Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (review)

Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain. By Pamela J. Walker (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001) 337 pp. $35.00

In this engaging volume, Walker seeks to rescue the Salvation Army from the enormous condescension of historiography. Social historians, she contends, both liberals and Marxists, have been wedded to the premise that modernization + urbanization = secularization. Thus derives their inability to grasp an organization like the Salvation Army, which revived modern revivalism when it was supposed to be declining and shifted its locus from the countryside to the urban slum. In fact, as Walker herself effectively demonstrates, the more fundamental reason for social historians' neglect of the Salvation Army is that without the category of gender, it never made much sense. Hence, her own application of gender as an analytical category constitutes the most valuable feature of her book. It enables her to understand how and why the Salvation Army worked.

The genius of the Salvationists was to adapt the democratic attributes of American Revivalism to Victorian British circumstances. Like Revivalism, Salvationism grew out of Methodist Evangelicalism, and might be described as Methodism carried to a higher power. Where official Methodism (especially Wesleyanism) aimed at the regeneration of sinners, the Revivalists and Salvationists aimed to regenerate the hardest and most unregenerate cases, on which all the existing denominations had given up. Correspondingly, the British Salvationists (like some American Revivalists) opened up a space for women to evangelize, and allowed them a critical leadership role in the organization of missions.

Walker's hypothesis is that these two innovative, democratizing features of the Salvation Army were related. She traces their interaction in the remarkable spiritual partnership of Catherine and William Booth, out of which the Salvation Army grew. Both were born in 1829 in quasirespectable, working class, Methodist families, and both became serious, studious, religiously preoccupied youths. Finding the Wesleyans unreceptive to plebeian spiritual agency, they each gravitated toward various breakaway Methodist sects. During the first decade of their relationship, they focused on getting William established as a charismatic preacher. Then, after 1860, with greater boldness, Catherine embarked on her own evangelical career. In 1865, they joined forces to create their own organization, the East London Christian Mission, which concentrated on the poorest of neighborhoods, unserved by any existing sect. The Mission then took off like wildfire, and established secondary branches in urban slums throughout Britain and, eventually, the entire world. In 1878, when the organization had more than 800 paid and voluntary workers, it was renamed the Salvation Army and reorganized, military-style, under the central command of the Booths. Somehow, Catherine found time to raise eight children, seven of whom were later inducted into key leadership positions, to help spread their parents' brand of Salvationism around the globe.

Walker argues that the typical male Salvationist was a regenerated workingman who had repudiated the rough culture of gambling and drink. The typical female Salvationist, by contrast, was a middle-class woman eager to escape from the domestic confinement of Victorian separate spheres. The Salvationists, Walker shows, had a deeply ambivalent relationship to the plebeian environment in which they worked. On the one hand, they wished to separate themselves from the world of sin all around them. On the other hand, they sought to use the very instruments of popular culture—music halls, brass bands, advertisements, popular magazines, and street performances—to get their message across. In adopting these tactics, the Salvationists precipitated an unholy counter-alliance of respectable middle-class Christians, popular entertainers, publicans, and neighborhood working-class roughs, each of whom (for different reasons) wanted to keep the Salvationists away from their turf. In the end, after Catherine's death, in 1890, the Salvation Army moved in the direction of providing social services, and seemed to lose some of its original, evangelical edge.

At this point, Walker's argument runs into trouble or, more...