HITLER AND BUCHMAN
On returning from Europe, Frank Buchman, Oxford group revivalist, is quoted
by a reputable New York paper as having said: "I thank heaven for a man like
Adolf Hitler, who built a front-line defense against the anti-Christ of
communism.... My barber in London told me Hitler saved all Europe from communism.
That's how he felt. Of course I don't condone everything the Nazis do.
Antisemitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every
Jew. But think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the
control of God. Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could
control a nation overnight and solve every last bewildering problem."
In this interview the social philosophy of the Oxford group, long implicit
in its strategy, is made explicit, and revealed in all its childishness and
viciousness. This philosophy has been implicit in Buchmanite strategy from
the beginning. It explains the particular attention which is paid by Mr.
Buchman and his followers to big men, leaders, in industry and politics.
The idea is that if the man of power can be converted, God will be able to
control a larger area of human life through his power than if a little man
were converted. This is the logic which has filled the Buchmanites with touching
solicitude for the souls of such men as Henry Ford or Harvey Firestone and
prompted them to whisper confidentially from time to time that these men
were on the very threshold of the kingdom of God. It is this strategy which
prompts or justifies the first-class travel of all the Oxford teams. They
hope to make contact with big men in the luxurious first-class quarters of
ocean liners.
A NAZI PHILOSOPHY
In other words, a Nazi social philosophy has been a covert presumption of
the whole Oxford group enterprise from the very beginning. We may be grateful
to the leader for revealing so clearly what has been slightly hidden. Now
we can see how unbelievably naïve this movement is in its efforts to
save the world. If it would content itself with preaching repentance to drunkards
and adulterers one might be willing to respect it as a religious revival
method which knows how to confront the sinner with God. But when it runs
to Geneva, the seat of the League of Nations, or to Prince Starhemberg or
Hitler, or to any seat of power, always with the idea that it is on the verge
of saving the world by bringing the people who control the world under
God-control, it is difficult to restrain the contempt which one feels for
this dangerous childishness.
This idea of world salvation implies a social philosophy which is completely
innocent of any understanding of the social dynamics of a civilization. Does
Mr. Buchman really believe that the dictators of the modern world create
their dictatorships out of whole cloth? He does not know, evidently, that
they are the creatures more than the creators of vast social movements in
modern history. The particular social forces which create dictatorships are
on the whole the decadent forces of a very sick society. The sickness of
that society is the sickness of sin; and if a word of God is to be spoken
in such an hour as this let it be the woe of Christ upon his Jerusalem or
the prophecy of judgement which an Amos or Jeremiah pronounced upon their
civilization.
THE PRODUCT OF THE QUIET HOUR
There is unfortunately not the slightest indication that the prophetic spirit
of the Bible has ever entered into this pollyanna religion by way of the
quiet hour. Several times Mr. Buchman has confessed that the word of God
which he heard in his quiet hour was the slogan: "An international network
over spiritual live-wires," whatever that may mean. In other words, the world
is to be saved by a vulgar advertising slogan rather than by a genuine priestly
and prophetic mediation of the judgement and the mercy of God upon a sinful
world.
THE MAN OF POWER
In the simple and decadent individualism of the Oxford group movement there
is no understanding of the fact that the man of power is always to a certain
degree an anti-Christ. "All power," said Lord Acton with cynical realism,
"corrupts; and absolute power corrupts absolutely." If the man of power were
to take a message of absolute honesty and absolute love seriously he would
lose his power, or would divest himself of it. This is not to imply that
the world can get along without power and that it is not preferable that
men of conscience should wield it rather than scoundrels. But if men of power
had not only conscience but also something of the gospel's insight into the
intricacies of social sin in the world, they would know that they could never
extricate themselves completely from the sinfulness of power, even while
they were wielding it ostensibly for the common good.
Mr. Buchman has greater aptness for advertising slogans than for historical
perspectives. Otherwise he might have had occasion to meditate upon the life
of Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was a Christian in the real sense. There was
a vital Christian faith in him which is hardly available for a modern statesman
even after the ministrations of the Oxford group. Cromwell really wanted
to do the will of God -- and thought he was doing it. Yet nothing in Cromwell's
personal religion could save his dictatorship from being abortive and
self-devouring. Let Mr. Buchman read about Cromwell's campaign in Ireland
and the religious pretensions he made for his ambitions there and learn something
of the moral complexities which men of power face and the temptations to
which they succumb. It might be added that Cromwell's genuine religion not
only failed to make his dictatorship palatable; it also failed to save him
from the personal temptation to arrogance and cruelty.
The life and religion of Bismarck suggest similar lessons. Bismarck, who
established a slightly more palatable dictatorship in Germany than Hitler's
was a convert of the pietist movement. This movement was informed by an
evangelical fervor which some of us may be pardoned for preferring to the
sentimentalities of the Oxford groups. It deeply affected Bismarck. He was
in certain areas of his life a very genuine Christian. But his surrender
to God hardly accomplished the results in politics which Mr. Buchman envisages
as a possibility in the case of Hitler's conversion. It did not help God
to "control his nation overnight and solve every last bewildering problem."
The increasingly obvious fascist philosophy which informs the group movement
is in other words not only socially vicious but religiously vapid. The slightest
acquaintance with the history of Christian thought on the problem of the
relation of the absolute demands of the gospel to the relativities of politics
and economics would prove its childishness. A careful study of the gospel
itself, particularly its abhorrence of the self-righteousness of the righteous,
would reveal the danger of any doctrine which promises powerful men the
possibility of fully doing the will of God. They had better be admonished
that after they have done what they think right they will still remain
unprofitable servants.
The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation
in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which
we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian
contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a
religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a
way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not
the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois
optimism, individualism and moralism expressing itself in the guise of religion.
No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer
homes to its message! |