Moral Re-Armament

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Moral Re-Armament (MRA) was an international religious movement that, in 1938, grew out of the Reverend Frank N. D. Buchman's Oxford Group. Buchman headed the movement for 23 years, from 1938 until his death in 1961.

The movement, in its early years, was made up of Buchman's personal followers, and so the name change was incremental rather than abrupt and formal. One of the first uses of the term was in 1938, when H. W. Austin edited the book Moral Rearmament (The Battle for Peace). Buchman and his fellow Oxford Group leaders liked the new phrase, and the former Oxford Group developed into Moral Re-Armament.

The origin of the movement's name lay in the political climate of the late 1930s, in which the re-militarization of post-WWI Germany was a contentious issue. The rejoinder of the Oxford Group and MRA was that the world needed not military re-armament, but moral re-armament.

The movement had Christian roots, and grew into an informal, international network of people of all faiths and backgrounds. It was based around what it calls 'the Four Absolutes' (absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love) and encouraged its members to be actively involved in political and social issues. One of the movement's core ideas, especially popular during the Cold War, was that changing the world starts with seeking change in oneself.

[edit] Successors and Spin-Offs

In 1965, Up with People was founded by members of and with support by MRA.

In 2001, the MRA movement changed its name to Initiatives of Change.

[edit] Criticism

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