July 29, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Red-Hot and Righteous: The Urban Religion of the Salvation Army
By Diane Winston
On a south Manhattan beach in 1880, seven “Hallelujah lassies” and their male commandant disembarked an ocean liner from England and burst into song. Few people would have predicted the echo would resound for 120 years.
Fewer still might have recognized the beginnings of a charity that today raises funds to the tune of almost $1.2-billion annually in the United States.
But in embracing theatrics and bombast eschewed by other Protestant evangelicals, the Salvation Army became the first successful urban-based religion in the United States, writes Ms. Winston, a research fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University.
Her book examines how a religious organization cut through class divides by tempering its preaching with spectacle and song, cloaking itself in a military identity, overcoming attacks by street ruffians, brushing off ridicule in the press, and offering human services to anyone in need.
The Army won over poor urban residents who found little appeal in musty theology, Ms. Winston writes. The organization’s English founder, William Booth, had insisted that the Army’s first priority was to attract attention, and the organization relished publicity as much as the trench boys in World War I relished the doughnuts baked by the Army’s tin-hatted “Sallies.”
Ms. Winston devotes sections to the Salvation Army’s appeal to women; its favorable reputation as a provider of war-time aid; its pageant-filled tenure under Evangeline Booth, William’s daughter; and its portrayal in films, plays, and other popular entertainment.
Ms. Winston credits the Army with melding fundamentalist fervor to the consumerism spawned by the Industrial Revolution. The organization hewed a path from the sacred to the secular with such panache, she writes, that even today most people who drop money into red kettles have little idea what the religion preaches.
The Army’s formula has not strayed far from its 19th-century origins, she writes.
“Whether staging musicals based on the life of Evangeline Booth or performing rap concerts in lower Manhattan, Salvationists continue to use the vernacular culture in evangelical crusades — even if their image as street-savvy soul-savers has been eclipsed by their reputation as dependable providers of social services.”
Publisher: The Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-1423; (617) 495-2480 or (800) 448-2242; fax (617) 495-8924 or (800) 962-4983; World-Wide Web http://www.hup.harvard.edu; 290 pages; $27.95; I.S.B.N. 0-674-86706-8.
