Frank Buchman - Buchman and Communism

Buchman and Communism

After his early experiences in China, Buchman was acutely aware that the failure of the vast Western missionary effort in China enabled an alternative set of beliefs, communism, to take root. In his subsequent work in British and American universities he found that communism was a potent and attractive force. Whilst admiring the boldness and passion for change of communists, he believed that communism was inadequate because it was built on moral relativism and was militantly anti-God. A frequent theme was that the commitment and strategic ideology of communism must be matched by equally committed and strategic forces working for God. After visiting South America in the early 1930s he told some of the young people working with the Oxford Group: "In one country I was told two young Communists had made it their duty to attach themselves to each Cabinet Minister to win him to the Party line. Which of you will plan as thoroughly to bring a Christian revolution to your leaders?"

Buchman believed that both fascism and communism had their roots in materialism, which he called "the mother of all 'isms'" and, as such, materialism was democracy's greatest enemy: "People get confused as to whether it is a question of being Rightist or Leftist. But the one thing we really need is to be guided by God's Holy Spirit. That is the Force we ought to study.... The Holy Spirit will teach us how to think and live, and provide a working basis of our national service.... The true battle line in the world today is not between class and class, not between race and race. The battle is between Christ and anti-Christ."

After Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denouncement of Stalinism and the apparent thawing of relationships with the West, MRA produced a pamphlet Ideology and Co-Existence alerting the West to the strategies and tactics of Communism. It was translated into 24 languages and became the most widely distributed publication which MRA ever produced, giving rise to a popular perception of Buchman and MRA as being primarily anti-communist, and, therefore, right wing. However this was a gross oversimplification. In the 1950s he told a colleague: "If Britain and America were to defeat Communism today, the world would be in a worse state than it is. Because the other man is wrong doesn't make me right."

In the late 1940s the coal mines and factories of Germany's Ruhr Area were an ideological battleground. Moscow-led communists expected to gain control of the workers' councils as part of their plan to turn Germany into a communist state. Many of these workers' leaders were among the 120,000 from the Ruhr who saw the MRA play The Forgotten Factor and heard from employers who had changed their attitudes from exploitation to cooperation. Some senior communist leaders from the area embraced MRA and were summoned to account for themselves at the Communist Party headquarters for North Rhine-Westphalia. There they recommended that the Party should make itself acquainted with MRA and "take the next step of its development by facing up to the moral standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love", supporting their contention with quotations from Marx and Engels. Their approach was rejected and the men were expelled from the Party.

Buchman had accepted the invitation of Dr Heinrich Host, head of the German Coal Board, to send a team to the Ruhr. For two years, Buchman sustained over 100 MRA workers in the area. Before their arrival, 72% of the workers' council seats were held by communists. By 1950, the percentage had shrunk to 25%. According to Hubert Stein, an executive member of the German Miners Union, this decline was "to a great extent due to Moral Re-Armament". In 1950, Radio Berlin and other stations broadcast a speech by Buchman: "Marxists are finding a new thinking in a day of crisis. The class struggle is being superseded. Management and labour are beginning to live the positive alternative to the class war.... Can Marxists pave the way for a greater ideology? Why not? They have always been open to new things.... Why should they not be the ones to live for this superior thinking?"

From this time, Buchman and Moral Re-Armament were periodically attacked by Radio Moscow. In 1952, Georgi Arbatov described MRA as "a universal ideology" which "supplants the inevitable class war" with "the permanent struggle between good and evil."