Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain

In this engaging study, Walker reminds readers of two basic facts: the Salvation Army's origins were British, and it was first and foremost an evangelical religious group, not a charity. Among the book's many accomplishments is setting the sectarian Army in a larger denominational framework; Walker shows that its bureaucratic structures and doctrines drew heavily from Methodism. Walker pays special attention to gender, noting, for example, that women's conversion stories differed from men's. Whereas Christian men often recounted the scarlet peccadilloes of their lives before conversion, ""few women described such a sinful past."" Finally Walker shows how Salvationists baptized secular working-class culture as Christian, borrowing lowbrow drinking tunes and putting religious lyrics to them. The book has a few flaws. For example, Walker insists that one of the reasons the Army is important is that it shows scholars that religion is not just what happens in church the Army, after all, happened in the streets. But this is something of a straw man, since few scholars of religion limit their vision to cathedrals. Also, although Walker no doubt started this book, which began as a Rutgers dissertation, before Diane Winston's book Red-Hot and Righteous so cogently profiled the Salvation Army in America, there are too many similarities between the two to call Walker's work truly pioneering or original. Still, it is an entertaining, informative and well-researched contribution to the study of religion in the Victorian era. (Apr.)