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On eastern U.S. campuses and in better-class communities, "Soul Surgeon" Frank Buchman's Groupers organized house parties for tennis, tea, and friendly arm-on-shoulder proselytizing. Groupers were encouraged to "get square with God" by "sharing" their sins in public confessions to their fellow members—a practice which led some outsiders to accuse Groupers of an undue interest in sex. No creed or doctrine was necessary. "Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity, Absolute Unselfishness and Absolute Love" were the Buchmanite requirements, plus regular "quiet times" for listening to God.
"God Provides." In 1938 the Group took a new name—"Moral Re-Armament." Aims were piously unspecific ("You don't join anything, you don't pay anything, the idea is that you begin living the M.R.A. standards"). But there is nothing vague about the M.R.A. technique. Teams of 50 to 500 Buchmanites, many of them apple-cheeked, athletic Britons, have descended en masse upon communities, distributing literature, staging M.R.A. morality plays and organizing banquets to provide top-drawer local backing (like Los Angeles' George L. Eastman) for M.R.A. speakers.
With the coming of war, Buchman's fortunes and following diminished somewhat. Possible reasons: M.R.A. workers' requests for draft exemptions, and publicity given to Buchman's famed outburst (in 1936) thanking heaven "for a man like Adolf Hitler."*
Since war's end, however, things seem to have been looking up again for M.R.A. At last year's World Assembly, 5,000 delegates held their sessions at an Alpine resort hotel the Buchmanites had newly purchased in Switzerland. In Los Angeles last week, Assembly delegates ate, slept and lounged in a brand-new seven-story local headquarters. "Buchmanism" never seems to worry about funds. But its sources of income, like the number of its converts, are matters that Buchmanites are vague about. Says Founder Frank Buchman solemnly: "Where God guides, God provides."
* A skeptical Scottish undergraduate named Loudon Hamilton, who, when Buchman first urged him to listen for God's instructions, replied: "I have been accustomed to address God myself on occasion . . . but that was only a one-way communication. If God were to speak to me, as you suggest, I am not quite sure it would not be somewhat uncomfortable." * The real Oxford Movement took place in the mid-19th century under the leadership of John Henry (later Cardinal) Newman, John Keble and Edward Pusey. * Said Dr. Buchman, in a New York World-Telegram interview: I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler who built a front line of defense against the Anti-Christ of Communism . . . Think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to God . . . Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last bewildering problem."