Religion: Moral Rearmament

Decade ago the followers of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, commonly called ''Buchmanites," were mostly youngsters at the age of puberty who were obsessed, or were told that they ought to be obsessed, with personal, private sin. Prime Buchmanite teaching was that such sin could be purged by confession. Today the high command of Buchmanism is more mature, the movement calls itself the Oxford Group,* and its policies have been weaned from sex.

In recent years Oxford Groupers have concluded that '"God-control" could, and should, change not only individuals but nations and the world. One instance of this belief which gives pause to many an anti-Fascist is the Buchmanite notion that dictators are fine fellows who simply need a little Buchmanite guidance to become good Buchmanites—and incidentally order their obedient millions to do likewise. Last week in London, world headquarters of the Group, and in Switzerland, where Buchmanites have held many an international gathering, Dr. Buchman's current strategy bore newsworthy results.

To the London Times last fortnight, 33 M.P.s dispatched a statement approving the Oxford Group's "crusade for moral rearmament which appears to be spreading rapidly." Signers included not only Conservative committee members and two onetime Lord Mayors, but Laborites like Arthur Henderson, J. R. Clynes (onetime Home Secretary), John McGovern. Last week in the Times much the same approval was expressed by an even weightier assemblage of 17 names. Among them: Earl Baldwin of Bewdley, the Marquess of Salisbury, Field Marshal Sir William Birdwood, Lord Chamberlain the Earl of Clarendon, Admiral of the Fleet the Earl of Cork & Orrery, the Earl of Lytton, Viscount Sankey, Lord Trenchard, Lord Stamp. Said these noble lords, while the world approached a crisis (see p. 17): ''The world cannot forever continue plunging from crisis to crisis. We must act before crisis ends in catastrophe. . . . God's living spirit calls each nation like each individual to its highest destiny and breaks down the barriers of fear and greed, of suspicion and haired."

Last week at an international Group houseparty in Interlaken, Switzerland gathered 2,000 Groupers from 40 nations. Though Oxford Group publicity (increasingly well-organized) featured such leaders as Foreign Minister J. A. N. Patijn of The Netherlands and Parliament President Carl J. Hambro of Norway—scheduled to speak at Interlaken—it w'as careful not to ignore the lowly-born. One delegate to the assembly was Labor Leader Todd Sloan, 62, onetime London dock hand, to Oxford Groupers a "radical agitator" now reformed. In clearest terms he stated Buchmanism's new, grown-up policy: "In the moral rearmament of the Oxford Group I have found some common sense with real fire behind it—not the mean-minded revolution of the changed life in the individual, which never goes beyond personal convenience, but a broad evolution which changes a nation's moral climate. This new evolution is our last chance. . . ."