Moral Re-Armament Assembly

Moral Re-Armament (MRA) was founded by Dr. Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister from Pennsburg, Pennsylvania. Dedicated to achieving international peace and social justice, the MRA began in London after World War I as a non-denominational Christian evangelical fellowship known as the Oxford Group. The organization was renamed in 1938 after Buchman called for “moral re-armament” to counter the threat posed by German militarization. Since 2001, the MRA has continued its mission under the name Initiatives for Change.

Violet Oakley met Buchman in 1928 through the Dowager Queen Sophia of Greece, whose portrait she had painted.¹ Oakley was in Florence, where she resided when the League of Nations was in recess. She and Buchman had compatible political ideals rooted in Christian egalitarianism and pacifism and they developed a friendship that lasted for the next thirty years. When the League of Nations refused to exhibit Oakley’s painting Christ at Geneva because sectarian religious imagery was not permitted, Buchman agreed to hang it in the MRA headquarters in Berkeley Square in 1939.

After World War II, the MRA held World Assemblies at Mountain House in Caux, Switzerland, to promote international reconciliation. At Buchman’s invitation, Oakley spent several months in 1949 at Mountain House, where she drew forty portraits of members of the World Assembly and wrote the foreword to The Holy Experiment: Our Heritage from William Penn, 1644–1944, published in 1950. She also made drawings of the surrounding landscape.

In 1956, Oakley attended conferences at the MRA world training center on Mackinac Island, Michigan, and offered to design a mural for the dining hall that she called The Three Communions (The Last Supper, Morning After the Resurrection, Banquet in Heaven). The title may have referred to a concept used by sociologist Will Herberg in Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay on American Religious Sociology, published in 1955. Herberg maintained that immigration in the United States had resulted in in “three communions—Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism—as three diverse, but equally legitimate, equally American” expressions of religious faith.² Oakley made several studies for The Three Communions, but the mural commission did not materialize.

¹ Bailey Van Hook, Violet Oakley: An Artist’s Life (Wilmington: University of Delaware Press, 2016): 362.

² William Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay on American Religious Sociology (reprint of first edition Doubleday, 1955; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983): 87. The “three communions” concept had been used in the nineteenth century to express the underlying unity of the branch religions of Christianity: Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant.