Report on M.R.A.

Dr. Frank Buchman, 76, always travels first class ("Isn't God a millionaire?" says he), but the road is often rough. In 1926, the Pennsylvania-born ex-Y.M.C.A. leader was asked to leave the Princeton campus because his famous meetings at which young followers eagerly confessed their private sins seemed the wrong sort of spiritual exercise for growing boys. But Dr. Frank kept marching on, smilingly proclaiming panaceas for war, Communism and evil of all kinds. Leader Buchman, whose followers have described his divine guidance as a kind of telephone conversation with God, always managed to find bright and wealthy followers to help him "change" the fellows (in the U.S.) and the chaps (in England).

But the brickbats kept coming, from people who did not like what they thought was a mixture of hucksterism and religion, or a deadly gift for oversimplification.

Last week came the biggest brickbat in a long time--a report of the Social and Industrial Council of the Church of England on Buchman's Moral Re-Armament.

Falling in Love. The report, made by a committee of 18 clergy and laymen (two dissenting), criticizes M.R.A. on three counts: theology, psychology and social thinking. Theology it finds woefully wanting in M.R.A. "A certain blindness to the duty of thinking is a characteristic . . . We have at times been haunted by a picture of the movement, with its hectic heartiness, its mass gaiety and its reiterated slogans, as a colossal drive of escapism from . . . responsible living."

Buchmanites, says the report, tend to be guilty of using God. "They seem constantly to advocate courses of action for purely this-worldly reasons ('an idea that will be more than a match for Communism . . .') and in general seem little concerned with the worship of God for His own sake ... In a very real sense the individual falls in love with the group.

"M.R.A. fails to take the nature of politics seriously. This is basically because of the movement's strong emphasis on 'unselfishness' or 'love' as a personal quality, but without any like emphasis on 'justice' as a social quality . . ."

Filling a Need. "It was surely this that led Dr. Buchman, so it is alleged, to believe that through 'change' induced in Hitler there could come a 'God-controlled fascist dictatorship.' His error was not so much that his appraisal of Hitler was so naive . . . but that he failed to see ... that dictatorship is not bad just because it has a bad man as dictator."

The Anglican report closes with a few blows against its own breast. M.R.A., it says, "is in its way a judgment on the Church. In spite of its deficiencies and even its dangers, it has filled a vacuum in the lives of many men and women who . . . have been bewildered by the vast problems of our age ... But the vacuum should have been filled by a living and prophetic Christian faith, rooted in the life of the Church..."

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