So strongly associated is the Salvation Army with its modern
mission of service that its colorful history as a religious
movement is often overlooked. In telling the story of the
organization in America, Lillian Taiz traces its evolution from a
working-class, evangelical religion to a movement that emphasized
service as the path to salvation.
When the Salvation Army crossed the Atlantic from Britain in
1879, it immediately began to adapt its religious culture to its
new American setting. The group found its constituency among young,
working-class men and women who were attracted to its intensely
experiential religious culture, which combined a
frontier-camp-meeting style with working-class forms of popular
culture modeled on the saloon and theater. In the hands of these
new recruits, the Salvation Army developed a remarkably democratic
internal culture. By the turn of the century, though, as the Army
increasingly attempted to attract souls by addressing the physical
needs of the masses, the group began to turn away from boisterous
religious expression toward a more "refined" religious culture and
a more centrally controlled bureaucratic structure.
Placing her focus on the membership of the Salvation Army and
its transformation as an organization within the broader context of
literature on class, labor, and women's history, Taiz sheds new
light on the character of American working-class culture and
religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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