Why You Shouldn’t Donate to the Salvation Army—Ever!

The Salvation Army is not exactly a charity, as many people assume. It is a religious sect, and a fundamentalist/evangelical one at that. It is part of the Religious Right and it has an agenda just as they do.

Like other fundamentalists they think abortion should be outlawed. They write: “The Salvation Army deplores society’s ready acceptance of abortion, which reflects insufficient concern for vulnerable persons, including the unborn.” Get that? The “unborn” are persons. That is in line with the “personhood” campaign to define every fetus as legally a person. Similarly you can count them out when it comes to defending the rights of individuals to terminate their own lives in the face of unbearable pain and misery. They say: “The Salvation Army believes that euthanasia and assisted suicide undermine human dignity and are morally wrong regardless of age or disability.” Yep, I sure would feel more dignified, if my mind was gone, and I was bedridden, lying in my own urine and feces while suffering in pain — instead of being able to choose to terminate my life before that happens.

On alcohol and drugs they don’t want legalization or harm reduction strategies. As they note there are “both spiritual and temporal dangers inherent in the use of alcoholic beverages” and the church “believes total abstinence to be the only certain guarantee against overindulgence and the evils attendant on addiction.” They also believe there is a “direct connection between the incidence of addiction and the easy availability of alcoholic beverages and the increasing social acceptance of their consumption.”

No gambling either, they say that “engages its participants and promoters in an exercise of greed contrary to biblical moral teaching.” “We believe gambling is wrong, regardless of any perceived benefit of entertainment, charity, or personal gain, even when its destructive influences may not be seen on an individual basis.”

How about gay people? Well, they try to sound enlightened by saying “same-sex orientation” is not blameworthy but “requires individual responsibility and must be guided by the light of scriptural authority.” If they stopped at “individual responsibility” there would be no problem. Instead they toss in the Bible and then say this means homosexuals “are called upon…