Salvation Army Silent on Impact of Race-Based Training on Fundraising
A lot of Salvationists are serious Christians who believe in the gospel of love and follow the apostle Paul in his saying (Galatians 3:28) "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus". Paul explicitly denounced racial consciousness and group identity thinking generally.
So the current policy will clearly be seen as the heresy that it is and will drive many erstwhile supporters away
The Salvation Army is also now very wishy-washy on homosexuality, despite clear Bible teachings that it is an abomination to God. See Romans chapter 1. The Army has given into secularism. It is no longer Christian. It follows popular beliefs, not the Bible
Salvation Army chapters across the country saw a significant drop in donations in the weeks before Christmas because of fallout over a racially charged training curriculum, according to a nonprofit group that advocates “colorblind” policies.
Chapters in California, Massachusetts, and Michigan are among Salvation Army locations cited by Color Us United as affected by its campaign against training materials, called “Let’s Talk About Racism,” that include tenets of critical race theory and anti-racism teachings.
The church’s national headquarters has yet to announce fundraising figures for 2021, but it is evident that financial contributions to The Salvation Army have been “tanking,” Color Us United spokesman Christian Watson told reporters.
“It’s very clear their numbers have been hit hard,” Watson said of The Salvation Army during a virtual press conference Jan. 19. “You can either chalk it up to COVID or economic turmoil, or you can do what we claim is the probable cause—and that is Color Us United’s particular efforts against The Salvation Army’s woke curriculum.”
As previously reported by The Daily Signal, one session includes definitions of individual, structural, and institutional racism that claim whites are the beneficiaries of discriminatory policies. Another session makes the case that the larger Christian church, as well as The Salvation Army itself, has been infected with racism.
“What has not changed is that racial groups are placed into a hierarchy, with White or lighter skinned people at the top,” a sentence on Page 2 says.
Watson cited news reports that point to a steep decline for The Salvation Army’s annual fundraising drive, called the Red Kettle Campaign. Boston.com, for example, found that donations to the Massachusetts division were down 20% from 2020.
The chapter in Sacramento, California, also missed the mark: Its end goal for 2021 was $320,000, but it had raised only about $93,000 by Dec. 6, according to KTXL-TV (Fox 40).
Kenny Xu, president of Color Us United, read to reporters a text that he said he received Dec. 21 from a Salvation Army officer in central Michigan who refers to an infusion of sarcastic “apologies” from white residents for being white:
Locally we are down in our fundraising by about $100,000 to date. My kettles get flooded by these white apology papers daily. I will need to face the budget realities of all this come January. But I don’t blame you guys. The army put itself in this situation regardless of where the push came from to correct it.
The Daily Signal last week sought comment on the church and charitable organization’s fundraising from David Jolley, communications director for The Salvation Army’s national headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.
Jolley did not respond until late Thursday afternoon, when he emailed to say that “because of reporting timelines around the country, we won’t have overall fundraising totals until mid- to late-February.”
“We’re happy to share those totals once [they are] finalized in a few weeks,” he added, and said that Salvation Army officials had not responded earlier because they “were at our National Advisory Board meeting last week.”
The fundraising figures could become available when The Salvation Army releases its next annual report in March. The charity raised $2.3 million in 2020, up from $1.9 million in 2019.
Founded in London in 1865 as a Christian church, The Salvation Army is widely known for its charitable work for the poor. The church is organized in a military-style structure that includes officers, soldiers, and other volunteers. Collectively, church members are known as Salvationists.
Gen. Brian Peddle, a Canadian who is CEO and international leader of The Salvation Army, first announced the church’s “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum for members in a May 2021 Facebook message.
In November, weeks after Xu and Color Us United began to publicly condemn the material, the church said that its New York-based International Social Justice Commission had withdrawn the documents for “appropriate review.” They are not currently available online.
In a separate interview, Xu told The Daily Signal that The Salvation Army has a vested interest in revealing its fundraising numbers.
“If their donations aren’t down, they should be excited to tell you that, because they could turn around and say we didn’t have any effect,” Xu said of Color Us United’s campaign against the training curriculum. “But if their donations are down, it’s in their best interest to report that too, because that means they should make some major policy changes.”
Watson also told reporters that Color Us United wrote Jan. 12 to The Salvation Army’s Board of Advisors, National Commander Kenneth Hodder, and the charity’s four U.S. territorial commanders.
The letter identifies “four instances” of other woke activities outside the “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum, he said without giving details, and calls on the church to “lead the charge in saying America is not a racist nation.”
“We are asking The Salvation Army to reconsider their ideology and to embrace what their true calling is, and that is to serve Christ and to serve the world by serving Christ,” Watson said.
An op-ed by Xu that appeared in December in The Wall Street Journal followed his similar piece Oct. 3 in The Daily Signal and criticized The Salvation Army for what he called “an internal coalition of woke ideologues.”
The church responded with a letter to the Journal and a YouTube video from Hodder, the national commander. The Salvation Army repeatedly has denied the allegations from Color Us United in press statements and media appearances.
Color Us United’s nationwide petition has attracted more than 18,000 signatures calling on the church to revoke the “Let’s Talk About Racism” curriculum.
The nonprofit advocacy group had set a Christmas deadline, which came and went, for The Salvation Army to apologize and state plainly that America is not a racist country.
“The deadline for their apology was for their sake, not for our sake,” Xu told The Daily Signal, adding:
Because that was when the media attention was at its highest. If they released something that said we fully do not believe America is a racist country, we fully renounce CRT [critical race theory] and we are going to get rid of our DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] programs because they don’t help any people in the inner-city communities or white coal miners—if they did something during that media cycle before Christmas, they would have a much likelier chance of recovering the support that they lost.
Xu said he estimates that Color Us United has spent about $90,000 in its efforts to change The Salvation Army’s mind. His group made use of Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms in November and December to create public awareness about what it called the church’s adoption of tenets of critical race theory and support for other “woke policies.”
About 300 of those who signed the petition are Salvation Army officers, according to Color Us United.
The church’s annual report says it has 3,317 officers in the U.S. and more than 27,000 worldwide.
“Our goal in 2022 is not to beat up on The Salvation Army,” Watson said. “Our goal is simply to help them to make the right decision and to stand on their history of charity and biblical foundations and endorse the fact that America is not a racist nation, endorse the fact that their employees are not racist or privileged, and endorse the fact that we all do better when we embrace a colorblind mentality.”
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Will We Ever Eradicate the Cancer of Identity Politics?
Not if Leftists have their way. They revel in all the hate that goes with it.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally granted a writ of certiorari in two now-consolidated affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
The cases will be jointly argued during the next Supreme Court term, and they place directly in their crosshairs the court’s noxious precedents in the thorny area of race-conscious university admission policies.
As presented to the court, the leading question the justices will consider is “whether the Supreme Court should … hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions.”
The court should of course do so posthaste. The propagandist assertion that America in the year 2022 is bedeviled by a sprawling, pan-institutional “systemic racism” is a destructive lie, but the ubiquity of affirmative action means that university admissions offices do, in fact, propagate systemic racism.
Fortunately, there is reason for optimism that the justices will do their job. It was the mercurial Chief Justice John Roberts himself who, in the 2007 case of Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle, penned perhaps his most iconic line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
But by Wednesday afternoon, Monday’s propitious step forward toward an America no longer obsessed with race and identity politics was abruptly undermined by a severe step backward toward a race-centric polity. Justice Stephen Breyer, an octogenarian Jewish male and the senior statesman of the court’s liberal bloc, announced his retirement, effective at the end of this court term and contingent upon the successful confirmation of his successor.
The announcement was hardly surprising; given Breyer’s long-standing Democratic ties, his liberal jurisprudence, and the fact that Republicans are poised to retake control of the U.S. Senate this fall, it would have been more surprising if Breyer had not retired this year.
The more interesting twist came after news broke of the impending retirement: President Joe Biden affirmed that he intends to fulfill his 2020 campaign promise to nominate a black woman—not a black man, not a Hispanic woman, but specifically a black woman—to replace the retiring Jewish male justice.
There is only one way to describe crass identity politics operationalized at this high a political level: evil.
The nine justices of the Supreme Court are the most important jurists in the country. They swear an oath to uphold the Constitution and the American rule of law, which has the equality principle at its very core.
From the Declaration of Independence to the 14th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, genuine equality under the law and an eschewing of the centrality of something as arbitrary as race has always been the American lodestar.
Americans have often fallen short of our enunciated ideals, but the equality ideal of race neutrality has often provided American statesmen succor during our darkest hours. For Abraham Lincoln, the equality-centric declaration was an “apple of gold” for which the Constitution was but an enveloping “frame of silver.”
Biden’s affirmation of his campaign-season promise to nominate such a specific population subgroup is a dagger to the telos—the overarching orientation of true colorblind equality and justice—of the United States.
Even holding aside the lunacy, from a sheer sample size perspective, of announcing at the outset of a Supreme Court justice search that one intends to limit that search to roughly 2% of the national lawyer pool, the higher-level message Democrats telegraph by doubling down on such an identity politics obsession is extraordinarily pernicious.
How can a justice who knows she was selected purely on the basis of race and gender reasonably be expected to adjudicate cases during her court tenure that implicate issues of race and gender?
Furthermore, consider the impact Biden’s announcement surely has on young lawyers all across the nation who do not fit into the narrow sliver of the intersectional pie that he has now proclaimed will comprise his entire prospective talent pool.
Hold aside white men; that ship seems to have sailed. What kind of message does this send to young liberal lawyers who are black men? Or how about the message it sends to young liberal lawyers who are Hispanic women?
And why stop at the intersectional sliver of black and female? Why not preemptively announce that his next two hypothetical court picks will be a Muslim and a homosexual, respectively? (Jews and Mormons, two religious minorities who nonetheless sit low on the left’s intersectional hierarchy pyramid, of course need not apply.)
The juxtaposition of the court’s colorblind certiorari grant on Monday and Biden’s color- (and sex-) centric announcement on Wednesday is nothing if not ironic. Perhaps Republicans might be galvanized to make opposition to identity politics a key part of their 2022 midterm election platform.
And regardless of who replaces Breyer, the court next term will hopefully take us closer to a society that is race-blind—and not besotted by cancerous identity politics—by gutting affirmative action in America.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/28/will-we-ever-eradicate-the-cancer-of-identity-politics
************************************************Meet Alvin Bragg, Rogue Prosecutor Whose Policies Are Wreaking Havoc in ManhattanMore splits appear in NATO as Hungary says it doesn't want UK troops 'for now' and leader Viktor Orban travels to Moscow for one-on-one talks with Vladimir Putin
Both Hungary and Russia are former Communist countries so tend to have some things in common
Hungarian Defence Minister Tibor Benko today declared that there is no need for NATO to deploy its troops in Hungary amid tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine.
Benko said the Hungarian government is not explicitly against NATO deploying troops in central and eastern European countries closer to Ukraine, but stressed that Hungary is able 'to perform this task on its own' in its territory.
Benko's reluctance to accept a deployment of foreign NATO troops in its territory comes as UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace said it was vital to discourage Putin from invading Ukraine by showing NATO's willingness for combat as a deterrent.
Wallace said it was 'important to signal to Putin that the very thing he fears, that is, more NATO close to Russia, would be the consequence of invading Ukraine... This is why the UK offered NATO more ground forces, more readiness as a deterrent.'
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is expected to travel to Russia tomorrow for talks with Vladimir Putin in which he is likely to ask the Russian President for an increased gas supply.
Downing Street confirmed meanwhile that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will travel to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and to show support in the face of perceived Russian aggression.
Moscow denies planning to attack Ukraine and is demanding security guarantees including a promise by NATO never to let Kyiv join the alliance.
Hungary, an eastern-European member state of NATO, enjoys relatively strong relations with Russia despite tension between the alliance and Moscow.
In his talk with Putin scheduled for tomorrow, Orban will seek to increase the amount of gas it receives from Russia, after Hungary agreed a new long-term gas supply agreement with Russia's Gazprom GAZP.MM in August.
Orban is also expected to discuss an ongoing expansion of Hungary's Paks nuclear plant, where Russian state nuclear energy company Rosatom is building new reactors.
Hungary's reliance on Russia for gas imports and Russian intervention in its nuclear plant may be behind the eastern European nation's reluctance to receive foreign NATO troops.
Fears of an imminent Russian incursion in Ukraine have grown in recent days, despite denials from Moscow and pleas from Zelensky to avoid stirring 'panic' over the military build-up on the border.
Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov yesterday accused NATO of trying to pull Kyiv into the alliance, despite Russia massing 100,000 troops on Ukraine's borders. Moscow wants NATO to rule out Ukraine ever becoming a member as a condition for its withdrawal.
The head of Russia's security council, Nikolai Patrushev, said talk of a Russian invasion was 'completely ridiculous' and claimed: 'We don't want war and we don't need it at all.'
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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