Daniel Sack Other Page (new Book)

As other documents on this web site suggest, Alcoholics Anonymous has
its roots in the Oxford Group Movement, a religious movement of the
1930s. (After 1938, it became known as Moral Re-Armament. Recently it
has changed its name to Initiatives of Change.) The little-known
movement has its own origins in Anglo-American evangelical Christianity
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its founder, Frank
Buchman, was a Lutheran minister and YMCA secretary. He also served as a
missionary in China and India. He brought together a variety of
influences to create a unique evangelical style.
In the decade after World War I Buchman developed a network of young
followers on prestigious university campuses in America and Britain. The
network focused on encouraging these young men-nominal Christians-to
have exciting religious experiences and find a deeper faith. His
confrontational evangelical style often caused conflicts on these
university campuses. It grated against many students' culture
Christianity; rebellious students objected to what they perceived as the
movement's moralism and exclusivity. In the end these conflicts led
Buchman and his followers to leave most of the universities.
My doctoral dissertation, Disastrous Disturbances: Buchmanism and
Student Religious Life at Princeton, 1919-1935, tells the story of the
conflict on one prominent campus. More importantly, it places Buchman
and his work in the larger history of American religion (as well as the
history of American higher education). This larger context, I believe,
is an important contribution to the community of people interested in
Alcoholics Anonymous history. The work is also important because it
draws on archival materials not used by previous historians, including
the Moral Re-Armament records at the Library of Congress.
(I am currently writing a history of Moral Re-Armament,
which I hope tocomplete by 2004 or 2005.)
This dissertation is available through inter-library loan. (Several
libraries own printed or microfiche copies.)

You can also buy a copy
from University Microfilm International (http://www.umi.com/).

Go to
http://tls.il.proquest.com/hp/Products/DisExpress.html

and request dissertation 1181091. You can buy the
dissertation unbound, hardcover, softcover, or microfiche.


--
Daniel Sack
dansack@earthlink.net

more about Daniel Sack

http://www.materialreligion.org/participants/sack.html

Chair: Charles Lippy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

The Legacy of the Protestant Reformation in Modern Times: Frank Buchman and Moral Re-armament - Tyler B. Flynn, Jr., Pennsylvania State University
The Sophisticated Insiders and the Evangelical Outsider: The Buchman Incident at Princeton - Daniel Sack, Material History of American Religion Project, Vanderbilt Divinity School
Making America Protestant, Catholic and Jewish: Louis Finkelstein and America's Third Democratic Faith - Fred W. Beuttler, University of Illinois at Chicago

Comment: Charles Lippy

http://www.muohio.edu/~relcwis/news/

http://www.materialreligion.org/objects/may97obj.html
this article is where I found Mr Sack!! Nice photo of Cavalry House Manhattan

b) Daniel Sack, Men want something real: Frank Buchman and Anglo-American College Religion in the 1920s in Journal of Religious History, Vol. 28, no. 3, Oct. 2004 pp. 260ff

Frank Buchman was a Lutheran evangelist and sometime YMCA secretary in Pennsylvania who in the 1920s repackaged evangelical Christianity for British and American elite universities, creating a religious message tailor-made for a community of young men. Stressing a personal experience of God, Buchman's message owed much to the kind of evangelical exhortation found in Keswick.

He reached out to "key men", or elite members of the university, and later the wider society, especially the wealthy, offering help to sustain their personal morality through group meetings and dedication. The religious group experience, especially the importance of repentance and the cultivation of love, rather than the adherence to, or propagation of, theological doctrines, became the hallmark of Buchmanism, later to be "re-christened" as Moral Re-Armament.
Sack shows that this creed appealed to men, and sought to avert what many evangelicals thought was the regrettable "feminization" of Christianity. Concentrating on undergraduate heroes, especially champion athletes, Buchman propounded an evangelism suitable for the leaders of the post-1918 world's commercial and scientific age. But by concentrating on a narrow personal morality - and often only on questions of sex - Buchman avoided any wider challenge to the existing social order. In Britain his Oxford Groups propagated these views through very popular house-parties, often held in lavish country mansions. The aim was to evangelize from the top downwards. Certainly these cells seemed to fill a social and spiritual need, challenging the conformist and cultural Christianity of the day with a more intense and masculine spirituality.

Sack's account focusses mainly on the American scene, and notes that probably Buchman's most enduring legacy is Alcoholics Anonymous, whose techniques are directly derived from the Oxford Group's evangelical methods.