Origins of the Salvation Army - Hardcover

Murdoch, Norman H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0870498584 ISBN 13: 9780870498589

Publisher: Univ of Tennessee Pr, 1994

Synopsis

The Salvation Army is today one of the world's best known - and best regarded - religious and charitable movements. In this deeply researched study, Norman Murdoch offers some surprising new insights into the denomination's origins and its growth into an international organization. In particular, he identifies quick accommodation to failure as a persistent theme in the Army's early history.
Murdoch follows the lives and work of the Army's founders, William and Catherine Booth, from their beginnings as Wesleyan evangelists in the 1850s to their inauguration of a Utopian social plan in 1890. As teenagers in England's midlands in the 1840s, the Booths were especially influenced by an American-style evangelism that had crossed the Atlantic. Catherine eventually became an advocate of female ministry (and her preaching outshone her husband's) while William went on to found the Christian Mission in the slums of east London.
When the East End mission faltered in the mid-1870s, Booth took his preaching to the provincial towns. The failure of that ministry led him in 1878 to reorganize his efforts along then-popular military lines, and the Salvation Army was born. With women as its "shock troops," this Christian imperium spread beyond Britain's boundaries to become as international in scope as Victoria's empire. As the Army's expansionism began to collapse, however, the Booths added wholesale social salvation to their emphasis on the salvation of individual souls. The 1890 work, Darkest England and the Way Out, was their blueprint for ending unemployment and moving slum dwellers back to the land.
Challenging various notions popularized in the denomination's official histories, this book will be of special interest to historians of nineteenth-century social reform, scholars of evangelical Protestantism, and those interested in the relationship between class and religion in the Anglo-American world.

About this title

About the Author

Norman H. Murdoch is professor of history at the University of Cincinnati.

Reviews

In a fascinating and thoroughly documented social history of the origins of the Salvation Army, Murdoch focuses on the founders, William and Catherine Booth, and their remarkable ability to speak both the religious and social languages of the Victorian Age. He traces their work from revivalist roots imported to Britain by American evangelists in the middle of the nineteenth century, whose purpose was to aid the urban poor. Murdoch's is a critical history, an appreciative account of the Booths' contributions that is also a painstakingly clear description of the failure to convert the urban masses to the Wesleyan gospel of nineteenth-century revivalism. The book is relevant not only to those with specific interest in Salvation Army history, but also to those with more general interests in the social history of Victorian England, the interrelationship of religious and social movements in the Anglo-American world of the nineteenth century, the interrelationship of Christian evangelicalism and Anglo-American imperialism, and the relationship between theological and social dimensions of religious organizations. Recent political and religious developments in the U.S. make this case study of the transformation of an urban revivalist mission into a movement that is also explicitly social and political particularly timely. Steve Schroeder

This revisionist history of the Salvation Army, from its genesis to around 1900, attempts to debunk several myths about the religious sect. Murdoch (history, Univ. of Cincinnati) shows that the Salvation Army's founders, William and Catherine Booth, were heavily influenced by American revivalists and that the army was actually a failure in the London slums from which it had arisen. The author also stresses how William Booth's autocratic control of the organization naturally led to schisms. The author closely examines the evolution of the army's ministry from a strictly evangelistic emphasis to its more practical social services program. His treatment is comparable to another, more localized history, R.G. Moyles's The Blood and Fire in Canada (1977). Murdoch has imbued the army's saga with the fervor and intrigue of its proponents to create a balanced, well-researched, yet intriguing history. Recommended for all adult collections.
Jonathan Jeffrey, Western Kentucky Univ., Bowling Green
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ of Tennessee Pr
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0870498584
• ISBN 13: 9780870498589
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241