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V.C. Kitchen’s first time at an Oxford Group house party, was motivated by casual curiosity more than anything else. Based on things he had read in the newspapers, Kitchen had gathered the impression that it was a kind of fanatical cult with bizarre practices. He assumed he was going to see something very exotic, with flickering torches in a dimly lit room with tiger skin rugs on the floor. In an orgy of confession, men and women were going to stand up in mixed company and give lured accounts of all the sins they had committed, including all the gross details of their most perverted sexual escapades. These emaciated true believers, hollow eyes gleaming with blind fanaticism, would also sit around and engage in automatic writing rituals which seemed to be a mixture partly of the kind of séances which mediums held when they were talking to the spirits of the dead, and partly of what young people did at parties when they played with a Ouija Board and allowed the pointer to move around the letters of the alphabet written on the sides of the playing board in an attempt to receive messages from the spirit world. Under the control of Frank Buchman and the other cult leaders, the converts would blindly do whatever these divine commanders ordered; immediately and without question.
The Oxford Group was portrayed as a fanatical and authoritarian cult, where the members gave up all their individualism and freedom. Members were not allowed to ask questions and explore issues rationally, but simply had to obey the cult leaders and let the group rule their lives. There were in fact a number of books and articles published during that era claiming to be exposés’ of the Oxford Group, where the authors, who seem to have been extremely stodgy people, attempted to give the impression, in their selective and over dramatized accounts, that this went on. The writers of these attacks were the sort who believed that proper upstanding Christians should never talk about anything in a religious context that was not “nice” and “proper” by the standards of some imaginary Victorian ladies magazine, and they criticized the Oxford Group for talking honestly about the real sins which people actually committed. In addition, these negative accounts tended to be written by the sort of establishment who wanted a culture religion which was locked in hypocrisy and denial, where there was a polite following of all the surface rules, without anyone ever coming to grips with the ways we human beings really destroyed our lives and the lives of those around us. The Oxford Group critics criticized what they insisted was the blind authoritarianism of the movement, and the particular way that Oxford Group people would pray to God to receive divine guidance, where they did in fact sometimes take out a pencil and paper and record their thoughts during prayer and meditation.
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