Christianity in Action: The International History of the Salvation Army (review)

Few organizations in the world enjoy more widespread recognition than the Salvation Army. Almost all Americans are familiar with its ubiquitous street-corner bell-ringing, especially at Christmas time, and with its long history of social service, including its "soup kitchens" and other ministries to those in need. A prominent advertising agency recently rated the Army's red-shield logo as one of the ten most instantly recognizable "brand names" in the world.

What is not quite so widely understood, however, is that the Salvation Army is not simply a religiously motivated social service organization, but has always been, since its American founding in 1880, a freestanding Protestant Christian denomination. Religiously, it belongs firmly to the family of "holiness" churches that emerged from Methodism in the late-nineteenth century, and as such it retains much in common within other similar denominations, often with "Holiness" or "Wesleyan" as part of their name.

However, more than most such denominations of similar or equal size, the Army's flamboyant beginnings, its genius for spectacular public relations, and its highly visible place in American life make its history of considerable intrinsic interest to religious historians and a potentially rich subject for scholarly interpretation. Moreover, the Army's strong social and religious conservatism, and its longtime affinity with powerful private and governmental institutions, are especially deserving of full, fair, and careful analysis.

Colonel Henry Gariepy's Christianity in Action is not such a study. Rather, it is a celebratory, pious institutional history by the longtime chief editor of the Army's official publication The War Cry and a faculty member of its "Officer Training College" (what more conventional denominations label a seminary). The book's foreword by the commanding general of the church's international headquarters in London and its jacket endorsements by other prominent Salvationist officers (i.e., ministers) suggest its intended audience and tone.

As with most such insider institutional histories, the work does chronicle the basic facts and major actors in the Army's long and colorful history, with a plenitude of notable events and dates. The writing is upbeat and uncritical throughout, and controversies are only briefly and delicately treated. Readers looking for wider contexts, insights, or interpretations will be disappointed. The author instead intends that his readers will "find within these pages both information on and inspiration from this movement that God brought into existence and blessed" (p. xvi).

There is indeed a good deal of useful, factual information in Christianity in Action, and for the most part it is competently conveyed in straightforward prose. However, historians looking for more useful introductions to the Salvation Army's history would do better to begin with Edward McKinley's older Marching to Glory: A History of the Salvation Army in the United States, 1880–1992 (San Francisco, 1992), or Diane H. Winston's more recent Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army (Cambridge, MA, 1999). McKinley provides a good, basic sense of the Army's mission and institutional history, while Winston is especially illuminating on the urban and women's history dimensions of the Army as it has evolved through time.

Gariepy's narrative will be profitably read by many of the Salvationists and others for whom it is intended and will no doubt serve to inspire them to carry on the Army's generally admirable work. On the evidence of this book, however, it appears that genuinely critical history, whether in the hands of insiders or outsiders, has not yet been viewed by the Salvation Army as another way it might advance its religious mission or develop different sorts of relationships with other Christian traditions and the wider culture.