Word: buchman
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Shoemaker's misgivings are not the first that have been felt about tony Evangelist Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who has led a series of hit-&-run house-party revivals, known successively as "Buchmanism," "A First Century Christian Fellowship," "The Oxford Group" and "Moral Re-Armament (MRA)." All have a free-&-easy panacea, best summed up in MRA's California drive last year: "You don't join anything, you don't pay anything, the idea is that you begin living the MRA standards...
...these standards, "absolute honesty," British Humorist A. P. Herbert hoisted with devastating effect in the House of Commons last month by quoting Frank Buchman's varying entries in Who's Who between 1928 and 1939. Sample Buchman claim he riddled: "studied at Cambridge University 1921-22." That debate was a Waterloo for Buchmanism. Its 172 followers in Parliament (the fruit of two years' intensive lobbying) were all set to protest Labor Minister Ernest Bevin's refusal to exempt the Group's lay evangelists from military service. When Herbert and Bevin got through...
...exempted from military service, there was a great hubbub. To Laborite Bevin's defense sprang Crusader-Humorist Alan Patrick Herbert, Oxford University's Member in Parliament. To Oxonian Herbert the Oxford Group is a bee in the bustle. It riles him to think that Frank Buchman and his brash, eupeptic fishers among the up-&-outs* have the nerve to link themselves implicitly with the great Oxford Movements led by John Wesley and Cardinal Newman...
...Buchman," Herbert said, "is an American citizen, owing no allegiance to the King. ... He loves Adolf Hitler as well as he loves us, and there is in his preaching record a strange tendency towards flabbiness and Fascism...
Oxonian Herbert's words touched off a row like a summer thunderstorm. One hundred seventy-four Members of Parliament signed a petition supporting the Group. Evangelist Buchman himself was not available for comment (he was last seen in Bath, Me. attending a Group musical show called You Can Defend America), but from his press-relations department came a stream of releases giving testimonials from everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to "the Lord Mayor of Bristol and 52 aldermen and councilors...