in tension with the encouragement to find and follow an individual calling. David and I share the same birthday, one year apart. We’ve never worked together, but our paths have crossed and we’ve corresponded. I strongly felt that his academic work from all those years ago could still interest a contemporary audience, for those who would like to understand better this rather unusual movement. David and I share a conviction that whatever mistakes were made, there were and are in this story some important lessons for those who want to contribute to a better world, who feel deeply the need to stress the human factor and its importance. As a footnote for researchers and scholars, I would conclude by saying that ii there is a most impressive bibliography, and some precious appendices. One on estimated numbers of full-time workers, and another with a time- line for Frank Buchman’s travels, from 1902, until his death in 1961. Last summer, during the Caux Forum, my wife and I had a meal with an Australian academic working on a history of Moral Re-Armament in Australia. ‘How many times did Buchman visit our country?’ she asked. Neither of us knew, but I told her, I can send you a copy of David Belden’s thesis, and in Appendix 3 you’ll find the answer in seconds, and she did! Andrew Stallybrass, November 2018 iii Author’s Preface for the 2018 Online Edition by David Belden Rereading 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 iv 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.

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