The new IofC UK podcast platform delights me, like an answer to prayer. Or, for me as an agnostic, an answer to a long-time longing. I was raised—in the ancient world of the 1950s and 60s—among religious people I loved, but with whom, from my early twenties, I found it barely possible to talk. At least, we couldn’t talk about the things I was coming to care most about, including critiques of capitalism, male dominance, puritanism. Turning 20 in 1969, I was more affected by the times than my people were.
In 1976 I finished a doctoral thesis about my people and their movement, Moral Rearmament (MRA). I hoped some of them would read it and we could discuss it. I circulated some copies. But the copies disappeared, and no one asked to talk.
I had hoped my thesis might start a minor trend of taking MRA seriously in academic studies. didn’t happen. And I didn’t try to make it happen, being more activist than academic. About twenty years ago a young American woman I knew told her thesis advisor at a US university that she wanted to do her sociology PhD on MRA. He said no, because if MRA was worth studying he would have heard of it.
How could MRA have been so obliterated in public memory? It had accomplished exciting things. It innovated methods of personal healing, which gave rise to Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12 Step movement. It did something AA has never attempted, so far as I know: it applied those methods strategically to societal and international conflicts, with some success. It contributed significantly to the creation of the ECSC, which became the European Union.
Last year Dr. Grace France completed the first doctoral thesis in English to build on mine in almost fifty years. She gave a fitting opening interview for IofC’s new podcast.
And now I get invited on the podcast myself. I could have talked with Denis Nowlan, an old friend, for hours. I told him my background, growing up in MRA central, and then we shifted to what excites me today—restorative justice and trauma healing, and how that is being integrated into organizing for social justice.
After I left MRA the passion to join a movement that was having real traction in remaking the world never left me. For me, there’s a beautiful symmetry in coming round to trauma healing and social justice in a different way than MRA did it. That’s why my working title for the memoir I hope to publish this year is So Then, How DO we Change the World?
I see MRA as a precursor in some ways of current efforts on the Left to combine trauma healing with social change (e.g. here). But it’s hard to convince a lefty of that. In 2008, Frank Buchman, MRA’s founder, was described by American journalist Jeff Sharlet in The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power as an eminence grise of the extreme Right in US politics.[1] The movie star Glenn Close and her sister Jessie—who were raised in MRA and attended the Caux school for a while—wrote a moving memoir about Jessie’s recovery from addiction. In it they blamed MRA for their traumas and ascribed Jessie’s recovery to AA.[2] They showed no awareness that Buchman had some responsibility for both: a result of misinformation.
MRA and IofC’s main way of counteracting the misinformation and the accurate but damaging information about it has traditionally been to tell more stories of miracles of healing it midwifed. That is what happened in retelling the old stories when Caux celebrated its 75th Anniversary. But with barely more than one exception—about the Caux school—those stories did not fess up to any harm done by MRA.
The boy who always cried wolf was not believed in the end. MRA always struck me as the boy who cried miracle—and so was not believed either.
I have some idea how hard it was for MRA to admit its faults in public, because it always felt under siege from a secularizing and skeptical world. The most human thing to do when feeling shame is to clam up. I know how hard it is to love myself when I feel my failures. I would rather the world—or my wife—didn’t know. But, as the folk I have worked with in prison, like to say, “You are only as sick as your secrets.” When I have come clean, I feel a huge relief at no longer trying to look too good. I’m still learning how to love myself despite my faults. At my best I see a surprising beauty in embracing both.
Can one persuade a new generation to take MRA’s miracle stories seriously, if one doesn’t help them sort the healing from the harmful? If one doesn’t analyze how IofC has had to leave MRA’s bad stuff behind? By bad stuff I mean the male and Anglo-Saxon dominance, homophobia, extreme puritanism, groupthink, the countering of intellectual objections by accusations of sexual sins, etc. How movements change is as fascinating and hopeful as how individuals do.
This podcast is a rare and welcome example of the movement inviting dialogue about itself with those who don’t agree with it. I hope it can at times allow IofC to tell its story of growing out of the dysfunctions of MRA. I believe this can enable a skeptical world to revisit MRA’s best insights.
After I left MRA in 1972, I felt like an exile from my own country and people. Every now and then, I have managed to make overtures for discussion, and I have been welcomed warmly, in private. It feels very good to be invited this time to comment in public.
[1] Sharlet (2008) p 126
[2] Resilience: Two Sisters and a Story of Mental Illness by Jessie Close, Pete Earley, Glenn Close, 2015.
