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6 Politics and Ideology If MRA was intended to be vehicle for changing the world, it was also an idea— although there was sometimes a confusion of the two concepts in MRA publicity .1 It grew out of a desire on Buchman’s part to articulate a vision for the world. This had been present in his mind at least from the mid-1930s onward. In December 1936, in response to the rise of Popular Front governments in Europe, he had suggested that what was needed was a “world Christian Front,” and he added, “We must think what it means to be a world front.”2 The launch of MRA a couple of years later was effectively an attempt to articulate what such a front might mean. Buchman’s aim was to generate a worldwide movement of moral and spiritual renewal that would avert war and bring a new spirit into national and international life. The process would begin with the individual, he typically declared: “It starts when everyone admits his own faults instead of spot-lighting the other fellow’s.” Anybody from any walk of life could choose to participate: “Every man, woman and child must be enlisted, every home become a fort.” The result would be felt at a global level in the creation of a moral and spiritual force powerful enough to “remake the world.”3 Buchman’s thinking after the outbreak of war reflected a similar aspiration. In a series of world broadcasts in October 1939 he emphasized that “a new world philosophy is needed, a world philosophy capable of creating a new era of constructive relationships between men and nations.” He hoped that MRA could be that world philosophy.4 It was in the context of trying to formulate such a philosophy that in 1943 Buchman started to call MRA an “ideology.” He was initially skeptical about the term but came round to believing that it had advantages. If Garth Lean is right, the term appealed to him because it hinted at a comprehensiveness of commitment that he thought “religion” had lost.5 But it also allowed him to try to present MRA as a direct competitor to the totalitarian ideologies. In his “War of Ideas” speech of 1943, for example, he Politics and Ideology 133 contrasted MRA’s “positive message” with what he saw as the “negative” character of communism and fascism—specifically their “divisive materialism and confusion.”6 It was also a way of challenging Western leaders to look to the moral and spiritual values that he thought were essential if democracy was to function properly. MRA could be presented as giving democracy a moral root. “There is Fascism, and Communism, and then there is that great other ideology which is the centre of Christian democracy—Moral Re-Armament,” he said in 1945.7 In a general sense, Buchman and his supporters were trying to stretch the meaning of the concept of “ideology” to incorporate the very element that it hitherto appeared to lack: the spiritual component.8 Yet in talking about MRA as an ideology, Buchman was not talking about a set of ideas that could be understood in isolation from practical life. When, in a speech titled “The Good Road” in 1947, he presented MRA as an ideology for democracy—“democracy’s inspired ideology,” he called it—he explained it as “a life to be lived, a road to be followed.” He was thus describing MRA as promoting a kind of spiritual journey rather than a doctrine: “Here is the good road. Anyone can travel it. Everyone must travel it—ordinary men and the statesmen alike. As we step out upon it, God becomes real.”9 It was yet again an example of how Buchman put an emphasis on practice rather than theory. The “good road” image was, of course, another way of trying to express what a world philosophy might look like, one that highlighted the experiential emphasis of MRA. Another image that Buchman used in relation to ideology was that of light; an ideology was a “global light” bringing “illumination” to the entire world, he suggested in Caux in 1954.10 At one level the use of the term “ideology” did not mean any change in the underlying message. When Buchman used the word, he really just meant a faith that could inform the entire thinking and living of an individual or people as a whole.11 He thought that the Bible itself was a witness to ideological conflict...

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