Buchman, Frank

Buchman, Frank (Nathan Daniel)

(1878–1961) Protestant evangelist; born in Pennsburg, Pa. The son of devout Lutherans, he graduated from Muhlenberg College in 1899, went on to Lutheran seminary and was ordained in 1902. He was for several years a pastor and social worker in Philadelphia. In the 1920s, in Oxford, England, he founded what would become Moral Rearmament, an ecumenical, conservative, and ultimately anticommunist movement that for a while had a wide international following. An account of his mature views, America Needs an Ideology, appeared in 1957.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.