The Salvation Army, an evangelical mission that arrived in the United States in 1880, held the postmillennial view that all aspects of everyday life could be sacralized. To usher in its version of the Kingdom of God, Salvationists waged a stealth campaign, adopting the idioms and instruments of commercial culture to subvert the values and ideology of advanced industrial capitalism. Its strategy was to "spiritualize" everyday life, fashioning a vernacular religion that turned the familiar--coffee and donuts, uniforms and parades--into reminders of the sacred.
Using commercial culture as an interpretative lens, Winston places the Army in the thick of city life, viewing it as an urban cultural phenomenon with religious and social dimensions. By focusing on material culture, she reveals a set of discourses involving gender, class and performance that complicate previous interpretations of the Army as a conservative social mission.
Winston argues that the Army offered a new mode for religiosity: a vernacular, non-sectarian faith present in commonplace objects such as bonnets, kettles, and donuts. One result--the once ragtag mission has become the nation's largest charitable fund-raiser. (For an example of the religious meaning of material objects, see Winston's discussion of the Salvation Army doughnut in our Objects and Documents section.)
Diane Winston is a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University and the director of "Mission, Formation and Diversity: Adult Education at Church-Related Colleges," a project funded by the Lilly Endowment. Her book on the Salvation Army and American commercial culture will be published by Harvard University Press in winter 1999. She received her B.A. from Brandeis, a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, a masters in journalism from Columbia, and her Ph.D. in religion from Princeton University.
Center for the Study of American Religion
1879 Hall
Princeton
University
Princeton, New Jersey 08544-1006
dwinston@princeton.edu
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