MORAL RE-ARMAMENT

'Moral Re-Armament' ('MRA') was an international religious movement that, in 1938, grew out of the Reverend Frank N. D. Buchman's Oxford Group. Buchman headed the movement for 23 years, from 1938 until his death in 1961.
The movement, in its early years, was made up of Buchman's personal followers, and so the name change was incremental rather than abrupt and formal. One of the first uses of the term was in 1938, when H. W. Austin edited the book ''Moral Rearmament (The Battle for Peace)''. Buchman and his fellow Oxford Group leaders liked the new phrase, and the former Oxford Group developed into Moral Re-Armament.
The origin of the movement's name lay in the political climate of the late 1930s, in which the re-militarization of post-WWI Germany was a contentious issue. The rejoinder of the Oxford Group and MRA was that the world needed not military re-armament, but ''moral re-armament''.
The movement had Christian roots, and grew into an informal, international network of people of all faiths and backgrounds. It was based around what it calls 'the Four Absolutes' (absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love) and encouraged its members to be actively involved in political and social issues. One of the movement's core ideas, especially popular during the Cold War, was that changing the world starts with seeking change in oneself.

Contents

Successors and Spin-Offs

Criticism

External links

Successors and Spin-Offs

In 2001, the MRA movement changed its name to Initiatives of Change (IofC). IofC has formed a non-governmental organization (NGO), IofC-International, for purposes of cooperation with organizations such as the United Nations and the Council of Europe.
In 1965, Up with People was founded by members of and with support by MRA.

Criticism

During Buchman's life, MRA was criticised as a personality cult. The Four Absolutes were criticised as being impossible to fulfil and mutually contradictory, as when Absolute Love required the telling of a white lie, in contradiction to Absolute Honesty and Absolute Truth. MRA would hide its Christian basis when that would have invited attack, as within communist or Muslim countries.

External links

MRA

★ Religious Movements (U Virginia)

★ Preliminary Guide to the Albert Heman Ely, Jr. Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library Materials in the collection document the 1930 meeting of Ely and his wife, Constance Jennings Ely with Frank Buchman, and their subsequent involvement in the Moral Re-armament movement.
Initiatives of Change

★ Initiatives of Change homepage successor of MRA

★ Timeline of MRA and related organizations