The General and the Bishops: Alternative Responses to Dechristianisation

Abstract

‘Colour, soup, soap and hope’ is how a historian in the 1970s summed up the response of that quintessentially late Victorian creation, the Salvation Army, to the plight of the so-called ‘submerged tenth’ in late-nineteenth-century England.¹ Richard Shannon’s words convey very well the attitude of a generation which largely accepts and appreciates the Salvation Army’s social work but treats with mild amusement and some disdain its anachronistic ‘blood and fire’ theology, bands and bonnets. A hundred years ago, this genial consensus did not exist and the Salvation Army was either welcomed for being in the frontline against dechristianisation and working-class assertiveness, or criticised for itself posing, or at least comprising part of, a social and religious threat. Attitudes to the Army, in other words, have not moved in a single, straight line of development from hostility to acceptance; from its earliest days reactions have been mixed and have indeed moved with considerable speed through a variety of changes in the public and ecclesiastical mind. Within an astonishingly short space of time, the Army could be, on the one hand, praised, patronised, and even courted by other religious leaders, and almost overnight, castigated like a precursor of the Moonies for brainwashing teenagers, keeping them beyond their parent’s reach, expropriating their money, and marrying them off at the earliest legal age, to other sect members. In short, the development of the Salvation Army, especially in the 1880s, and social and ecclesiastical reactions to it, has much to reveal about what the notions of responsibility and respectability meant in a religious context in late Victorian Britain. ‘The Salvation Army’, Kitson Clark has suggested, ‘is perhaps the most significant and notable product of this exciting period’.²