The Culture Wars and The Salvation Army – A Way Beyond Identity Theology (Essay)

Estimated reading time: 27 minutes

At the moment The Salvation Army is experiencing a culture war. To understand what that means, and how it might be resolved, we need to understand how culture wars work and the essentially theological nature of culture wars.

What Is A Culture War?

At its heart, a culture war is an argument over the identity of a group of people.

There is a battle for who that group of people should be, and perhaps more importantly, what they should not be. There is a clash of narratives, of identifying markers, of what it means to be… whatever the people are arguing about.

Culture wars can be located in two places:

• Competition within a culture over a dominant identity
• Between two or more different and completing cultures over which should be the dominant culture with a certain zone of influence

The 19th Century and the Origination of Culture Wars

The idea of a culture war is not explicitly discussed until the 19th century.

The first time the language of culture wars is used is in the Kingdom of Prussia where Otto von Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia, launched a Kulturkampf (culture struggle) which took place between 1871 and 1878.

The culture conflict was between the Roman Catholic church and a block of liberal politicians over the limits of religious authority and power that the Roman Catholic church had over the secular state. The conflict was particularly about ecclesiastical and educational appointments, although it also included a fair amount of racism and bigotry against Polish culture in the East of Prussia.

Bismarck lost his Kulturkampf when the Roman Catholic church responded by forming a centrist party to gain a block of seats in the parliament to vote down the attempts. Bismarck then switched sides in the culture war in order to fight off the rise of socialism.

This is the first time the idea of a culture war is explicitly and knowingly utilised and it describes a clash internal to culture, between secular and religious interests, over what should be the dominant influence within a culture or state.

There are historical examples of clashes within a culture, or between two cultures, but they lack the features of the kulturekampf. That being said, we can learn from those historical examples.

The Clash of Populism and Structuralism in the Formation of Culture Wars

A key historical example is the historic debate between populism and structuralism. A debate which has become more relevant to us over the last decade.

The clash between populism and structuralism can be seen in the way Cato, a traditionalist Roman senator, argued that the Roman Republic needed to return to its glory and virtue rather than the way of the mob.

Here the clash of cultures was between the ancient values of the republic, or at least what were presumed to be the ancient values of the republic including the political and class structure which underpinned the state, and the rise of the influence of the poor and the power they could wield for those patricians who sought their support such as Julius Caesar.

This example highlights the tension inherent in a culture war between those who represent the values and identity of the status quo, and those who are pushing for change.

Culture Wars and Tearing Down Statues

Another example which has resonances for us today is the issue of statues.

Over the last five years we have experienced moments of cultural iconoclasm where statues were pulled down because the people they imaged had been involved in slavery or some other morally dubious issue.

They were pulled down not only because of what that individual had done, but because they represented a culture and a time and an ideology which the protesters were pushing back against.

But the destruction of statues or other public art is not a new things. Pulling down the statues of slave traders has a very long and very Christian heritage.

Culture Wars and Iconoclasm in the Early Church

Statues of great people were incredibly common in the ancient world, especially Greek and Rome. It was how you honoured people, especially generals and emperors, and it made a public statement not only about who the person was but what they represented to the state.

But from late antiquity onwards, the construction of statues almost entirely disappears. Almost all the statues that go up during the middle ages are of saints and biblical figures. Christianity has an inherent tension towards graven images and towards the idea of great men or great people being idolised.

Culture Wars and Iconoclasm in the Enlightenment

Then with the start of the enlightenment in the 17th century and a re-emergence of classical culture a renewed interest in creating statues takes place.

The rediscovery of classical writing and its increasingly widespread use in education leads to the identification of classical philosophy and culture, especially republican values, with ‘modern’ ideas. States, especially imperial states, wanted to identify with Rome, while republicans wanted to look back to the Roman Republic and to Athens.

To make a visible cultural link between their time and the classical period, they build neo-classical buildings and erected statues. But at the same time puritans were knocking down statues, shattering and destroying public artworks, and arguing against them.

There was a clash between those who wanted to destroy these statues and saw them as idolatrous, and between the people who wanted to put up the statues as a sign of their cultural heritage.

One side said we are not the kind of people who put up statues of mortals, and that these statues represent people who were sinners and should not be represented. The other side said we are in a new age of enlightenment, we are the new Rome and Athens, and these statues are a mark of our classical heritage with which we are leaving behind the darkness of religion.

Both sides were drawing from an historical tradition for their arguments and for their identity. Progress came by looking back to a better time and bringing those cultural forms into the present.

Modern Culture wars and Iconoclasm are Ancient Christian Practices

The campaigns against statues today would be instantly recognised by Christians of the early Church, of the reformation period, and of the puritan era.

The desire to tear down statues of people who are historically problematic draws on ancient Christian traditions which are very wary of both statues and great people, especially when their actions where not moral.

The modern movements to tear down statues inherits this tradition, but does so either unknowingly or without acknowledging it. There is an intensely theological element to iconoclasm which shouldn’t be ignored. Regardless of whether you think statues should be destroyed or torn down or removed to a museum, or whether they should be preserved in situ, that debate draws on the arguments and history of Christianity.

The debate around statues is rehashing theological arguments from over a thousand years of history without knowing that is what they are doing.

Why Do Culture Warriors Target Statues?

Statues are one of those perennial targets of cultural conflict because they are more than the physical object.

They are figurative art which tells a story, points towards the values of the people who erected them, and act as a hub for culturally formative narratives. Statues are one of the ways that western nations have defined their culture and have acted to tell a story to their people about who they are.

The erection of a statue tells the people that what this person did is what this place, our people, are about. But they can also contain multiple competing narratives within them which appeal to a wide variety of people.

Take the statue of Queen Boudicca near parliament square in London as an example. The statue is built during the height of Imperial pride in Victorian London.

The name Boudicca translates as victory, so that statue is also a statue of Queen Victoria, and represents the conquests of the British Empire. But there is a tension in this statue which is at odds with the imperial culture which built it. Queen Boudicca rebelled against the invading Roman empire and died fighting them.

She is a figure of resistance to empire from a subjugated people. The statue simultaneously represents the inheritors of the empire that killed her, and the people who fought against that empire, and perhaps those people who fought against the British empire as well.

In this sense, statues become something onto which we project our narrative assumptions just as much as they are built with an inherent purpose.

Culture Wars Are Ideologically and Economically Driven

What these examples of have shown is that at the heart of culture war is a clash between at least two groups or ideologies which are arguing over how a culture should perceive itself and the direction in which it should travel.

A somewhat reductionist way of identifying the sides in a culture war is whether they are on the side of progress or whether you consider progress as a loss. In short, between conservative and progressive ideologies.

Culture Wars and the Battle Between Progressives and Conservatives

In the Ancient world progress was sold as returning to how things were before.

We saw some of this with the way in which the enlightenment wanted to appeal to classical culture for their new secular philosophies, and with Cato railing against the populists.

A classic example of this is the Emperor Augustus claiming his autocracy and burgeoning empire was actually the restoration and recovery of the ancient Roman republic from a time of dictators. The fact that those dictatorships had been begun by his adopted father is overlooked.

The past was seen as a morally superior time to the present – an essential element in conservativism is to identify the past as superior to the present and the future. Conservative progress is wrapped up in a return to past values and past cultures in order to move forwards.

Make Stuff Great Again

Campaigns that want to ‘make … great again’ draw on this language as does appeals to the spirit of a previous age. Essentially the claim is that things have gone badly wrong because we have forgotten who we should be and we need to get back to who we were in order to recover our virtue.

Christianity comes along with a complete break from this.

The early Christians are not looking back to a better time, they are fixed on an end point for civilisation and creation itself and identify movement towards this goal as being good while the past belongs to the old ways which need to be undone. Change becomes good.

The Arc of Progress

There is an arc of progress towards heaven and either you are going on that journey or you are still under the sway of the old powers which have been done away with.

Even the language of a new covenant, of new humanity, of the new creation, are all about movement away from the past and towards something different. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says that anyone who is in Christ is a new creation, the old has passed away and everything has become new.

This leads to a divide between the movement towards or the movement away from the final goal of creation.

Christianity and the Creation of a Universalising Identity

A key part of the way in which the idea of progress was changed by Christianity is the idea of universal identity.

Christianity is a universalising faith in a way which was radically different to other cultures and customs in late antiquity. Christianity said everyone can be in Christ, everyone has a greater identity as a citizen of heaven which is more important that what it means to be Roman, Persian, Thracian etc.

This universalising identity was in competition with local identity and local customs. There was not space for different identities to all exist alongside each other, for different gods and customs to be syncreticaly aligned or to be adopted.

Christ had come, the world had changed, people needed to get with the program.

Christians Tearing Down the Pagan Altars of Rome

An example of this is another form of iconoclasm that took pace in the late stages of the Roman Empire.

In the Senate of ancient Rome was an altar to victory, with a statue of Nikè on it. It was placed there by the Emperor Augustus and represented victories all the way back the Hannibal.

Think about Nelson’s column or Churchill’s statue. It represented not just one victory but all victory. It represented the martial pride of the Empire and its divine authority to rule over other peoples.

But in the 4th century when the Empire was Christianised the Christians hated this altar as a symbol of the pagan empire which had come before it. This was an altar where sacrifices had to be made to pagan gods which were believed to be demonic creatures against whom all Christians were called to fight.

Tearing Down The Altar

The altar to victory represented an older idea of Rome which could not exist in the new Christian Rome. It was removed in AD 357 but was then returned by Emperor Julian, known as the Apostate for believing in the pagan gods, before being removed again by the emperor Gratian in AD 382.

The altar, and its place in the senate building, had become a symbol of what Rome was going to be, pagan or Christian. A letter is preserved from the pagan senator Symacchus who asks for the altar to be returned and restored to the senate since Christians can have their churches.

In the old Rome, there was space for multiple identities and multiple gods. But this was not true of the new Rome. Bishop Ambrose of Milan writes to the emperor in opposition to Symacchus and says that we, Christian Rome, cannot negotiate with the demonic and as such the altar cannot be allowed to exist.

The Salic Culture Wars – Charlemagne’s Wars of Conversion Against the Pagans

A more physical and vicious culture war can be seen in the campaigns of Charlemagne from AD 770-790 to bring the Saxons to Christ.

Attempt to convert the Saxons in North and Central Europe had not gone well with missionaries being killed. So Charlemagne launched an invasion, destroying pagan temples, and cutting down sacred trees. He made it punishable by death to avoid baptism, to cremate a corpse (pagan burial rites) or to eat meat in the 40 days before Easter.

The religious practices of Christianity which formed Christian culture were forced onto the Saxons. They forcibly destroyed the previous culture in order to enforce a new one. The previous culture was seen as demonic which needed to be fought against. They literally believed that the pagan gods were demons that had to be rooted out and destroyed through the destruction of their temples.

However, this use of violence did not go unquestioned.

You Can’t Justify Christian Violence With The Commands of Christ

There were questions about whether it was actually Christian to kill people and threaten them with death in order to make them become Christian, or at least say they were Christian.

There was a great tradition of Christian martyrs who had died at the hands of the pagans when trying to convert them. Questions were raised about the rightness of killing people to make them become Christian in the light of that tradition.

Alcuin, a monk from Northumbria, said “Faith arises from will, not compulsion” after he met Charlemagne in AD 781. He also said, “Let peoples newly brought to Christ be nourished in a mild manner, as infants are given milk – for instruct them brutally, and the risk then, their minds being weak, is that they will vomit everything up.”

(You can read more about Alcuin on my blog post here)

Following the challenges to his campaigns Charlemagne changes his mind and instead institutes a whole campaign of education with Alcuin driving the production of bibles from his monastery at Tours.

The violent culture war is itself ‘cancelled’ and gives way to a different form of culture war. One of education. The introduction of punctuation, spacing, and capital letters meant that scripture became easier to read. Education replaced violence as a way to bring about culture change.

Christian Education as a Tactic in Culture Wars and Ideological Struggle

An example of the way in which education was deployed as a weapon in culture wars can be seen where in the 10th century an Abbot of Cluny had a vision about snakes in a pot.

An Angel told him that these snakes are the classical writers Ovid and Virgil and he said Christians shouldn’t read these writers anymore. The writings of classical culture which had been praised and used to teach people Latin, were banned because they also spoke about Roman gods and as such were not fit for a Christian society.

Literature is fundamental to formation of a thinking society. It is generative of a collective imagination and creates shared narratives which can be used to provide explanatory power for complicated events. Controlling what can or can’t be read affects the development and influences on that culture and the way it is able to approach social issues.

Purity Culture, Banning Books, and Cancel Culture

We can see examples of this today such as in the USA where some school boards ban books because they think they are promoting an ideology which that school board thinks is un-American or which might be harmful for young people.

A similar example can be kicking people off of social media or controlling access to news or media sites in order to control the information which a population can engage with. Culture wars are won and lost through education.

Education as Ideological Purification

Since the 12th century the impulse to purify Christendom, the mission to improve society, lead to the rise of universities.

In Paris and Oxford and Boulogne universities as seats of learning were founded to train young people to become theologians and lawyers to provide the moral and legal frameworks for a society.

It was the 12th century which gave us the word modernity to relate to the new way of thinking about things. These university trained people were meant to be able to counter the heresies and false beliefs that were seen as dangerous to Christian society.

Universities and Critical Education Naturally Create More Progressive and Critical Minds

What happened was that young people go to university, study a broad range of information and engage with thoughts and ideas that are really only accessible through that university education, and then leave as priests and lawyers and come up against people who effectively go what the hell are you talking about because the new ideas mean nothing to them.

The new was of thinking clash up against the previous ways and the one that receives the sanction and authority of institutions such as the Pope, kings, and universities, is the one that wins.

The Role of Universities in Liberalisation

At least part of this is because of the formative affect on young people that universities and other places of higher education have.

They are culturally and often geographically separate from the community the young person grew up in and are a melting pot of multiple communities, identities, and ideas which are brought together under a meta-narrative of intellectual progress which is key for creating the possibility of culture wars.

Access to ideas and theories that are beyond what you have grown up with, and exposure to ways of thinking and living which are outside of what you have experienced amongst your friends and family, are the way that a clash of culture often begins. The young person either adopts these new ideas, or becomes entrenched in their previous position.

Universities and Progressive Orthodoxy

The role of universities have always been to educate and articulate progressive orthodoxies in a radical new way.

Inevitably, as universities train teachers, this percolates outwards and develops further and faster and grows away from the previous teachers until new young people become teachers and pass on what they have learned.

This is why university education can be threatening to people with a particularly conservative approach to progress. The university as a place in which culturally threatening ideas are percolated and passed on positions them as dangerous and threatening which is why they are so often labelled as liberal in order to attack them or distinguish them from a certain set of values.

Labelling is fundamental to culture wars. Label the enemy, use language that immediately identifies which tribe you are in, and then you know who your allies are and who you are against.

Communities Without Higher Education Become More Conservative, More Closed Minded, and More Fearful

The necessity of embracing different inherent to a university education means that communities which remain closed tend to be shielded from ideas that exist outside of their community, either through space or through intentionally rejecting and silencing those voices.

A community which does not engage in higher education, or only in carefully controlled and curated educational spaces, is less likely to engage in critical thinking or in ideas which question the status quo.

This is especially the case in communities with strong cultural norms and symbols, or in faith communities with easily identifiable marks of membership and belonging. Especially when outside ideas and ways of life are seen as threatening to the community. New ideas are rejected as are the people who carry them because they are harmful and threatening.

Culture Wars Depend on Ideological Violence

Whilst the violence of the reformation, the English civil war, the European wars of religion, all seem to suggest that Christianity forgot the lessons of Alcuin when it came to fighting culture wars, those ages were also the ages of pamphlets, of debates, of universities, and of the development of great systems of political and religious ideas.

The Civil rights campaigns of the 1960s highlight the importance of education within culture wars for changing culture and also demonstrate the ongoing theological elements within culture war.

The language of the civil rights movements were deeply religious, wrapped up in Christian and biblical language, especially around the exodus and the call for freedom.

This same model of seeking justice for oppressed groups is taken forwards by gay rights, feminism, etc. articulating arguments about justice and freedom from oppression but without the same explicitly Christian language despite the shared heritage.

Culture wars are fought with defensive ideologies.

People fight for the things that form their identity and which give me meaning in opposition to things which challenge my identity and are seen as harmful or destructive. Challenges to the things which form my identity are seen as threats to who I am and must be defeated.

Progressive views are as equally defensive of a particular ideology or sense of identity as conservative views are. Each side sees the other as dangerous. There is a real sense to which culture wars are framed as battles for the soul of a place or people or nation which must be won if that thing is to survive in a recognisable form.

Culture Wars in The Salvation Army

The Salvation Army has experienced the effects of cultural change throughout its existence, but it could be argued that the Army is currently in a period of culture war.

Historically the Army has gone through significant clashes of culture. This includes the implementation of social services and the arguments that ranged around whether the inclusion of formal social provision was what it meant to be The Salvation Army.

An argument which continues today internally and appears insane from outside of the Army.

The attempt of the Army in the USA to secede from the international Army and the questions around the authority of London are part of the challenges that eventually lead to the change of constitution in 1929 is another example of the kind of cultural battles that the Army has fought.

The worship wars of the late 20th century coincide with the debates around charismatic gifting as part of the question of who and what the Army should be. The examples, which only point towards a bigger picture, demonstrate that the Army has had a significant amount of cultural conflict within its short history.

However, it has reached a point where there is a culture war within the Army that is driving division amongst its members.

Like the early Christians, the Army has sought to have and promote a unifying and universal identify across its international body. This includes the campaign around being “one army, one mission, one message” which sought to bring people together from around the world behind a uniform sense of Salvationist identity.

But the Army has faced the same issues the early Church did when it ran across the differences between local approaches and a universal identity.

What Are The Salvation Army Culture Wars About?

The Salvationist culture war broadly revolves around three issues: what does it mean to be a member, sexuality and gender, ecclesial forms. These three issues can be unified around a question of how the Army reads the Bible.

The question of membership has been of increasing significance since the middle of the 20th century when the declining numbers in the western territories began to have an impact.

What Is The Salvation Army?

What does it mean to be a member of the Army? Is soldiership still the baseline measure of membership or is soldiership something to be seen more akin to an order within the denomination that only some people need to join.

When soldiership is combined with particular promises around lifestyle then there is a distinction between soldiers and non-soldiers, as well as the obvious distinction being uniform. There are some territories where you can only play in the band, sing in the songsters, or be a local leader, if you are a uniformed soldier.

If soldiership is understood as full membership, or as a document published in 2015 said soldiership is the expected way of expressing discipleship, them what happens to people who are unable or unwilling to keep the lifestyle requirements that go alongside soldiership?

Is Soldiership a Problem?

In the UK there are some employee roles that are only open to uniformed salvationists. There may be other ways of being a member, and the Army may say that all members are members and are equal, but when operationally this is not the case, it is difficult to make the claim for equality in membership.

This is also the case where officership is only open for soldiers. There may be other ways of undertaking spiritual leadership in the Army, but while senior leadership is reserved for officers, there is an implicit organisational hierarchy between officers and non-officers.

But what does it mean to be a member of the Army when there are fewer soldiers and more people attending the Army as non-soldiers? At least in the UK.

The internationalism of the Army is a key element in this discussion. The local understanding of membership in one territory is not going to be the same in another territory.

In a territory with high levels of soldiership and significant numbers of people applying for officership, the questions around membership will not be the same as in territories with low levels of soldiership and officers. What a member is, who gets to be a member, and what that member can do, have become battlegrounds within the Army, if not always internationally then at local levels.

Culture Wars Are About Essential Forms

Ecclesial forms seems an odd choice to describe a culture war, but the way that the Army worships, and to an extent what it excludes from its worship, is defining for its existence as a movement.

The kind of music that is used, the kinds of songs that are sung, the practice of open air worship, are all elements where conflict takes place. What makes a Salvation Army corps Salvation Army? The tension between what is sometimes colloquially known as ‘trad Army’ as opposed to contemporary Army, draws a divide between members.

People Disagree About Music

When only a certain form of worship is equated to being Army, then there are going to be only certain locations where that person will feel they are at the Army. Historically the Army maintained a strong and distinctive worshipping style with its own music and approach to worship.

As that has changed, there has been an increasing tension within what it means to worship as the Army.

This has been exacerbated by the ongoing questions about the practices of baptism and communion.

The Army and the Sacraments

The Army ceased the practice of baptism and communion not long after its beginning. But that did not stop people from wanting to bring it back or indeed from secretly practicing the sacraments in Army worship. There is a divide between people who want to bring back the sacraments, and those who do not. A divide which is not just theological, in fact a divide which is rarely expressed theologically, but rather in the language of identity.

The Army does not do the sacraments which makes it distinctive from other churches. To reintroduce the sacraments would change the identity of the Army. So culture conflict takes place between those for whom reintroducing the sacraments would make the Army closer to something they can identify with, whilst for others it would stop the Army being ‘the Army’ that they belong to.

Gender and Sexuality

Finally sexuality and gender is a huge issue for the Army at the moment and a real dividing line.

There are multiple sides to the conflict, and frequently the different positions to fail to understand each other. Perhaps even more than the other issues, the question of sexuality and gender in the Army produces heated and vitriolic debate and real conflict between people. It raises questions over who is in and who is out of the Army.

People have lost their soldiership and officership because of it. The international Army is worried about the splintering of The Salvation Army because of the differences on the issue. And at the heart of the questions are the lives of the people who are directly affected by this argument and for whom this is not an academic discussion but is a real matter of who they are and whether they can be accepted or not as they are.

More than anything else in the last 150 years the question of inclusion around sexuality and gender poses the risk to fracture the Army. Tribal camps are clearly formed and arguments are hashed out again and again on social media. There is little space for nuance or less space for compromise.

People Can’t Find a Compromise

Every side needs to win because for every side it is perceived as a matter of faithfulness to the Gospel.

These three issues are intensified by the fact that historically the Army has been quite a closed social community.

Its members did not often go to university, its officers even less frequently. Not did they attend many ‘secular’ entertainment venues and so most of their life and friendship circles revolved around the Army world. It existed in quite a socially distinctive community with moral marks of membership through a generally accepted code of practice and lifestyle requirements.

This has changed over time, create a progressive/liberal/reform/conservative divide within the Army which has increasingly had an impact on the Army’s identity and created the grounds for the Army’s culture war.

How Do You Read The Bible

The three issues outlined above all come down to how do Salvationists read the Bible.

Here is the big divide between those who adopt a more open view of scripture and those who take a more closed or prescriptive view. The arguments cannot be brought to a compromise because each side makes a call to the authority of scripture but in a way which is mutually exclusive. This underpins the complexity of culture war in a faith group where faith claims to authority cannot be brought to a compromise in an acceptable manner.

Can The Culture Wars Be Won?

The English reformation was very unpopular with the masses at the time. The pilgrimage of grace and the prayer book rebels were both resistance movements to the takeover of Protestantism. But the new order was supported by the heads of state and since the country was quite young at the time the new order took over and was successful.

To an extent, winning a culture war is a matter of outlasting your opponents and converting the young. You need the next generation to agree with you so that when the previous generation dies your beliefs are the ones that survive. You need control of education and universities to win a culture war. In a faith community, this also includes sermons, songs, and seminaries.

Ideas with Critical Mass

Once an idea gains a critical mass of followers it becomes very difficult to oppose it. Once something becomes seen as the norm and the essential identification of justice is given to that perspective – what is considered to be normal and acceptable to everyone else – then it will become the dominant theory.

This is increased if respected and admired people also adopt that view and campaign for it. There is the creation of new orthodoxy which survives until the next challenge and the next new orthodoxy emerges. There is an extent to which this is what is meant by the idea that the church must be in a constant state of reformation.

In the middle of culture war, can there be compromise? A place where people come together? Where even in the middle of disagreement, sometimes to the extent of questioning the validity of other people’s membership and even salvation, there can be room for discussion and conversation.

Is There Space For Compromise?

The creation of space for dialogue is key. The need to listen to each other in an open and constructive sense which recognises each others arguments but does not abandon one’s own position. But ultimately compromise cannot last. Even if a cultural war can be won there will always be another one. There will always be a new orthodoxy emerging to challenge the old.

Culture wars are not intrinsically a bad thing. They are sometimes necessary.

The challenge is to understand when a culture war is worth fighting, how to go about winning it, and being ready for the costs that go with it.

We can limit those costs by the way that we treat each other even while we are fighting for where we think the Army should be going. If we treat each other as the enemy to be defeated, then the costs to cultural change will always be high and will often be very damaging for the people involved.

When we can see each other as fellow children of God, earnestly trying our best to understand where God is leading us and out of love for the Army wanting it to be all it can be, then there emerges common ground for healthy discussion to take place.

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