BUCHMANISM. – So called by some writers from the name of its founder Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman. Buchmanism is known by various names; initially it was simply called the “Group Movement” (Group Movement); shortly thereafter it took the name “Oxford Group Movement” (Oxford Group Movement) from the fact that it first spread especially among the students of Oxford, and now “Moral Re-Armament” (Moral Re-Armament) from which comes the acronym M.R.A. They claim to be the Christians of the first century (First Century Christians) and say they wish to help all other Churches. They proclaim the same principle that G. Wesley held regarding the official Church of England, and Swedenborg regarding the Protestant sects; yet the former gave rise to Methodism and the latter to the Church of the New Jerusalem.
The initiator of this “movement” was born in 1878 in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania; he was ordained a Lutheran minister in 1902 and for some time led a small Lutheran parish. Disgusted, it seems, with the administrators of the Overbrook sanitarium, in 1908 he made a trip to England. Whether, as Ivor Thomas says, he was converted at the Keswick Convention, or, as others recount, he felt moved in a country church, he wrote letters asking forgiveness of the Overbrook administrators. The peace he felt in his soul after this act led him to reflect and then formulate a theory about the spiritual utility of knowing one’s own sins, confessing them to someone, abandoning oneself to God, and listening to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit. Returning to his homeland, he immediately began to apply this method to some university students, and after a few years he made a trip to the Orient. In 1921 he visited the University of Cambridge, where he attracted some followers with whom he settled in Oxford. It was not long before he gathered around himself a fine group of students, and, exploiting their youthful enthusiasm, he pushed them to propagate his methods and doctrines. Among others, the trips they made to South Africa (1928–29), to Canada and the United States (1932), and the great gathering in Hollywood, California, in 1939, became famous. At this event in particular there was an impressive display of advertising art and propaganda literature, with titles such as “a mystical crusade for moral rearmament,” etc. On the stage crowned with an arch, and on the announcement “New men, new nations, a new world,” the acronym M.R.A. stood out amid a forest of flags raised by representatives of thirty nations. They claimed that with moral rearmament they would achieve world peace, and only a few months later the most immense of all wars broke out. The groups under the new name of M.R.A. spread especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in Canada, and in South Africa; they had some success in other Protestant countries; little or nothing in Catholic countries.
Buchman did not write any book on his method, but communicated to his followers his religious experience of a return to what, in his view, constitutes primitive Christianity (First Century Christianism): gathering in groups under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, confessing one’s sins to one another (1 John 5:16; Eph. 4:25), consecrating oneself entirely to Christ, and inducing others to convert to the same life. According to this interpretation, Buchman established, as essential constituents of the movement, four standards of life (Standards of Life): absolute honesty (in business), absolute freedom (in morals), absolute disinterestedness, absolute love; and four practices: Sharing, communicating to others one’s religious experiences by confessing one’s sins, temptations, etc.; Surrender, abandoning one’s life entirely to the guidance of God; Restitution, repairing the wrong done; Listening to God’s Guidance, listening to and following the guidance of the Holy Spirit in every action or word, and thus practicing the Quiet Time, a brief period of spiritual recollection in order to hear such guidance. Proselytism is essential, so that every member must necessarily be a Life-changer, an ardent converter, to change the world as quickly as possible. The feverish anxiety for conversions with pathetic appeals and radiant millenarian visions of a world in peace and prosperity is an inevitable characteristic of Buchmanite style. The invitation is made, besides individually, in gatherings of invited guests in a home or in some country villa, called House-parties, and more broadly in missionary expeditions of propagandists, called Teams, including public gatherings, speeches, and spectacular parades, such as the nighttime gathering of 30,000 people in Hollywood on July 19, 1939. The original group professes no dogma or particular confession; indeed, it wishes its members to remain in their respective confessions so as to revive Christian conscience; therefore in 1939 in America it took a new, more generic name: “Moral Re-Armament” (Moral Re-Armament).
Nevertheless, it has aroused opposition even in the Protestant camp. In reality it is a Protestant sect, similar to Methodism. In the Catholic camp there are those who consider it with a certain approval; others believe it falls under the prohibition of the CIC, can. 1258, §1, even while considering with benevolent sympathy the movement, inasmuch as it aims to revive the languishing religious and moral life of Protestantism. The main reasons are as follows: because it totally disregards the flesh, and accelerates life, for the grave danger of Sharing, both public and private, made to anyone, even between young people of the opposite sex; for the danger of taking in the Quiet Time, as inspirations of the Holy Spirit, what is the product of fantasy or personal inclinations; for the superficiality of the “changes of life” or “conversions” made in family gatherings, etc. Grave drawbacks that cannot be compensated by any successes achieved by the group leaders, by the goodwill they manifest even toward the Catholic Church, nor by the zeal that animates them.