Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

Salvationism struggles with an obsession over its identity, which can create fear. But what is it about Salvationist symbols and culture that gets people so passionate? Passionate in a way I don’t see in quite the same way in other denominations?

Issues That Kill Our Energy

There are always ‘those issues’ in churches and denominations which can suck the oxygen right out of the room.

How should the chairs be set up? What style of music should we be singing? Liturgy or free? Songbooks or PowerPoint?

These kinds of questions matter a great deal to some people. But they just make other people want to tear their hair out and switch to a different church. Why do some issues, or even the perception of these issues, get people going in a way that others don’t?

I think there are three things going on.

• When faced with some of the bigger, more existential questions around faith in the modern world, focusing on some of the more immediate issues brings a sense of comfort and control
• There is a degree to which the Army itself produces the kind of culture which becomes heavily invested in symbols, uniforms, and marks of belonging in a way which may not exist in other denominations and which therefore provokes these kinds of disagreements
• Fear of change, of not belonging, or not understanding, of being no longer part of something which used to provide you with a sense of belonging and safety

These three things all seem to come from a single point. The question of identity.

Fear of Change Comes From Fear Of Loss Of Identity

Fear is a huge motivator. Whether it is fear of change, or fear of decline, or fear about our place in the world.

In Where God Happens, Rowan Williams writes that a church should be confident in the grace of God. So a church which gives off the scent of fear is one which fails to live up to the Gospel.

Further, churches which let fear become a driving force within their decision-making often end up in what Michael Jenkins refers to as a ‘Hyperactivity of Panic’ which:

“…manifests itself in clutching for any and every programmatic solution and structural reorganisation in the desperate hope that survival is just another project or organisational chart away.” (Jenkins, Michael 1999, The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Postmodern Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 9)

Rather Than Focusing On What Needs Changing, Fear Leads Yo Distraction With Secondary Matters

Rather than addressing the issues, churches turn to new programmes, projects, and reorganisations to drive positive change. They hope it will kickstart something and make the people involved feel they have achieved something.

I’ve been guilty of this myself when leading a congregation. When faced with questions about a church’s viability, I have started a new Bible study. I decided that what was really needed was a new partnership with a local agency. Something which felt like we were doing something, but which failed to address the underlying issues.

I think that the hyperactivity of panic is one aspect of this obsession. It presents itself as a kind of obsessive Salvationism.

The Dangers of Obsessive Salvationism

Taking the signs, symbols, and culture of the Army and placing significant emphasis on them.

It means a person might go on a long rant about standards falling because fewer people wear formal uniforms on a Sunday. But they won’t invest the same amount of energy in their church’s activities.

Even my use of the word ‘church’ rather than ‘corps’ will no doubt bring its own selection of comments.

My instinct is to swipe all of these things to one side. It just feels so unnecessary. These nonsense issues get in the way of the Kingdom.

But I can’t do that. These things genuinely matter to people in a deep, powerful, and influential way. It shapes how they express and experience their faith as a lived reality.

It comes down to the formation of identity and a sense of belonging.

Objects and Practices That Form Identity

In 2018, I published an article in the Practical Theology journal titled “Where do I Belong?”

In it, I explored theological issues of belonging in the context of homelessness. I found the work of Russel Belk helpful for my thinking around questions of identity in relation to changing forms and culture. Specifically, Belk argues that our identity does not lie solely within us but also extends beyond us.

Who I am is not made up solely of my personality, experiences, and memories. It is also objects, places, people, and organisations. This is what Belk called the extended self.

The Creation of the Extended Self

Our memories are not all contained within our brains. We take photos, write in journals, use diaries, and make notes. These are all ways of preserving our memories externally. Our memories help shape our identity, so the objects that hold them also contribute to it.

This can also include items like songbooks and Bibles that are passed down but are now rarely used. It could include plaques on the wall in memory of loved ones. Or the way the church building looked when you got married in it, had the funeral of your loved ones in it, or had significant moments of your life within it.

When the structure and fittings of the church change, those memory-bearing objects are lost. There is a real sense of loss of self-identification in that moment. Because the things with which you identified, the things that helped tell you who you were and where you belonged, have gone.

Symbols Are Ideological Battlegrounds For Identity Formation

Signs and symbols are things which we not only believe to be true, but which represent things to which we have allegiance or attachment. They are incredibly significant for our identity.

Think about people who wear T-Shirts with comic book characters on them. Or who wear the branding of their favourite sports team. They want to identify with the aesthetic, values, or culture that the symbol represents. So it comes to represent who they are as a person.

This is perhaps the reason why so many people get fixated on whether the Army should use the crest or the red shield. Or whether that shield should be used with other colours.

Particularly around the use of the rainbow shield by LGBTQ+ and ally Salvationists, who find it grants a sense of belonging and identity. People react because they see it as a disruption or an attack on something fundamental to their identity.

Denominational Symbols of Membership Create Markers of Identity

When we think about the way we use signs, symbols, and representative objects, including flags, crests, shields, etc., we need to think that this is not just a question of representing a denomination. In a very real sense, these objects shape people’s identity.

The uniform is a significant and obvious example of an exterior form that grants identity. When people are all wearing the same thing, there is a natural sense of belonging. At least for the people wearing the same thing!

The uniform represents promises and choices around lifestyle. For some people, changes to the uniform are perceived as challenges to those promises.

When the uniform seems minimised, some people may feel they are being minimised, that they do not belong. The thing that helped form their identity seems to be disappearing, so their sense of belonging decreases.

Whilst one person’s sense of belonging is decreasing, another’s is increasing. What once seemed to keep them on the outside is disappearing.

The Way We Worship Has Become Part Of Who We Are

Different styles of worship are frequently a factor in disagreements. They lead to people falling out within a church or in an online space.

The songs people sing as they grow up or at significant events in their lives stay with them. They help shape how they articulate their faith. The music people find comfortable and can worship with affects how they feel they belong.

If the person sitting next to you is lost in worship, but you are feeling awkward, it is a disruption to your sense of belonging to that person. Your sense of identity in that place is challenged because you struggle to identify with the songs or style.

I’m Bored of People Being Upset About Songs

They are strange, alien, old-fashioned, unusable, or simply ‘not what we do’ because they are used by other churches.

This is especially true when songs and music have been written specifically for the Army. It is interesting that very few new congregational songs have been written in the Army since the second half of the twentieth century.

There have been plenty of songs from musicals or songster arrangements brought into congregational worship. But very few new congregational songs have been written by a Salvationist specifically for a congregation.

When certain styles come to define what it means to worship as a Salvationist, changing that style impacts on Salvationist identity. Something which can leave a person feeling that they don’t belong.

The same is true if the church’s music is radically different from the prevailing musical culture. It can be difficult to transition into singing in church. This makes it less likely to engage with Christian music outside a church setting.

We Have Forgotten Where We Began

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that when the Army first began. It took tunes from the music halls and gave them Christian lyrics. The equivalent today would be the Army taking songs from the top ten list and putting Christian words to them.

Except that we forget the music halls’ music was aimed at the working class and the poor. So the Army today would also need to take hold of tunes and styles of music that speak to the urban poor, to the oppressed, to the isolated and the modern working classes, and put Christian lyrics to them.

The churches then were scandalised. I wonder whether we are seeing a similar sense of scandal today in the battles around styles of worship.

Who Decides Who Gets To Belong?

The question of who gets to belong is crucial to a person’s sense of identity.

A person’s identity, according to Belk, is at least partially drawn from the people they want to be around and the people they want to be like.

That is how marketing works. The mimetic theory of desire says that when there is a person we approve of and want to be like, we will also like and respect what they like and respect.

Equally, if there are people that we do not want to be like then we will not want what they have. Further, we will not want them to have what we have. Whereas we want to share what we have with people that we do like.

The people we identify with have a profound impact on our own sense of identity. Which I think is a significant factor in questions about inclusion, LGBTQ+ membership, and belonging within the church.

For people who believe that same-sex activity or questions around gender are ‘sinful’, then they will perceive the acceptance and membership of people with that background as a threat.

Belonging and Scapegoating

René Girard discusses this in relation to the scapegoat as a sacrificial figure who takes on all the differences and otherness in a community and gets rid of them so everyone else can feel they are the same. There is an existential threat to a kind of ‘purity’ which operates beneath the surface in some of these cases.

Not in everyone. Not for everyone. But often enough, the unconscious self of a person finds someone who is different, especially when that difference is tied to sinfulness or spiritual uncleanness, as a threat.

In a similar manner, people who feel that they do not belong to who they are, that their identity itself is a barrier to membership because of how they are treated or perceived, then the organisation, or those who react against them, are also an existential threat to their very selves.

This brings us to perhaps the most important point.

A Challenge to the Symbols of Belonging is a Threat to Our Sense of Identity and Security

When we take into account all the different ways that identity can be developed. When we understand that a change to these things can lead to a sense of loss, dislocation, disruption, and ultimately a sense that the person’s identity is in question. Then we can see a change, or a perceived challenge, to those identity markers will be seen as a threat, and people will react accordingly.

It’s why conversations, especially online, around these issues rarely go well. Because people retreat into fight-or-flight mode, feeling under attack and under pressure, who they are and whether they belong are being challenged and put at risk.

Fear becomes the predominant factor in those conversations.

It is fear that the church a person belongs to is no longer something they can recognise or feel they belong to, because the markers of identity have shifted. Fear that the difference between the markers of an organisation and an individual’s personal experience is so broad that they cannot be crossed. Fear that another person can tell you that you don’t belong, even though you feel that you do, because the markers of identity that matter to you do not matter to that other person.

A conversation based on fear is never successful or produces positive results.

How To Discuss Identity Without Being Afraid

How do we have those deep conversations about identity without resulting in a hyperactivity of panic or in obsessive Salvationism? I think there are two key ways.

First, it is to encourage those conversations to happen at the small scale and not only from the top down. Encourage people to ask the question of ‘how’ they belong to the Army as well as ‘why’ they belong to it.

Whether that is with friends, in congregations, or online, have the conversation about what the Army means to me. Think through what distinct markers of identity matter to you and why they do. If the uniform is a key part of your identity in the Army, or brass band music is, then it’s worth asking why that is the case.

If your identity in the Army is grounded in social action, in a place where you grew up, in the friends you go with, in its doctrines, in its history, ask yourself why those things matter to you. Then, when you encounter something that makes you tense, feel uncertain, or feel like this is just not ok, maybe it’s worth taking a minute to ask yourself why that is.

How and why is that issue affecting you? What part of your experience is challenging? Are you reacting like its a threat? Developing personal reflection as something to undertake before engaging in these kinds of questions would make for a much nicer and healthier environment, as would seeking the good of the person we are disagreeing with.

Being Confident In Christ For Our Identity

Second, and I would suggest more importantly, we just need to be a bit more confident about what forms our identity as disciples of Jesus. Then, our trust and confidence in the identity of the people we disagree with as being disciples of Jesus.

Our identity is first and foremost to be ‘in Christ’.

This comes before any other markers of identity which form us and tell us who we are or who we should be. We are who we are, and who we should be and become, when we know ourselves to be ‘in Christ’.

But we must never see this as a result of our own works or goodness. To be ‘in Christ’ is not a mark of status or reward for good effort but is possible only through the sheer and utter grace of Jesus and made known through faith.

Where is our Identity rooted?

We all share in this identity before anything else. Even when you disagree with them. Especially when you disagree with them.

We do not own the right to decide upon another person’s relationship with Jesus, nor do we have the qualities required of us to judge another person.

When we start to see each other as being ‘in Christ’ as being siblings with a shared relationship, then questions about membership, about styles of worship, about uniform, about anything else you can think of, are put back into their proper perspective, and the church will flourish.

Rather than being a community of fear, it becomes a community of bold, confident, and courageous people who care deeply for each other through a shared sense of identity and relationship in Christ.

When we have that sense of boldness in who we are, then we can stop changing the furniture or trying to add another programme to revitalise something.

Instead, we will ourselves be the point at which others will know the fresh and vibrant life of faith.

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