The Religious Tenets and Doctrines of Buchmanism

Dr. Frank Buchman believed that the age of miracles had returned, that people could have direct, personal access to God, that people could be "changed", and that confession was necessary for "change". Frank Buchman also declared that people were essentially weak and sinful — "defeated by sin", he called it — and that only "surrender to God" and becoming totally "controlled by God" would save them.

Henry P. Van Dusen, writing for The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1934, described Buchmanism, a.k.a. "The Oxford Group Movement", this way:

Notice the repeated phrases "the only way", and "one way and one way only". That is one of the first and most obvious characteristics of any cult. They almost always claim that they have the only way — the only way to Heaven, or to salvation, or spirituality, or eternal bliss, or higher knowledge, or sanity, or mental powers, or recovery, or whatever it is that the cult promises to deliver...

A corollary to cults' claims of having The Only Way is the assertion that "the other people" do not have The Way. "They" are all misguided and missing the boat, and "they" won't be going to Heaven (or whatever the declared goal of the cult happens to be). Thus the cult encourages an isolationist "us versus them" mindset, which naturally segues into an attitude that the cult members are special — that they are superior to the common rabble who haven't been "saved" and who don't have The Big Answer....

Another common cult characteristic shown there is the demand for Surrender to the Cult. You can't just join the group; you have to surrender to the cult and give it everything — your life, your mind, your heart, your loyalty, your obedience, and even your soul.

The first and most obvious characteristic of Buchmanism was meetings, meetings, meetings. The Buchmanites were always forming groups and having lots of meetings, just like Alcoholics Anonymous would do decades later. A slang term that some others used for Buchmanism was "Groupism" — the religion of those people who believe in groups and meetings.

      The early house-parties attracted varying numbers, from twenty to 150. Sometimes they were week-end affairs; sometimes they were prolonged for ten days. Young people in the twenties predominated. It was the practice, I believe, for them to contribute 5s. a head as "registration fee."
      The purpose of house-parties, it was stated, was to "relate modern individuals to Jesus Christ in terms which they understand and in an environment which they find congenial." There were "informal talks on sin," and a feature of those days, apparently, was separate groups for men and women for the discussion of sex problems "in a more intimate vein than is possible in a mixed gathering."
Inside Buchmanism; an independent inquiry into the Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament, Geoffrey Williamson, Philosophical Library, New York, c1954, page 202.

Frank Buchman always maintained that converts should remain in their own church. New people may be converted to believing in Buchmanism, but they were supposed to continue as members of their original church while simultaneously attending numerous Group meetings. Buchman declared that his sect was not a new religion, but rather something that would supplement and revitalize the existing Christian churches — "The Oxford Group is not a new religion; it is religion anew." That seemingly generous attitude had the side effect of making everyone, no matter what their religion, fair game for conversion to Buchmanism, and their former church couldn't even complain about losing a member.

But one contemporary noticed that, while the Oxford Group claimed to not be in competition with other churches, many Oxford Group meetings were scheduled for Sunday morning, at an hour which prevented O.G. members from attending the services of other churches, even if they wanted to...

An important part of the Buchmanite meetings was confession and "sharing." There were two distinctly different kinds of sharing:
    1) sharing as confession, and
    2) sharing for witness.
Sharing as confession was supposed to unburden one of the sins which Buchmanites declared kept people separated from God, while sharing for witness was intended to convince new prospects to join the Group and "surrender to God". That is, sharing for witness was just a lot of testimonials that were intended to convince newcomers that Buchmanism is the answer.

The Buchmanites were really big on public confession, and were always openly confessing everything they had ever done to meeting rooms full of strangers. They entertained their audiences with wild, humorous, and sometimes licentious stories of their sins, misadventures and escapades before they got changed into moral people by Frank Buchman and his followers. And converts would "share" the message that their lives had been much improved by following Frank's "Guidance" and "principles".

Rev. Geoffrey Allen was a leader and a true believer in the Oxford Group Movement who attempted to explain and rationalize all of the practices of the Oxford Groups, like receiving Guidance from God in séances and "sharing" sins with others who are not ordained priests or ministers.

As first created by God, the infant has a transparent purity of soul. In early childhood, how early who can say, the devil passes by. Fear and pride and self-will enter in. The child becomes ashamed and fears to confess its shame. The evil by the great illusion is buried deep within the personality. The poison of repressed fear or shame festers in the depths of the soul. Then there must come the healing work of God. Man must be converted, not with an empty change of opinions, but with the turning inside out of his life. Sins must be confessed openly on the lips, that they may be purified in God's fair air, and that so there may be room for His gift of love and peace within the newly cleansed heart.
He That Cometh; A Sequel to 'Tell John,' being further essays on the Message of Jesus and Present Day Religion, Geoffrey Allen, Fellow and Chaplain of Lincoln College, Oxford, 1933, pages 121-122.

Sooner or later, when we are ready to receive it, the Spirit will lead us to a deeper sharing of all that has been weighing on us from the past. It is a healthy practice for everyone, when they are led by God to do so, to share to the depths whatever in the past has most burdened their memory with thoughts of guilt. Such deep sharing may often be of things of which it is a shame to speak in public, and it will be right to accept the guidance of the Spirit, and to share with some one older individual. Such an individual will then stand to us as ambassador of the forgiveness of Christ. In a Church which was fully Christian the natural person to whom to take such confession would be the priest. Whether in the actual Church the priest is always the right person is questionable. He might be shocked; and that might be good neither for him nor for us. The person who receives such confession must be someone who has learnt from his own experience, both under the Cross and in the Christian fellowship, that the forgiveness of Christ outreaches the furthest sin of man. He will therefore never be shocked; before the utmost evil he will say without blame, as Christ would say: 'Thy sins are forgiven; go and sin no more.'
He That Cometh; A Sequel to 'Tell John,' being further essays on the Message of Jesus and Present Day Religion, Geoffrey Allen, Fellow and Chaplain of Lincoln College, Oxford, 1933, pages 131-132.

• Notice how Rev. Geoffrey Allen implied that non-clergy (i.e., Oxford Group members) were more qualified, or at least better equipped, than ordained clergy to hear confessions, because they wouldn't be shocked by what they heard. Rev. Allen declared that the poor innocent cloistered feeble-minded old priests might be harmed by shocking confessions, but some worldly, experienced old degenerates from the back alleys could handle the job with ease.

• Rev. Allen also claimed that the people who heard the confessions must be experienced sinners who have learned about the sin from their own experience.
  So let's see... Logically, Catholic priests can't hear confessions about wild sexual affairs unless they have had a few dozen themselves... And murderers can only confess their sins to another experienced murderer... Right?

• Rev. Allen also claimed that unordained non-clergy (like Oxford Group members) had the power to forgive and absolve sins in the name of Jesus Christ — that they could "stand to us as ambassador of the forgiveness of Christ" — "Thy sins are forgiven; go and sin no more." — which is a new religious doctrine that will certainly start some interesting theological debates: "Who needs seminaries or trained clergy? Who needs ordained ministers and priests? Some college dropouts with a couple of months of indoctrination in cult religion should be good enough..."

  That shows typical cultish arrogance. Cult members like to claim that they are special, and somehow more qualified than ordinary people — even more qualified than the experts or the professionals. Like an A.A. member declared, after reading the "Big Book" Alcoholics Anonymous:

  Here was a book that said that I could do something that all these doctors and priests and ministers and psychiatrists that I'd been going to for years couldn't do!
  The Big Book, 3rd Edition, page 473.
  

• And of course Allen would have us believe that all of the Groupers were constantly receiving Guidance from God, Who was even telling them whether they should confess something and to whom they should confess it. Rev. Geoffrey Allen's theology was a radical departure from mainstream Christianity.

• The mention of using laymen, rather than ordained clergy, to hear confessions brings up another problem with the Oxford Groups. The Group members who hear confessions are supposed to keep such confessions confidential, but what about the people who leave the groups? How long will they remain silent?⁸⁷ And what about the Group members who are less than Absolutely Pure, and tend to be gossips and blabber-mouths? The Oxford Groups had just that problem — gossips who could not keep secrets. More on that here.

  And of course Alcoholics Anonymous has the same problem today. Anything you say in an A.A. meeting can become common knowledge all over town as the local gossips have a hey-day. And your "sharing" can even be used against you in a court of law.

• Rev. Jeffrey Allen simply assumed that everyone was burdened with feelings of guilt over things that they had done in the past. That was one of the fundamental Buchmanite beliefs — that everyone is separated from God by a long list of things that they haven't confessed. That is also Standard Cult Characteristic Number Two: You Are Always Wrong — it's all your fault. No matter what the situation is, you are to blame for it.

Rev. John A. Richardson wrote a critical analysis of the Oxford Groups where he stated:

It was customary in the early days of the Church to give literal obedience to the injunction of St. James, "Confess your faults to one another," the only passage in the New Testament, I think, that can properly be quoted in this connection. We know, however, that the practice of public confession, or, as the Groups would put it, confession in the fellowship, was deliberately abandoned in the fifth century, because it became a cause of moral mischief. The minds of the young were contaminated by the practice, and the sensibilities of older persons needlessly offended.
      It is freely affirmed upon what seems to be unimpeachable evidence that the revival of this ancient custom by Dr. Buchman has not been altogether unaccompanied by moral evils similar to those that occasioned its abandonment. Members of the Groups assure me that in their own experience they have seen nothing of the sort, but I cannot help feeling that they have been singularly fortunate in that regard; for there is not lacking evidence that sometimes, at least, things have happened in this connection to cause grave concern. Thus one, whom Dr. Hensley Henson [the Bishop of Durham] certifies to be "a very thoughtful and devout Churchwoman, who was present at the Oxford House Party," in 1933, I fancy, states that "some of the confessions were terrible. One in particular should never have been made in public to an audience mixed in every sense of the word."   ...
      Within my own hearing, further, it was said by one prominent among Canadian Church leaders that at a meeting of the Groups in British Columbia — at Vancouver, if I am not mistaken — that he and his wife were forced to leave the hall in protest against the character of some of the sharings.
The Groups Movement, The Most Rev. John A. Richardson, pages 60-61.
Morehouse Publishing Co., Milwaukee, Wis., 1935.

As Rev. Richardson pointed out, the practice of public confessions in the very early Christian church caused grave problems:

1. The minds of the children were contaminated by the practice. The children will hear adults confessing what they have done, and the children will think that they might like to try that too...
2. Plus, the children will start to think that "Everybody does it, so why shouldn't I? It's no big deal; everybody does it."
3. The sensibilities of older persons were needlessly offended.
4. People took pride in their sins. (As in, "My sins and infidelities and binges were lots bigger and longer and more outrageous than yours... Why, you're just a wimp when compared to a big hardened old reprobate like me.")
5. And then people become desensitized to the sins confessed. Something about which people talk every day, and admit every day, becomes commonplace and loses its power to shock or shame. The unthinkable becomes thinkable.

Rev. H.A. Ironside described Oxford Group confession sessions this way:

A group of them go off by invitation to some country inn, beautiful city hotel, or country home. They boast that they are generally not after the down-and-outers but the up-and-outers, people of wealth, people of fashion and culture, and they gather together to spend several days in fellowship. Their meetings are largely of this character: they come together as groups and devote a great deal of time to testimony. These testimonies are generally in the nature of confessions. They act on the scripture that says, "Confess your faults one to another," and stop there and do not notice the rest of the connection. They take it that the way to get help is to come together and confess their faults one to the other. Sometimes as a matter of decency women meet together and confess their sins to each other, and men meet together and confess their sins to each other. When I was in Boston, I found a good deal of scandal had been occasioned by mixed companies holding these parties and confessing their sins, many of which were of such a character that Scripture says, "It is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret" (Eph. 5: 12). Yet they confessed these things openly, men before women and women before men. You can understand that the result was anything but helpful. Where do you find anything in the Word of God that suggests this kind of confession of sin? They say when they come together and honestly face their sins and tell about them, it gives them a certain spiritual strength that enables them to turn from their sins and so enter upon a new and a changed life.
The Oxford Group Movement; Is It Scriptural? by H. A. Ironside, Litt. D.; A Sermon Preached in Moody Memorial Church

The tone of the confessions at Buchman's meetings was often anything but repentant. Converts would tell grand entertaining tales of their "extremely sinful ways" before being "changed" into a Buchmanite in a manner that bordered on bragging. The confessional stories were often told in a jocular manner that kept the audiences laughing. As Marjorie Harrison, a contemporary critic, said in her book,

When Dr. Buchman invited converts to stand up and confess at one meeting that I attended, he said: "Remember these three points when you speak: BREVITY, SINCERITY, and HILARITY." Members of his group are taught to be funny and jocular about their sins. I should like to know how that can be reconciled with the teaching of any religion.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 145.

      The Salvation Army has deliberately adopted a method that it considers suitable and successful in attracting corner men and women. The [Buchmanism] Group uses measures equally undignified as a means of appeal to gilded youth. In place of tambourines it has a slangy jargon: instead of sanguinary hymns, modern catch-phrases: its emotional appeal is subtle and insidious instead of blatant. Above all, and in this it differs from every other form of revivalism, the "penitents' bench" with its genuine, if hysterical manifestations of sorrow, is superseded by the slap-stick confessional.
      But apart from superficial methods, there is no other likeness between the Salvation Army and the Group Movement.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 26.

Then Harrison described a ten day meeting in January, 1934, in London:

      The Church Times sent a special representative whose report is obviously written with care and a sense of responsibility. His description is extraordinarily reminiscent of many meetings that I have attended.   ...   He ... calls attention to the fact that "very many sins were confessed amusingly and greeted with laughter."
      ... I have heard Dr. Buchman himself enjoin new converts to make their testimonies with hilarity!
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 31.

Marjorie Harrison attended many Oxford Group meetings, and noticed that the confessions changed as members gained experience in making public confessions:

      You will see an instance of how "changing" can be for the worse, if you go to a Group meeting when new converts are asked to testify. These people are very touching in their complete sincerity, humility and deep reverence. Then hear the various members of the "Teams" — the same type of people after they have had an intensive training in Group methods and have recounted their sins at many public confessions. There is no longer any ring of sincerity; they are glib. There is no humility; they are smug, complacent, and insufferably priggish. And the reverence is gone completely.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 91.

Contemporary clergy criticized Buchmanite sharing by saying,

There is subtle temptation to spiritual vanity which assaults the public speaker, especially if he posses the orator's gift and knows it; and against that temptation, even the most humiliating self-accusations provide no sufficient protection.   ...   The penitent may feel a strange pride in the sins which he publicly proclaims as once his own.
The Oxford Groups; The Charge Delivered At The Third Quadrennial Visitation Of His Diocese Together With An Introduction, Herbert Hensley Henson, D.D. (the Bishop of Durham), 1933, page 54.

Again, we see the warning about people taking pride in their sins: "My sins were much bigger and more outrageous than your wimpy-ass little sins."

The practice "emphasizes past occurrences unwholesomely," says Dr. Douglas J. Wilson, Prof. in the University of Western Ontario, to whose article in The Christian Century of August 23, 1933, allusion has already been made, "becomes artificial and partially insincere, and breeds a perilous spiritual pride."   ...  
The spirit of pride is never likely to be far away from one who makes repeated and habitual recital of sins before a public gathering; and herein, one cannot but think, lies a danger which even the leaders of the Groups cannot wisely disregard. "What you talk about without embarrassment," says the Bishop of Durham wisely, "you do not feel deeply. The gravity of the wrong-doing dwindles as it is discussed" (The Group Movement, 2nd Ed., Part II, p. 55).   ...
The sincerity of those adherents of the Groups who spend weeks and months, and in some cases, even years, in traveling from place to place in the interests of the Movement will not be called in question. No thoughtful person can doubt, however, that their repeated sharing for witness before large public gatherings must strain that sincerity severely. A mechanical element enters into the telling of the same story over and over again, and it becomes stale in its recital. Instead of a spontaneous witness to victory won, it tends insensibly to become a routine performance, and the sincerity of the confession diminishes. "It would be less than human," as it has been said, "if, in such circumstances, the story should not become exaggerated and embroidered."
      Hilarity, moreover, has been almost exalted as a virtue by the Groups, and, if the press reports of the meetings are to be believed, a jocular element enters not seldom into the sharings, bringing with it a danger of which many public speakers with a gift of humour are well aware — the danger of making the real end of the story the laughter that it provokes, instead of the truth that it is intended to tell.
      A typical case in point was brought to my attention some little time ago by one whose statement no one who knows him would dream of questioning. In the course of her sharing at a large meeting in Montreal, a youthful member of an international team sketched briefly the background of her life. She was a clergyman's daughter, she said. On Sunday morning, of course, they all went to church, and then came home to a good, hot dinner, during which, "while father carved the joint, mother always carved the congregation." The flippant statement was rewarded with the applause and laughter which it was obviously intended to provoke.
      Not long after, the same team was operating in another city, where my informant happened to be, and once more he attended a large gathering, at which sharings were being given. The same lady gave the same sharing in substantially the same words, and again her story found its climax in the same pitiful joke at the expense of her mother, "While father carved the joint, mother always carved the congregation," and once more her mot was rewarded with laughter and applause. I do not suggest that such instances of bad taste are common. The story shows sufficiently, however, one danger to which those who are called upon to tell habitually the story of sins forgiven are inevitably subject.
The Groups Movement, The Most Rev. John A. Richardson, pages 68-71.
Morehouse Publishing Co., Milwaukee, Wis., 1935.

One critic of the Oxford Groups noted how superficial the confessions at the house parties really were. People routinely confessed to having thought ill of someone, or having been jealous, or having had a selfish urge, or having worn make-up or drunk a cocktail or smoked a cigarette, but rarely did anyone ever confess to having committed a real crime or to anything serious (other than sex). At one house party, when it came Frank Buchman's turn to confess something, he admitted that he had cheated the Post Office out of small change by putting insufficient postage on some letters. The whole group then ceremonially trouped down to the Post Office where Buchman "made amends" by paying the postage due. Some of Frank Buchman's followers then marveled at what a wonderfully honest and spiritual man Frank was, to have confessed to such a trivial thing.

One of the peculiar features of Buchmanism was "Guidance sessions." People would sit quietly with a notebook in hand, and listen for God's messages during "The Quiet Hour", and God would speak to them, they believed. Buchman liked to describe it as Group members receiving "powerful spiritual radiograms". So the members of Buchman's groups were forever claiming that God had guided them, and told them to do this or that...

An Oxford Group pamphlet gave these instructions:

6. In the attitude of "Speak Lord for Thy servant heareth" wait patiently and quietly, listening for what He has to say, what he has to reveal to us concerning ourselves, what He wants us to do in His service, what message He wants us to bear, what piece of work He wants us to do, or what new truth He wants us to learn about Himself.(John 16:13-14)¹²⁷

7. You may find it real help to write down the ideas and thoughts which the Holy Spirit has caused to arise in the mind. The advantage of this is two-fold; It is an aid to concentration and acts as a reminder of duties to be performed, and is of value in checking at the close of the day thoughts received each morning and through the day. (Jer. 10:2)¹²⁸
from THE QUIET TIME By Howard J. Rose

And Frank Buchman declared,

Our destiny is to obey the guidance of God.
Frank Buchman, speaking at the opening of the Moral Re-Armament Training Center, Mackinac Island, Michigan, July 1943, quoted in
Remaking the World, the speeches of Frank Buchman, Frank N. D. Buchman, page 201.

The whole Buchmanite family participates in the Quiet Time. They sit quietly with notebooks in hand, ready to write down the messages that they receive from God.

The London newspaper reporter Arthur James "A. J." Russell, who intended to write an exposé of Buchman, but who was "changed" into a devoted Buchmanite and became the first Oxford Group archivist, described his introduction to Frank Buchman's Guidance this way:

      And then, of course, Frank suggested the inevitable Quiet Time. Taking two sheets of notepaper, he handed one to me. We sat down and listened in prayerful silence. I tried to pick up another of those luminous thoughts. Nothing exceptional came: quit a lot of ordinary human thoughts, but no luminous ones. I had no wish to confess my sins to the person Frank had named, but I wished to see the thing through as an honest test. Yet my thoughts in that Quiet Time agreed with what Frank urged, though my wishes did not. I wrote down my thoughts; then read them aloud to Frank, who confidently and surprisingly pronounced them to be God-given thoughts.
      "Oh, come," I said to myself. "That's much too strong an interpretation." How on earth could a few wandering thoughts, unattended by mystical feeling or luminosity, scribbled on a sheet of notepaper, be catalogued as God's thoughts by anyone in his right senses? Still, I was determined to see the thing through, being a believer in the pragmatic method of learning by doing.
For Sinners Only, A. J. Russell, page 95.

In spite of his initial skepticism, Russell was soon converted into a true believer who went on to write two whole books of praise for Frank Buchman (For Sinners Only and One Thing I Know). Eventually, A. J. Russell became the historian and chief publicist for Frank Buchman's organization.

Notice how Frank Buchman claimed that he had the ability to tell whether a thought had come from God or not. We never got any explanation of just how, when, or where Dr. Frank N. D. Buchman acquired that great magical power, but Frank still felt entitled to routinely censor or re-interpret other peoples' Guidance, because he allegedly saw God's will and knew God's mind far more clearly than they could.

Rev. Geoffrey Allen, a minister at Oxford University who became a true believer and a leader in Buchman's cult, described Guidance this way:

It is a custom to be recommended, that those who seek to receive instruction from God in quiet should take pencil and paper, and write down the thoughts to which His Spirit leads. If any feel superior to the use of such material aids, they may well question whether God also is convinced that they do not need them. The custom of writing slows the rapid pace of wandering thoughts, that the voice of the Spirit may be heard; it enables us the more surely to remember His lessons, and to see that His requests are performed.
He That Cometh; A Sequel to 'Tell John,' being further essays on the Message of Jesus and Present Day Religion, Geoffrey Allen, pages 99-100.

That sounds very similar to the common occult practice called Automatic Writing, which is another favorite trick, like the Ouija board, of would-be psychics. What you do is, you just relax and let your hand write anything that comes into your mind. Then you imagine that you are "channelling" someone else's thoughts — usually the thoughts of a dead person, ghost, or spirit. Well, Buchmanites went so far as to imagine that they were channelling God.

B. W. Smith, who investigated the Oxford Group in 1936, described Frank Buchman's "guided" behavior as:

      Always, he says, he follows his "guidance." Sometimes he is guided as to how much to spend for postage. Once, in Canada, when they quoted him a rate of $12 a day for rooms, he said that God had told him to pay only $3.50. Once, just at the beginning of an important Group meeting in Aberdeen, Scotland, he suddenly said that he had been "guided" to take a ship to South America. It turned out that the ship he was guided to go and return on also carried the Prince of Wales. It is not recorded what progress Dr. Buchman made with the Prince, but I believe he "changed" the ship's doctor.
Buchman — Surgeon of Souls, B.W. Smith, Jr., American Magazine, 122:26-7+, November 1936, page 151.

Frank Buchman would walk into a room full of followers and brightly announce, "I knew someone here needed me. I received Guidance to come." That kind of ego game is easy to play; in any group of a dozen or more people, it is easy to find someone who was supposedly in need of a few words of divine wisdom.

Vic Kitchen, another long-time true believer in the Oxford Group, wrote a book where he listed some of the benefits of living a surrendered and "Guided" life:

... Even with no change in the curriculum or staff, a surrendered and God-conscious student can gain much more from the present modes of education than any of his pagan friends.
      There is first of all the matter of choosing schools and of finding the means to go there. I have seen youngsters in the Oxford Group, for instance, select their schools or colleges, not according to parental preference, not according to ideas of their own, but according to the direct and often amazing guidance of God. This guidance sometimes leads to most unexpected institutions that neither the student nor parent had considered. At other times God shows the opportunity for attending leading universities that the student had considered beyond hope. In one case, due to depression, a young man had given up all idea of going to college. Then God told him that he ought to go — told him where to go — and told him where to find the money. This is not an unusual occurrence. It is only one case in many.
      Once in his school or college, moreover, the guided student finds the right selection of studies and he finds a greater ability to study — a certain sharpening of the mind such as I have tried to describe in my own experience. He finds himself able to attack the most intricate studies and to master subjects that have always been a bugbear. He finds, moreover, that God does not let his studies suffer when, as sometimes happens, He diverts him temporarily to other details of His work.
I Was A Pagan, V. C. "Vic" Kitchen, pages 96-97.

Obviously, that just reeks of the common cult characteristics, "We Have The Panacea", and "Magical, Mystical, Unexplainable Workings". And then there is the name-calling and "Devaluing the Outsider" — non-members are all "pagans". Vic Kitchen also made use of the propaganda technique called Proof By Anecdote. Stories about a few students who got into better schools than they had hoped do not prove that God is manipulating reality for the happiness of Oxford Group members.

There's more:

      Guided living also eliminates the frictions which are bound to arise when two self-centered people revolving on different axes are brought into close proximity. There is little friction between my wife and myself because, when we see a difference of opinion in the offing, we have a quiet time and refer the matter to God. He settles it, without argument or dispute, in the way He knows is best for both of us.   ...
[Ah, but who gets to decide what God said?]
      These, of course, are only a few — a very few — of the many blessings which occur when an ordinary marriage is turned into holy wedlock through surrender of self-will and the sharing of one's sins.
I Was A Pagan, V. C. "Vic" Kitchen, pages 112-113.

So Vic Kitchen considered surrender to the cult and confession of one's sins to be a panacea.

Peter Howard, the fascist disciple of Buchman who took over the leadership of Buchman's organization after Buchman's death, wrote a book that defended the Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament. In 1940 to 1941, during World War II, Peter Howard wrote:

      Some people in the Group have received the most remarkable and dramatic pieces of guidance from God. I have heard a naval officer describe, with obvious sincerity, how in the middle of a naval action he received precise guidance from God which told him which decisions to take and which helped him and his ship through.
      Others record how they suddenly received guidance to go to a certain street and there met people who needed their help.   ...
      When the air raids began, I was frightened, but foolhardy. Thus, although I felt alarmed, I goaded myself to stand out in Ludgate Circus and watch the bombardment when the first mass daylight raid on the London docks came our way.
      Soon after promising Garth Lean to listen to God, I received a message that if I trusted myself to God there was no need to fear. But that to go about in the streets unnecessarily when a raid was on was wrong.
      Explain it as you like, I have not from that moment felt over-alarmed in air raids.
Innocent Men, Peter Howard, page 33.

Similarly, another faithful Buchmanite wrote a book about his war experiences, and credited his survival to practicing Frank's style of Guidance. Edward Howell wrote in Escape to Live that God spoke to him and told him how to escape from a prisoner of war camp in Greece. Then God told him which way to run, "the author seeking guidance whenever he feels at a loss."⁷²

I decided that the situation was out of my control if indeed it had ever been in it. God must decide and tell me what to do.
From Escape to Live, quoted in Inside Buchmanism; an independent inquiry into the Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament, Geoffrey Williamson, Philosophical Library, New York, c1954, page 51.

Edward Howell went on to say that, by following God's Guidance, he eventually met up with a group of escaped Australian soldiers, and together they made their way to Turkey and safety.

Arthur Strong quoted Howell at greater length:

      In the Spring of 1942 Wing Commander Edward Howell began to recover from wounds he sustained in the Battle of Crete, May 1941. While commanding a Hurricane Fighter Squadron he was shot down, and was seriously wounded in ground fighting. He was left for dead. Eventually, picked up by German paratroopers, he was flown to prison-camp hospitals in Greece, where he had an experience which changed the course of his life. In his book "Escape to Live" he tells an amazing story.

Captain Edward Howell

      "Having long been an atheist, I decided to stop trying to run my life and to let God, if he was there, tell me what to do. The result was immediate and fascinating. I found myself able to communicate with Him and receive constant instruction. Still in very poor health, I was half my normal weight and had both arms crippled with open wounds, so that everything had to be done for me by others. I had lost most of what we normally value, yet I suddenly found myself happier than I had ever been, and that I cared about the people around me with an inner peace and purpose I had never known before. I had escaped from self-concern and self-interest into a new way of living. I had escaped to live.
      "Then God showed me how to escape from prison. In my condition it seemed quite impossible but I chose to trust and obey Him and miracles resulted. There was no one about where there should have been; a locked door had been left unlocked; a sentry had his mind somewhere else. I managed to scale a high wall without using my helpless arms and fell, literally, on my feet instead of my head. A star became my guide. My wounds healed overnight. Shepherds and villagers in the Greek mountains became my friends and helpers despite language barriers. Finally, a smuggler's boat took me by night from Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, to safety in Turkey and so back home again.
      "Home was the end of that journey and the beginning of many others, also fascinating and rewarding. I took part in the planning for D Day and was also on the Air Staff at the Pentagon in Washington. Since the war I have worked with MRA in many countries, and have also been in business in the United States and Greece.
      "The worst experience of my life had been transformed into the best. I became aware of the immense network of God's people, those who respond to Him, giving the continuing hope and promise of a new world. The star had led me into wholly new ways — and still does."
Preview Of A New World; How Frank Buchman Helped his country Move from isolation To world responsibility; USA 1939-1946, Arthur Strong, page 112.

The Buchmanites believed in a God who micro-manages the world. According to Buchmanism, God has a grand plan for everything, right down to the germs. Everything that happens is caused by God. There are no coincidences or accidents, they say. This quote from the "Big Book", Alcoholics Anonymous, is typical of Buchmanite beliefs:

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation — some fact of my life — unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing, absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake.
The A.A. Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, 3rd Edition, the story Doctor, Alcoholic, Addict, page 449.

According to Buchmanism, everything is subject to the will of God. God is concerned with even the tiniest of details in this world. God even cares whether you choose to drink coffee, tea, Coke, Pepsi, or water with lunch today. A follower who has properly "Surrendered to Guidance", and who lives a life that is "under God-control", will intuitively make the choice that pleases God. And God, in turn, will make things turn out right for those followers who please Him. To hear the Buchmanites tell it, God is constantly kept busy pulling millions of puppet strings, to make things happen just the way He wants them to.

And God allegedly does not hesitate to let His wishes be known by broadcasting messages — "powerful spiritual radiograms" as Frank Buchman called them — to those people who will listen.

The group had ostensibly clearly heard God's Will during their first "Quiet Time", and such Guidance was supposed to be nearly infallible, but when Frank Buchman came in and contradicted them, the whole group changed its opinion of "God's Will" in two minutes flat. So much for getting infallible guidance from God during one's Quiet Time.

Also notice how Buchman called those who had not joined his group "pagans". That is common cultish behavior — name-calling, devaluing the outsider, and encouraging an us-versus-them mindset. So is the attitude that the leader is always right.

Geoffrey Williamson, a journalist who investigated the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, said of such "received Guidance":

It is idle to speculate whether these promptings emanate from a living God, from the depths of the subconscious, from an individual's own conscience, from a latent "better self", or from a form of wishful thinking.
Inside Buchmanism; an independent inquiry into the Oxford Group Movement and Moral Re-Armament, Geoffrey Williamson, Philosophical Library, New York, c1954, page 168.

And Marjorie Harrison, another contemporary investigator, stated:

      As The Times [of London] put it in a leading article, "It would be incredible if the bulk of the 'guidance' received in 'quiet times' would not consist of submerged thoughts and desires. Most of what is put forward as guidance received in these periods of relaxed attention is so trivial that it would be impious to ascribe it to the promptings of God."
      The Group itself does not deny this. Dr. Buchman himself admits that "thoughts might come from the sub-conscious self or from the evil one".
      The author of What is the Oxford Group? says: "The human mind ... takes up a train of thought it finds hard to discard, invents or remembers a thought of its own. But to those closely in touch with God, it becomes easy after a short while to differentiate between spiritual and human messages." Was there ever a more thoughtless, dangerous and careless pronouncement on a subject of gravest importance to the lives of so many people?
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 64.

And, I would add, "Such arrogance, such conceit." That Buchmanite just assumed that he was "closely in touch with God" because he had practiced Buchmanism for "a short while". For a short while? In the history of the world's great religions, we often find stories of saints who spent most of their lives in prayer and meditation — just to finally get a mere few paragraphs of enlightened wisdom — and those saints felt that it was worth the wait. And those saints did not claim to be "closely in touch with God" because they had prayed and meditated "for a short while".

The Bishop of London wrote to A. J. Russell,

I think I explained at St. Ermin's Hotel that I believe absolutely in Guidance by the Holy Spirit, without which belief I could not be for five minutes Bishop of London.
        But instances have been brought before me of mistaken views of Guidance on the part of the Group, which lead me to suppose that many of them leave out the light of reason (also a lamp given us for our Guidance) and what might be called sanctified common-sense.
One Thing I Know, A. J. Russell (1933), page 285.

The Bishop later explained:

"...I would say now that of course we Christians rely on Guidance. 'As many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are the Sons of God.' We take one day at a time, and we trust the Holy Spirit to see us through, and so He does. That has been my slogan for years.   ...
      "Yet frankly I have seen dangers and foresee dangers. For instance, in the matter of Guidance, we must remember that the Lamp of Reason was given us by God to guide us. Therefore, we must do nothing against reason. This will save us from mistaking a mere whim or desire as Guidance by the Holy Spirit. I illustrated that point when giving a farewell charge to thirty-three Groupers who left England in 1932, as a team to visit Canada and the United States. I told them of a very unhappy story of misguidance, which I knew to be true, for it was given to me by the father of the girl who was the victim of it. Because of the behaviour of a young man in the Group towards my informant's daughter, the father was completely put off by the movement. His attitude was understandable, if not quite logical.
      "The young man had written a love-letter to his daughter on the Friday, but on the Monday he had been 'guided' to propose to another girl.
      'The father said he wanted a horse-whipping, for his sense of decency should have come in to check such ungentlemanly conduct. The Group should insist upon such safeguards as the Lamp of Reason, and the observance of good taste and decency when interpreting Guidance. When I told my story at the Group meeting, it raised a laugh; but it is a serious objection, none the less, for the story is true."
One Thing I Know, A. J. Russell (1933), pages 291-292.

What was so darned funny? The Bishop told the very sad story of a girl who was hurt by a Grouper's goofy "Guidance", and the team of Oxford Group recruiters laughed when they heard it. Did their laughter indicate that they just couldn't bear to hear the truth?

(That was also a subtle form of resistance to criticism — just laugh at anything that might be a valid criticism of the Oxford Groups or of Frank Buchman's teachings. Don't take it seriously; don't really consider it or think about it. Just frivolously laugh it off and pretend that it is all very funny.)

Marjorie Harrison wrote:

        The Bishop of London, speaking on the Group some time ago, said: "God has given us intelligence and reason to be the lamps to guide us."
        The Group by its interpretation of Divine Guidance advocates the dowsing of these lamps.
        To return to the simile of a father and his children. The Group teaches the child to regard his father not as a guide and defence generally and a ready help in time of trouble, but someone to whom the child turns for actual direction in everything he does. Father, shall I play with my train or my bricks? Father, shall I build a house or a bridge? Father, shall I use red bricks or blue? Father, shall I knock it down? Father, shall I build it up? Father this and father that, until a father might well wonder whether his child is a half-wit, instead of a reasonable being.
        Why should we storm the courts of Heaven to know whether we shall buy cigarettes or take the 10.45 or the 11 o'clock train to town, or as a critic has said: "render God responsible for our neckties or whether we choose to eat beef or mutton at luncheon."
        Believe me, these instances are no exaggeration. Dr. Buchman acknowledges that he asks for guidance for the expenditure on postage.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 55.

Another Bishop declared:

Groupists actually speak of 'listening-in' to the Holy Ghost: whenever they run up against a difficulty they stop for guidance. Such an idea of God is crudely anthropomorphic, derogatory to God's honor, and contrary to natural morality.... Guidance as understood by the Groups encourages all kinds of illusions; it undermines the sense of personal moral responsibility, it leads to fanaticism.
The Rt. Revd. M. J. Browne, Bishop of Galway, in his Catholic Truth Society Pamphlet, quoted in
The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, by Tom Driberg, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, pages 195-196.

And Dr. Herbert Hensley Henson, the Bishop of Durham, said in his criticism of the Oxford Groups:

Groupism discloses in its conception of 'Guidance' precisely the same error as that which infects its conception of 'witness'. It 'seeks a sign'. It insists on something precise, concrete, calculable. Its temper of mind is rather Pharisaic than Christian. It seeks proofs of Divine action in what is abnormal, amazing, even miraculous. Its view of inspiration is mechanical, and its treatment of Scripture literalist. Thus it comes about that, even in the process of exalting the genuinely Christian conception of the 'guided life', it perverts and lowers it.
The Oxford Groups; The Charge Delivered At The Third Quadrennial Visitation Of His Diocese Together With An Introduction, Herbert Hensley Henson, D.D., 1933, page 70.

Marjorie Harrison interviewed Frank Buchman, and asked him about "Guidance".

I asked him to justify "Guidance" as he teaches it. He asked me if I had read the Book of Ezekiel lately. I replied that I had not. But I have since done so: I fail to see the slightest connection between the vision of Ezekiel, prophet and priest, a man set apart by God and chosen by Him, not when Ezekiel desired it but when God willed — to be the recipient of direct Divine Guidance, and the little circular clumps of converts, heads together, notebooks in hand, seated in the lounge of a fashionable hotel. Their heads are bent; eyes screwed up. Then in a moment or two they start scribbling in the little books. They read out the result in turn. They laugh and chatter and seem to enjoy themselves hugely. They appear to be playing "consequences", they believe they are having an audience with God. No, Dr. Buchman, there does not appear to be any connection between this and the burning vision of Ezekiel "among the captives by the river Chebar" when the heavens opened and he saw "visions of God".
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), pages 115-116.

And many Oxford Group members did behave irrationally as a result of their "Guidance". There were numerous stories of students getting "Guidance" to neglect or abandon their studies and skip their final exams, to abandon their careers and just devote their entire lives to the Oxford Group:

        The Group boasts of the reunion of parents and children thanks to its influence. It does not count the homes sundered through the same cause. Parents, who have made sacrifices to send their sons and daughters to the University, are exasperated and distressed to find time wasted, work neglected and careers ruined. I was told recently of a man who, at considerable financial inconvenience, had undertaken the education of a young nephew. In the midst of his University career the boy insisted on throwing up his work and attaching himself to the Buchmanites. No sense or reason can be used as an influence. To every argument they blandly reply that they know that they are right because God told them so.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 57.

        Here is another instance of the shallowness of thought and extremes of teaching of which the Group must be held guilty. In a booklet issued by the Group entitled The Guidance of God, there is a story of a three-year-old child taught to be quiet and listen to God's Voice. He looks up and remarks: "God says that you must eat more porridge this morning." Although the child is obviously reiterating an injunction of his mother's, this is put forward as a direct instance of Divine Guidance.
        In the same booklet there is the dangerous injunction: "Look for the coincidences" as sign-posts of Guidance.
...
... If every passing thought is to be followed as Guidance, and every coincidence regarded as a Divine intervention, where are we to stop this side madness? Dr. Buchman has no authority whatever for his doctrine of direct guidance available at any moment.
        The result of such a teaching, made "with an infallibility the Pope would envy", is to rob men and women of their God-given intelligence, and to weaken their sense of reason and their capacity for judgement until they become almost non-existent.   ...   It is a pitiable fact that many young children are now being brought up this way. I believe that there are no words too strong to condemn such a teaching, and that its consequences can be so terrible that no warning is too grave.
        The "Quiet Time" encourages introspection: the pseudo-guidance is its result. Minds deranged, homes made tragic, careers broken, bitter disappointment following the unhappy or negative outcome of this so-called guidance — these are the consequences.
        I would sum up in the words of The [London] Times: "It must be the most serious charge against the Groups that they encourage their members to shirk the discipline of thought in favour of impulses received from they know not where."
        The teaching on Guidance is as great a superstition as any purged from the Church at the Reformation.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), pages 67-68.

        It is not easy to get a direct answer to a direct question. People who have followed this pseudo-guidance for long lose the ability to think to the point. They are, even in conversation, under guidance and following the ideas that come into their heads at the moment. Groupers become extraordinarily evasive people.
Saints Run Mad; A Criticism of the "Oxford" Group Movement, Marjorie Harrison (1934), page 62.

Rev. John A. Richardson also wrote about 'Guidance':

A young man writes a love-letter to one girl on Friday, and is "guided" to propose to another girl on the following Monday. (Related to Mr. Reginald Lennard, Fellow and Tutor of Wadham College, Oxford, as authenticated by the Bishop of London, "Morals and the Group Movement," The Nineteenth Century and After, Nov., 1933, pp. 600-601.)   ...
      No less a person than Canon Grensted says, "I was once worrying as to which I should do: go a long journey by car or by train. After a long time wasted in weighing the pros and cons, guidance came suddenly through with the message: 'Don't be a fool, go by car.'" (For Sinners Only, A. J. Russell, Eng. Ed., Hodder & Stoughton, Ltd., p. 288). It is hardly in such language that we may expect the Holy Spirit to speak to us, but we may let that point pass. The significant thing about Prof. Grensted's testimony is that he regards it as wasted time to consider for a few moments the advantages and disadvantages of two contrasted courses of action in the experiences of ordinary life. He would have us believe, it seems, that the exercise of common sense by a Christian is superseded by dependence upon supernatural intimations.
      ... Prof. Douglas J. Wilson [Prof. in the University of Western Ontario] ... informs us that within his own experience "Group leaders were 'guided' to break important engagements while large gatherings of people sat waiting in confused ignorance" ("A Critique of Buchmanism," The Christian Century, August 23, 1933). I have it on excellent authority, moreover, that similar breaches of courtesy and common sense were observed in Toronto during one of the great gatherings of the Movement. Sunday pulpit engagements are said to have been actually broken without a word of warning even at the last moment, leaving embarrassed ministers to improvise a sermon. Called to account later on for their inconsiderate behavior, the defaulting persons are said to have replied with apparent unconcern that they had been "guided" to go elsewhere.   ...
      With such incidents in view, few rationally-minded persons are likely to disagree with the Bishop of Durham, when he says with his customary directness that such a conception of guidance cannot be reconciled "either with piety or with good sense. It appears to be equally inconsistent with the character of God and the self-respect of man" (The Group Movement, 2nd Ed., Part II, p. 66). Nor will they find it difficult to make their own conclusion arrived at in the matter by Mr. Reginald Lennard. "The practical dangers of 'guidance,' however," he affirms, "great as they are, do not seem to me to be the most serious objection which can be urged against it on ethical grounds. It is all-important to notice the fundamental implications of the doctrine — its ethical implications, I mean;... Guidance is only to be sought in those matters which are usually matters for reason and common sense or for principles and conscience. No suggestion is ever made that we should substitute 'guidance' for our eyesight and walk across a busy street under 'guidance' with our eyes blindfolded. In other words, that in man which he shares with other animals is honored and trusted to do its work. The reason, which most obviously distinguishes him from other animals, is dethroned. (The italics are my own. [—Richardson]) It is difficult to conceive anything more degrading. The theory and practice of 'guidance' is not merely foolish and likely to lead in practice to moral pitfalls. It is in itself fundamentally immoral.... Imagine a world in which everyone lived wholly by 'guidance,' making each day simply the execution of commands received in the morning 'Quiet Time' and noted in the guidance book! All planning and thought, everything permanent in human relationships and human purposes, everything which makes life really human and worth living, would be brushed aside as an irrelevant waste of time if this theory were worked out to its logical conclusion and acted upon to the full" ("Morals and the Group Movement," The Nineteenth Century and After, Nov., 1933, p. 602).
      I leave the subject by merely recording the opinion of the Rev. E. R. Micklem, of Mansfield College, Oxford, one of the contributors to Oxford and the Groups. "To look for daily intimations," he says, "— subtle promptings — which indicate the tasks God has in mind for us, rather than to look for illumination on the way of grasping the multifarious and obvious opportunities of service which our ordinary daily life presents, is to attempt to live in a world of mechanical responses rather than of personal relationships" (p. 144).
The Groups Movement, The Most Rev. John A. Richardson, pages 75-79.
Morehouse Publishing Co., Milwaukee, Wis., 1935.

Rev. Richardson made a couple of great points there. Nobody walked across a busy highway while wearing a blindfold, trusting Guidance to safely guide his feet. The reason that they didn't is because, deep down in their hearts, they knew that Guidance didn't really work.

And Rev. Richardson was quite correct when he called the practice of 'Guidance' degrading. It would reduce humanity to being just so many remote-controlled toys of God. Children like to play with radio-controlled toy cars or airplanes, but Frank Buchman would have us believe that God prefers radio-controlled hairless monkees that mindlessly, unquestioningly, obey the orders that they receive through "spiritual radiograms". The practice of Guidance would reduce people to being just so many brainless robots.

Rev. Geoffrey Allen of Oxford University, who became a true believer and a leader in Buchman's cult, even taught followers to be ready to break appointments whenever they received Guidance to do so:

As we surrender our prejudices to God, so also we must surrender our engagements, so that we allow Him to direct in perfect freedom how He would have us spend our day. We shall not start our time of quiet before Him, blocking in the day that lies ahead with all that we have planned to do, and then asking Him how He would have us spend what is left of our time. God is Lord of the whole of our time. If He wills that we should go to apparently fixed engagements, He will send us to them. If He wills that we should break free from them to be used for other work of His, He is able to guide us how without damage to others of His children we may be set free. Of course, under His guidance, we may be at liberty to fill our diaries with engagements for days and weeks and months ahead. We must, however, then each new day allow God to redirect us as His purposes demand. It is men and not God who are fickle; but where men in revolt live their days by their own changing, selfish wills, God must be also free to adjust His plans to their changing situations, so as best to use those who obey Him, for calling the world back to His service.
He That Cometh; A Sequel to 'Tell John,' being further essays on the Message of Jesus and Present Day Religion, Geoffrey Allen, pages 99-100.

Rev. Geoffrey Allen claimed that God would teach the Oxford Groupists how to break appointments without pain to others — "He is able to guide us how without damage to others" — but his young followers seem to have failed to learn that part of their lessons. (Note that Rev. Geoffrey Allen changed his mind about the Oxford Groups in a few years' time, and broke away from the Groups.⁸²)

Dr. H. H. Henson, the Bishop of Durham, strongly disagreed with Rev. Allen about his doctrine of breaking appointments:

I have read this passage several times, and considered it carefully, but I have not been able to reconcile it either with piety or with good sense. It appears to be equally inconsistent with the character of God and the self-respect of man. If generally acted upon, it would make social life almost impossible. It suggests that the Almighty may first 'guide' His children to frame engagements, which, when they fall due, He may 'guide' them to break. Instead of directing his course by reason and conscience, illumined no doubt by the Spirit of God, but indestructably free and responsible, the Christian is reduced to dependence on specific directions which he cannot foresee, may not understand or approve, and must not disobey.
Dr. H. Hensley Henson, the Bishop of Durham, quoted in
The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, by Tom Driberg, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, pages 195-196.

Curiously, few of the Oxford Group believers ever got any "Guidance" that conflicted with any of Frank Buchman's "Guidance". You would think that some conflicts or collisions would be inevitable, because anybody could think, or imagine that he heard, anything he wanted to, but apparently, "God" managed to keep His followers from making any mistakes. How convenient.

Actually, Buchman implemented a system of checks for the regular followers: they had to submit their received Guidances to the other group members, or, preferably, the group elders, for approval. That was called "Checking Guidance". The other members or elders would interpret and approve of the Guidance, or not approve of it. If it conflicted with the guidance handed down from Frank Buchman and his lieutenants, then such erroneous Guidance must have come from The Evil One, not God. In that way, no follower could get a message from God like, "Frank Buchman is crazy. Quit this stupid cult right now."

Collective guidance is the test of individual guidance. The Group demands total loyalty to the inner group. Some have had to leave the movement because of the Groups' demands which conflict with truth or duty.
The Oxford Groups; The Charge Delivered At The Third Quadrennial Visitation Of His Diocese Together With An Introduction, Herbert Hensley Henson, D.D., 1933, pages 73-74.

(The demand for total loyalty to the group is another standard cult characteristic.)

• Note that a hierarchical, authoritarian system of control of members is very typical of cults.
  
• So is the teaching that you cannot trust your own mind or your own thoughts, and must turn to the cult's mentors or elders for guidance.
  
• And so is the attitude that newcomers can't think right.
  
• And so is the deceit that "we have no structure or system", when in fact they have a very despotic system of control.

It was obvious to contemporary theologians that Frank Buchman went off on an occult tangent in developing his theology. Buchman and his followers were allegedly channelling God while receiving Guidance, not much different, really, from some spiritist or medium who claims to be channelling the spirits of dead people. There were even stories of Buchmanites getting together for Quiet Time "spook sessions", where they attempted to contact spirits other than God. In his historical novel Wide is the Gate (1943), Upton Sinclair described Oxford Groupers holding séances in London with a self-proclaimed medium who claimed to channel the spirits of the Indian chief Tecumseh and a long-dead Ceylonese Buddhist monk.

The contemporary clergy were certainly aware of the occult aspects of Buchmanism — they lumped Buchmanism in with other psychic phenomena like communicating with the dead:

LIBERAL CLERGY CONVENE Episcopal Conference in Philadelphia Is Told of Psychic Phenomena. Special to The New York Times. PHILADELPHIA, Feb 15. — Spiritualistic phenomena, Buchmanism, Biblical Miracles and conversion were discussed by speakers today at the opening session of the two-day conference of liberal clergymen of the Episcopal Church, who attended from all parts of the country.       The Rev. Dr. Walter F. Prince of New York, Secretary of the Psychic Research Society, told how the Rev. William H. Morgan, a Methodist minister of New York, experienced a complete change in his views on theology as result of an all-night communication with the spirit of his dead wife.       The Rev. W. T. Snead of Beverly, N. J., then declared that "castor oil and calomel would clear up most of the cases of psychic experiences" and asked about "premonitions that did not come true."       The Rev. Samuel Shoemaker Jr., rector of Trinity Church, New York, in a paper on Buchmanism, likened its founder, Frank Buchman, to John Wesley and George Fox in that "he had the courage to go into our highest social circles and tell people what they are." The New York Times, February 16, 1927, page 3.

"Sam Shoemaker" Rev. Samuel Moor Shoemaker Jr.

The sycophant Sam Shoemaker's hero-worshipping remarks were simply untrue. Frank Buchman did not tell the rich, the famous, and the titled nobility "what they are". Frank Buchman did that to the poor. Towards the rich, Frank's behavior would be better described by the word "grovelling".

Another important concept in Buchmanism is the idea that everyone has been "defeated by sin", and is "insane". Buchman redefined the word "sanity" to mean "living according to the Will of God" and "insanity" was living a life not "Guided" by God. Thus, only Frank Buchman and his arrogant followers were sane; everyone else in the world was "insane" and in need of Frank's "Guidance". Thus Buchman taught that people were incapable of running their own lives, and needed to surrender to "God-control" (i.e.: to Frank-control). A Buchmanite text teaches:

      What we want to do is get in touch with Him and turn our lives over to Him. Where should we go to do it?
      At once the lad replied:
      "There is only one place — on our knees."
      The lad prayed — one of those powerful, simple prayers which are so quickly heard by Him who made the eye and the ear: "Oh Lord, manage me, for I cannot manage myself."
For Sinners Only, A. J. Russell, (Harper & Brothers, New York and London, 1932), p. 62.

That theology is a Gnostic heresy. One aspect of Gnostic theology was the idea that this world and all of the people in it were irredeemably corrupt:

The earth and life on it are irredeemably evil, and separation from earthly life is precisely salvation.
      ... The Gnostic view is that this world was the creation of an evil spirit. Matter itself is chaos; it is the baser half of their dualistic universe.
      Gosticism's pretense to exclusive divine knowledge is also implicitly millenarian, for prophetic knowledge is often exactly of this kind; suitable only for the awareness of a select few who can comprehend it.
A Doomsday Reader: Prophets, Predictors, and Hucksters of Salvation, edited by Ted Daniels, page 42.

Buchmanism declared that you were inherently so corrupt and evil that you were incapable of managing your own life or of doing good things with your own free will, and that salvation was only possible through surrendering control of your life and your mind to "God" (i.e., to Frank Buchman and his minions who were supposedly in closer contact with God than you were). That is a heresy, in direct conflict with the Christian idea that you can repent your sins, change your ways, and choose to live a good life. Christianity generally believes in free will; Buchmanism teaches that you are the powerless slave of evil impulses, hopelessly "defeated by sin".

Peter Howard Peter Howard, who took over the leadership of Frank Buchman's groups after Buchman's death, wrote: Man is born to believe and obey. If he turns his back on God, he turns his face to man and man's dominion. He will believe and obey Hitler or Stalin as long as they hold the whip. Then he will serve their successors. Britain and the Beast, Peter Howard, 1963, page 97. Man is born to believe and obey? All men must be the unthinking slaves of some dictator or other, God or Stalin or Hitler? That is a very twisted view of human life. It's downright fascist. Peter Howard really was a fascist. He held a leadership position in Sir Oswald Mosley's New Party, which morphed into the British Union of Fascists — the B.U.F. — during the nineteen-thirties, and Peter Howard was the leader of the New Youth Movement, Mosley's copy of the Nazi Hitlerjugend. See the web page on Nazi Partying for more of the story.

Frank Buchman was also in love with the word "obey". Oxford Group slogans declared:

• "When man listens, God speaks. When man obeys, God acts. When men change, nations change."

• Our destiny is to obey the guidance of God.
  Frank Buchman, speaking at the opening of the Moral Re-Armament Training Center, Mackinac Island, Michigan, July 1943, quoted in
  Remaking the World, the speeches of Frank Buchman, Frank N. D. Buchman, page 201.

• "God spoke to the prophets of old. He may speak to you. God speaks to those who listen. God acts through those who obey."⁷³

And Buchman went on to say,

"The future lies with the men and nations who listen to God and obey."
The New York Times, August 28, 1939, page 9.

God has an inspired plan for peace and the means to carry it out through men and women who are willing to obey.
Frank N. D. Buchman, Remaking the World, page 104, quoted in
Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, 1971, page 84.

"The secret lies in that great forgotten truth that when man listens, God speaks; when man obeys, God acts; when men change, nations change."
Frank Buchman, quoted in Britain and the Beast, Peter Howard, 1963, pages 107-109.

But note that somehow Frank Buchman always managed to twist things around so that "obeying God" ended up meaning that everybody had to agree with Frank and do what Frank said. Everybody had to check their guidance with Frank or his lieutenants, and then Frank decided what God was really saying and what God was really ordering them to do.

Again and again, Buchman declared that people could not manage their own lives, that they must obey God and follow God's orders (as interpreted by Frank Buchman or his lieutenants):

God alone can change human nature.   ...   God made the world, and man has been trying to run it ever since. That must stop... Many have been waiting for a great leader to emerge. The Oxford Group believes that it must be done not through one person, but through groups of people who have learned to work together under the guidance of God.
Frank Buchman, quoted in Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, page 44.

In other words, people are so bad that the Oxford Groups should run the world.

Vic Kitchen, another one of Buchman's dedicated followers, agreed:

      My own political thought therefore no longer looks to political expedients for a real answer. It is given to the possibilities of theocracy under the Oxford Group and other working Christians in all sections of the world. Our old system of democracy, like our old system of economics, is gone — never to return. No intermediate stage of man-made adjustment is likely to linger with us for very long. Therefore, on whether you and I accept this new awakening of the Holy Spirit, depends the outcome of present political experiments. They will not escape disaster unless the tide turns to God. There, and there only, lies the Nation's Real Advantage — a "new deal" of the kind that enables everyone to hold a winning hand, and the only programme which enables everyone to play a vital part.
I Was A Pagan, V. C. "Vic" Kitchen, 1934, page 136.

So theocracy under the Oxford Group is the only answer to the Great Depression.

Frank Buchman's definition of "democracy" was downright Orwellian:

An increasing number of citizens in democratic states are now unwilling to acknowledge in speech and action those inner authorities on which the life of democracy depends. Each man has his own plan. It's so wonderful each to have his own plan. It's such freedom, such liberty! Everyone does as he pleases. But not in the Oxford Group. There you have true democracy. You don't do as you please, you do as God guides. You do God's plan.
Frank Buchman, speaking at Visby, Sweden in 1938, quoted in Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, pages 44-45.

Ah, but who gets to say just what God's plan is? The Oxford Group sure didn't hold elections.

Likewise, Frank Buchman's convert Herbert Grevenius praised Buchman with this Orwellian double-think:

His enormously active life is built on one thing only — guidance. He openly admits it. He is a sail always waiting to be filled by the wind, a man with a great and warm and humble heart, a democrat who wants to set men free under God's dictatorship.
Herbert Grevenius, quoted in
Experiment With God; Frank Buchman Reconsidered, Gösta Ekman, page 21.
and
Remaking the World, the speeches of Frank Buchman, Frank N. D. Buchman, page 266.

Frank Buchman's program consisted of "personal evangelism" with emphasis on:

• 1) both public and private confession of sin;
• 2) reception of divine "guidance" during "quiet times";
• 3) complete surrender to this "guidance";
• 4) the living of a "guided" life in which every aspect of one's actions was controlled by God;
• 5) the practice of the Buchmanite Four Absolutes — Absolute Purity, Absolute Honesty, Absolute Love, and Absolute Unselfishness;
• 6) making restitution to those one has harmed; and
• 7) carrying "the message" to those "still defeated by sin" — that is, going recruiting for the Group.

Note that the "Four Absolutes" are pretty typical cult fare. Many cults make impossible demands for super-human perfection from their members. Such impossibly lofty standards are good for making members feel inadequate and inferior, which is good for inducing lots of guilt, which then makes the members much easier to manipulate and control.

Tom Driberg, the London newspaper reporter and Labor Party Member of Parliament, pointed out that...

      ... the Four Absolutes, when compared with any of the classical codes of ethics, do not form a well-balanced or comprehensive rule of life. They read as if they were framed on the spur of the moment, in a flash of Guidance, by Dr Buchman; and as if, since 'Frank's guidance was always right', nobody ventured to question his authority and to suggest that other Absolutes, too, might be required.   ... there is in this code no mention of the social virtue of justice or of the personal virtue of humility.   ...
      In any case, is absolute honesty or purity (in the MRA sense of the word) really desirable? To quote the usual examples of the justified 'white lie': if a violent psychopath is looking for a gun, the honest citizen is not obliged, when asked, to tell him where it is; and it is not sinful dishonesty, but common courtesy, to let a worthy bore think that you are glad to see him.   ...
      An advocate of MRA has no right to shrug off such examples as absurdly extreme cases in which common sense would obviously come into play: 'of course we wouldn't behave so extravagantly'. For extravagant behavior is exactly what the Absolutes require. If you tell the psychopath that you don't know where the gun is, when you do, you are not being absolutely honest. This is the cleft stick into which MRA's absolutism forces its disciples: either they must behave extravagantly or they fall into dishonesty — minor dishonesty which they are debarred from calling, as others would call it, excusable. So, by deliberate training, they must come to lack that most precious of civilised human attributes, a sense of proportion.
The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament; A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, Tom Driberg, 1965, pages 230-231.

And it seems that the Four Absolutes were not original material, either. They had a long history:

Ethics       The Buchman ethical structure was based on the four moral standards of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. They were to be applied personally, socially, and nationally. The four standards were a part of the legacy from his personal evangelism mentor, Henry B. Wright of Yale. Wright, in turn, had found the four standards in the writings of Robert E. Speer.²³

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²³ Wright, The Will of God, and, Speer, The Principles of Jesus.

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World Changing Through Life Changing: The Story of Frank Buchman and Moral Re-Armament; A Thesis for the Degree of Master of Sacred Theology at Andover Newton Theological School, T. Willard Hunter, 1977, page 125.

Marcus Bach studied the Oxford Group / Moral Re-Armament organization, and reported,

      I had no intention of posing as a spiritual saboteur, but when Ned [Barton] and a young English friend, Aylmer, talked me into going with them on a "guidance walk", I took along the explosives that had been accumulating in my mind since I first heard of Frank N. Buchman.
      In response to their exaggerated praise of the man, I contended that his genius lay in the appropriation of other men's ideas. "Your four absolutes," I recounted, "came from Henry B. Wright, who got them from Robert E. Speer, who got them from Henry Drummond, who very likely got them from someone else."
      Aylmer responded to my mention of these men with "Never heard of them!"
      I was in the awkward position of an outside informant enlightening the neophytes. They did not know that the workable technique which Buchman had popularized had been tested in the laboratory of a Yale professor's life. At the time of his death in 1923, Henry B. Wright was collaborating with Buchman on a treatise devoted to personal religion. Wright's earlier publication, The Will of God and a Man's Life Work, was Buchman's text. Before Buchman became famous, he confessed that much of the best in his message had come from Henry B. Wright. It was Wright who made Buchman "system-conscious"; it was Wright who taught him the first words of his spiritual lingo.⁵⁷
      Neither of my companions on this morning walk was impressed or disturbed by my exposé of their leader. Aylmer, with a gesture of unconcern, said, "All that may be true, but don't we always ascribe originality to the man who makes a thing memorable? And you'll have to admit that F. B. has certainly sold the Oxford Group idea to the world."
      "But I must protest against the use of that name," I retorted. "There was an Oxford Group long before Buchman ever set foot in your country, Aylmer. It was initiated in 1833 and was intended to clarify the position of the Anglican Church in light of its higher function. I've often hear the charge that Buchman was never averse to capitalizing on the prestige this name afforded. It slyly put him into the company of men like John Henry Newman and John Keble and tied him to a great tradition in a way that was downright misleading."
      "Oh," said Aylmer deprecatingly, "let's not quibble about that."
They Have Found A Faith, by Marcus Bach, pages 146-147.

More Buchmanism: The Five Procedures of the Sane:

1. Guidance
2. Checking Guidance
3. Giving in to God
4. Restitution
5. Sharing

What they meant was:

1. Guidance == Conduct a séance and "listen to God" talking to you.
2. Checking Guidance == Ask the cult elders whether they agree with what you think God said.
3. Giving in to God == "Surrender" to the "guidance" and do what the voices in your head tell you to do.
4. Restitution == Go around apologizing and making amends to all whom you have offended.
5. Sharing == Deliver testimonials at meetings, "sharing" stories of how you lived a decadent life of terrible sin until you were saved by Dr. Frank Buchman's wonderful religion.

And more Buchmanism: "The Five C's": These steps were the procedure for recruiting more members. The most important duty of members was to "win more souls" for the Group. The five C's were:

1. Confidence
2. Confession
3. Conviction
4. Conversion
5. Conservation

What they meant was:

1. First, the recruiter got the prospect's Confidence and trust by utilizing whatever mind games were required.   (Yes, it's a "con" — a confidence game.)

2. Then, the recruiter Confessed something to the prospect in order to get his trust, and encouraged him to Confess something about himself in return. Gradually, the recruiter pressured the prospect to Confess all of his innermost dirty little secrets. The Oxford Group manual called "Soul Surgery" tells us that recruiters must be "lovingly relentless" in insisting that a confession be made.

3. Then came Conviction — the recruiter betrayed the prospect's trust, and turned his confession around and used it against him, amplifying and exaggerating it, in order to make the prospect feel as guilty as possible. The recruiter got the prospect to 'Convict' himself of sins — that is, to find himself guilty of having committed many sins and to confess that he was a worthless sinner who had been defeated by sin.

4. Then, the recruiter held out religious Conversion as the only way to escape from the feelings of guilt. The prospect was told that he must "surrender himself to God" (really, surrender to the Oxford Group recruiters).

5. And the last 'C' was "Conservation", which was somehow redefined to mean that the new convert had to go out and recruit more new cult members, using the same Five C's as were just used on him, doing unto others what had just been done unto him.

A very disturbing feature of those "Five C's" is the belief that it is okay to deceive the prospective new member in order to get his confidence and confession, and get him to join the group. The recruiting member, who is called a "Soul Surgeon," should twist the truth, mask details, tell half-truths, present only facts which will appeal to the prospect, and "confess" or "share" stories — true or untrue — telling how Buchmanism saved the recruiter from misery — basically, say anything — in order to entice the prospect to join the Group. "It's all okay," they said, "because it is all done in the service of God." The truth is, deceptive recruiting is a standard practice of most all evil cults, and so is the rationalization that the end justifies the means. And so is aggressive recruiting.

Beverly Nichols was, for a while, an enthusiastic member of the British Oxford Groups. He was deceived and converted by Oxford Group recruiters who wanted to use him for publicity purposes — they knew that he was a London newspaper reporter, journalist, and writer, and they wanted to get some good press. And their scheme worked. Besides giving them favorable newspaper coverage, Beverly Nichols also inserted an enthusiastic chapter of praise of the Oxford Groups into his current work in progress — a book of religious philosophy titled The Fool Hath Said. Naturally, that book became a favorite of the Oxford Groups. But Nichols gradually became disillusioned with the Oxford Groups. He suffered a nervous breakdown and left the Groups, and much later wrote a letter to Tom Driberg telling of his experiences with the Groups: I cannot remember the precise date of my first contact with them; I am almost certain that it was in the year 1936. However, I do recall that it came about as the result of an extremely private conversation, in the course of which I poured out my heart to one of its members, whom I prefer to leave anonymous. Like many of us, I was in a pretty distracted state at the time, because of the increasing danger of war. This is not merely a personal meandering, it is apposite to the story. After all, I was the author of Cry Havoc!, which, as you may recall, was a passionate plea for unadulterated pacifism. I was prepared to go to any lengths to prevent war, even maybe to blind myself to the essential evil in the figure of Hitler. Anyway, as a result of this conversation I attended my first meeting, and was so deeply impressed that I wrote an article about it in the Sunday Chronicle. A long telegram from Frank Buchman, congratulating me, arrived on the following morning. Odd as it may seem, I had not run into him at the meeting; indeed, I only met him once in my life, when I found him strangely antipathetic. After that, for the next few weeks — or was it months? — members of the Group were constantly calling and ringing up and writing letters, and I am bound to admit that by and large they were kind and helpful. They were aware of the tensions through which I was passing, because, at my very first meeting, I had got up and confessed that part of my hatred of war was based on simple personal physical cowardice. It was not a very sensational confession, and I hope you know me well enough to realise that this was not the sole reason for my pacifism. But though these young men did their best, I was not greatly impressed by their mental calibre. One of them, I remember, was quite shocked when I suggested that it might be a good idea if there was some moral rearmament in the actual armament industry itself: in the vast firm of Schneider-Creuzot, in Krupp's, and, of course, in our own Vickers. In Cry Havoc! I had stressed the appalling fact that there were secret agreements between these great firms of which the ultimate outcome must be war. For the weapons of war were their trade. But no member of the Oxford Group, as far as I am aware, ever thought it worth while to call on the Merchants of Death, a phrase of my own which was later attached to a best-seller in America.       Somewhere around June, 1936, I was at the end of my tether, and I suddenly decided to motor up to Oxford to see if these kindly people could give me any personal assistance. And there I had a most bitter experience. For my original sponsor, assuming that I was now irrevocably 'one of them', blandly informed me that the first meeting which I had ever attended had been 'staged' entirely for my benefit. They had a shrewd idea of what was wrong with me, and how I could best be 'got at', and so all those first confessions had been rigged. In other words, they had put on an act for my especial benefit, hoping that I would give them good publicity, as of course I did. Perhaps there was nothing so reprehensible about this precedure, but the effect on myself at the time was devastating. It seemed to me to go completely counter to their first fundamental principle of Absolute Honesty. Feeling as I did, I decided to be absolutely honest myself, and I got up on to the platform in order to tell them how I felt about it. But I could not speak, and I left the platform with the tears streaming down my face. I left the hall by a side door, and went out to sit in my car. Nobody followed me. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon, and I stayed in the car for about half an hour, trying to pull myself together. The next ten hours were a complete blank, but shortly after midnight my servant returned to my small house in Hampstead, to find me standing in the hall, staring at nothing and saying 'I can't stop crying.' ...       This little episode marked the beginning of a total nervous breakdown. The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament; A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, Tom Driberg, 1965, pages 269-272. (Note that the sponsorship system was present in the Oxford Groups. Bill Wilson didn't invent that for Alcoholics Anonymous either.) Beverly Nichols also described his experiences with the Oxford Groups in his later book, All I Could Never Be:       Ever since my return from Palestine I had been tortured by insomnia.   ...   After a week or so of this you neither feel nor look very pretty.       It was in this sort of state that I had come to Oxford; I thought that perhaps the Group might help me.  ...       But the first meeting of the Group was quite dreadful. Dr. Buchman reminded me more than ever of an American dentist, or rather, of a salesman of dental appliances ('use our special brushes and your teeth will last for ever'; 'use our special doctrine and you'll gain eternity').       What happened after the meeting was even worse. For I said to my chief Grouper friend — one of Buchman's right-hand men: 'I do hope that when we meet again there will be some "witnesses", like last year — you know what I mean, people who will get up and tell how their whole lives have been changed.'       To which he replied, with a bright laugh: 'Oh, but those people you heard were our star turns. We put them on specially for you.'       Why this should have shocked me so much I do not know; the fact remains that it did. I had thought that those men and women whom I had heard the year before were speaking as the spirit moved them, almost as though they were 'speaking with tongues'. Now it seemed that they had only been the high-spots in an evangelistic vaudeville. Surely that was not 'absolute honesty', which was the first of the four principles of the Group?       Such was the question I asked myself, sitting in that dingy hotel, waiting till it was time to go to the next meeting....       ...       But as I left the hotel to go to that last meeting I was in no mood of acceptance; my nerves were strung so tightly that I felt like snarling at everybody.       The little hall was crowded with about two hundred people. There was a large percentage of young women, and today they seemed to me strangely repulsive; they were both repressed and complacent; their virginity was not a flaming militant purity, but an asset to be smug about, like money in the savings bank. 'My virtue is still intact' — 'My bank balance is still on the credit side'; one felt that they would make those two statements in exactly the same tone of voice.       There was the same air about the young men. God forgive me if I were ever to sneer at any man's effort to keep himself clean, but true purity is creative, it is a form of shining self-expression; it has, indeed, a quality of passion about it.       Here there was no radiance — one had rather the sense that the young men were trying out purity as they might try out a new sort of pill, and the results were sadly unbecoming... unbecoming in the most obvious physical sense. These young men were ugly. They were pale and spotty and twitchy, and the palms of their hands were wet. Their hair was untidy. Their whole appearance lacked lustre.       Except Dr. Buchman himself. There he was on the platform, and he was lustrous enough. His pink cheeks sparkled; his spectacles glittered; his protuberant cuffs were dazzling white; his dark blue trousers were beautifully creased; and his shoes were bright as mirrors.   ... In the King's Head pub, West Ham, Buchman meets with his local "team". Top right: Bill Rowell, alleged to be "a leader of London's unemployed". (What on earth was that? Do the unemployed people form unions and elect leaders?) Below him, Tod Sloan (with the curly hair, reading), watchmaker, former labor activist, and friend of Ben Tillet — and also allegedly a "leader of London's unemployed". On Buchman's right, Bill Jaeger, a student who "pioneered the work". Seated left, Mrs. Annie Jaeger, his mother, who sold her shop in Stockport to go and help him in East London. [I find this photograph to be striking: It's the closest thing I've seen to a modern Heironymous Bosch painting.]       I sat down at the back and stared around me. All the members of the audience had little notebooks in which they were busily scribbling their 'guidance'. One or two of the young women, recognizing me, handed me their notebooks for my autograph, giggling as they did so. In a sort of dream I signed them — and I remember that as I signed the last one I wrote my name just below the pencilled phrase 'Stop Sunday Express and take in the Observer.' So God was guiding the journalistic tastes of His followers too! I had an urge to scribble underneath: 'But don't believe a word of the dramatic criticisms of either of them.'       And then the voice of Dr. Buchman:       'Shall we have a few moments' Quiet?'       Instantly the scribblings and the whisperings ceased. The eyes of Dr. Buchman closed behind their sparkling glasses. The eyes of many others closed. Mine remained open, and in them the tears began to gather. I head the birds singing outside, I knew that there were roses in bloom and green lawns and a river running; but how far away they seemed! I was a prisoner. I was in a lunatic asylum. I had gone mad, stark, staring mad. All these people were mad too. It would not matter if only I weren't so tired — so unutterably tired, because then I could escape.       Once more, I managed to pull myself together.       It was for the last time.       The nasal twang of Dr. Buchman broke the silence.       He called for 'witnesses'.       A smartly dressed woman rose to her feet. She began, in a thin, sugary voice. 'I have been having a great deal of trouble with my maid. It seemed to me that she was lazy and didn't look after my clothes properly. And that worried me because nowadays I suppose no woman can have quite as many clothes as she wants.' (Polite laughter.)       'Then the Group came into my life and I was "changed", and I found I hadn't been really honest with her. I had told her, for instance, that I had bought two black dresses because I wanted them for mourning, whereas I really only wanted them because they were becoming to me. So we started "sharing", and she told me that once when I was away, she had worn my clothes (which I had always suspected), and I told her I was jealous because her figure was better than mine, and now we're the greatest of friends. I think it only shows how God works in us if we will only allow Him to.'       She sat down. There was applause. Dr. Buchman beamed. 'That is a fine thought,' he said (pronouncing 'thought' as though it were spelt 'thot'). 'God works in us if we will only allow Him to! Make a note of it, friends.'       At this injunction there was much scribbling in the notebooks. During the scribbling a young man had risen to his feet. In an exaggerated Oxford drawl he observed:       'It came to me the other day, when I was reading a book on the early history of electricity, that God is using the Oxford Group to release the spiritual forces of the twentieth century just as He used the scientists to release the electrical forces of the eighteenth.'       This pompous and highly questionable statement elicited much applause. We were all told to write it down. The young man was asked by Dr. Buchman, if any equally impressive 'thots' had come to him, but God, apparently, had felt that He had given him enough for one day, so no more were forthcoming.       But a great deal else was forthcoming. Young women who had been cross at breakfast, but had now been 'changed', and were cross no longer. Business men who had drunk port in the afternoon to the detriment of not only their souls but their business. Now they were 'changed', the port was a thing of the past and trade was booming. Authors (unpublished), and artists (unhung), whose work had deepened and broadened beyond recognition, though not apparently to the extent of selling. Pettiness after pettiness, folly after folly — suddenly the whole thing was unbearable to me. I could stomach it no longer.       If I had been in a normal condition I should have begun to laugh uproariously. As it was, I was in the first agonizing stages of a nervous breakdown, and I began to cry. I cried, silently, but I knew that at any moment I should be sobbing out loud.       With the tears streaming down my face, I staggered to my feet, stumbled over a number of astonished people, and somehow or other got out of the room. Nobody followed me.       ...       ...   How I drove that car to London must always remain a mystery. Some queer automatic mechanism of the brain must have guided the wheel and used the brakes. (On the following morning the car was discovered undamaged, with its lights on, in a side-street about two miles from Hampstead Heath. Presumably the automaton which was then in control of me had some reason for leaving it there.)       When I 'came to' it must have been nearly midnight, and I was standing under a bright light in the little hall of the house in Hampstead, staring at the front door, waiting for it to open.       ...       At last there were steps outside. The door opened, and I saw the cheerful face of Gaskin. He stared at me as if he had seen a ghost.       'Whatever has happened, sir?'       'I can't stop crying, Gaskin.'       Nor could I. It was useless to try to sleep, with those great sobs tearing me to pieces. I spent the night roaming the Heath on the arm of a friend, trying to walk myself into a stupor. But the sobs would not stop. When the doctor came in the morning it was quite impossible to tell him what was the matter. He murmured, 'Acute nervous exhaustion', rang up a nursing home and booked a room. An hour or two later a specialist was jabbing me in the knee and shining bright lights into my eyes. I heard the gentle voice of a nurse. 'Just roll up your sleeve,' she said. There was the sting of ether on my arm. 'It won't hurt — just a prick.' A few moments later I went to sleep, and for three days and nights I was out of the world.       It is popularly supposed that nervous breakdowns are a luxury for the idle rich.       The Oxford Group taught me otherwise. All I Could Never Be, Beverly Nichols, pages 262-271.

Ken Ragge, in his book More Revealed, stated:

The extraction of Confession was considered of ultimate importance and great effort was made to get it.

When he is certain that the need for confession exists, the soul surgeon must be lovingly relentless in insisting that the confession be made... (18)

This "loving relentlessness" takes on a rather sinister air when the group's "hospital work" is considered. An alcoholic patient, locked away in a hospital, would be given only a Bible to read and was allowed only Groupers for visitors during the "Oxfordizing" period.* The poor victim was under steady pressure, perhaps for days, weeks, or months, to accept Oxford Group interpretations of the Bible and Oxford Group's will as God's will. Even outside of hospitals, the grouper's techniques sometimes led to severe emotional damage including nervous and mental breakdowns.(19)

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* All cults use some method to separate their target from outside sources of information.

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18. Walter H. A., Soul Surgery   The Oxford Group, Oxford: 1932
19. Driberg T., The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament: A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement   Secker & Warberg London: 1964

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More Revealed, Ken Ragge
http://www.morerevealed.com/

You will notice that Frank Buchman just loved lists of "principles" or "procedures" or step-like things. Frank had:

• The Four Absolutes,
• The Five C's,
• The Five Procedures of the Sane,
• The Six Basic Assumptions,
• and The Six or Seven "Principles" or "Practices of the Sane".

The Twelve Steps and The Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous are just another couple of iterations of the same old list-making routine.

(But note that Buchman never exactly called them "Steps" — although Sam Shoemaker talked about "taking the next step". "Steps" was more Bill Wilson's terminology. When Earl T. wrote in his Big Book story, He Sold Himself Short, that the early A.A.'s were using a 6-step program [on page 292 of the 3rd edition, and on page 263 of the 4th edition], that was a slight misnomer. It was Buchman's 6-step program all right, but Buchman called it something more like "the six principles" or "The Six Practices of the Sane".)

The Five Procedures included:

1. giving in to God,
2. listening to God's directions,
3. checking guidance,
4. making restitution, and
5. sharing one's sins openly.

The Six Basic Assumptions were that

1. men were sinners,
2. men can be "changed",
3. confession is necessary to "change",
4. the "changed" person has direct access to God,
5. the age of miracles has returned,
6. and those who have been fortunate enough to be "changed" should seek to "change" others.
   (Those who had been converted to Buchman's beliefs were called "the changed", and those who proselytized and recruited for the Oxford Groups were called "life changers" or "Soul Surgeons".)

The Oxford Group manual Soul Surgery (page 4) lists "The Principles Of Personal Evangelism" ("the Five C's") as:

1. Confidence — Get the trust and confidence of the targeted victim.
2. Confession — Confess something to the victim, and get him to confess something about himself in return.
3. Conviction — Turn the victim's confession back upon him and amplify and exaggerate it and make him convict himself of all kinds of sins.
4. Conversion — Offer religious conversion as the only way out of the guilt.
5. Conservation — Send the new convert out to get other victims by using these same practices on them.