The Cold War in the Plays of Peter Howard

Peter Howard was the worldwide leader of the Moral Re-Armament movement from 1961-65. After 1945 Moral Re-Armament sought to express traditional religious ideas in the idiom of the post-war world, and it made much use of theatre. This article explores Howard's ideas with particular references to his plays. Howard saw the Cold War from a spiritual perspective. In his view, the roots of political conflict were often to be found in dishonest relationships and moral compromises in the lives of individuals, as well as in a refusal to follow God's will. This applied to people both in the East and the West. Howard thus believed that both sides in the Cold War faced a common need for spiritual renewal. In this sense, Howard's interpretation of the East-West conflict was not of a Manichaean form; although committed to Western democratic principles, he did not believe that good and evil could be simply identified with the policies or actions of the different sides. In his view, everybody and every nation needed to turn to God and absolute moral standards as a way out of the global impasse.