Goodbye Red Kettle: The Salvation Army goes woke

The Army and I go way back — to before I was born.

My mother grew up in a poor, immigrant neighborhood in Troy, New York. Every year during Christmas, the Salvation Army would come around with warm mittens, knit caps and oranges for the children. My father, who served in the Second World War, knew he could always get a cup of coffee and a donut at one of their canteens.

When I worked in Boston, I rang a bell at the Downtown Crossing. Since it was founded in 1865, the Army has done a world of good the world over. That it has been infected with the pandemic of our age ("racial equity" — more properly racial Marxism) is depressing.

In the past I've always supported the Army. During the holidays, I considered it a sin to pass a Red Kettle without throwing in a few bucks. If things have changed, it's not my fault.

Internal forces have taken the Christian desire to repent and perverted it into an embrace of racism in the name of fighting racism, -- seen in Critical Race Theory — which has become the greatest threat to our unity and survival as a nation.

Throughout its history, the Salvation Army has served people of all races in America -- even during the era of segregation. Today, 60% of those it helps are minorities.

Still, the organization is driven to both apologize for its imaginary sins and demand that all Caucasians do the same.

The indoctrination takes place mainly through its online resource, "Let's Talk About Racism," which urges us to "lament, repent and apologize for biases or racist ideologies held and actions committed."

Naturally, this only applies to white folks. The black career criminal who was arrested for killing six white people with his car, and wounding 62 in Waukesha, was probably upset about climate change.

The accompanying "Study Guide on Racism," explains: "The subtle nature of racism is such that people who are not consciously racist easily function with the privileges, empowerment and benefits of the dominant ethnicity, thus unintentionally perpetuating injustice." You'd think they could at least be original.

The polemic continues: "We must stop denying the existence of individual and systematic/institutional racism. They exist and are still at work to keep White Americans in power."

It's the same virus being injected in school children that led to the parents' revolt and the upset in Virginia's gubernatorial election.

The propaganda isn't confined to study guides. A story in the November 26 Newsweek reports, "Active officers in the Salvation Army's western territory were trained in matters of racial equity in a compulsory manner in January." It's expected to spread throughout the organization like a cancer.

How long before the Army seeks to prove its new-found commitment to "racial justice" by opening its coffers to Black Lives Matter?

In the war for America's soul, standard Marxist dogma (the class struggle) has been replaced by the race struggle. Even if they don't hold racist views themselves, all whites are said to be the beneficiaries of so-called white privilege which confers unearned benefits on them while handicapping minorities.

Thus, the racial income gap is attributed to this entrenched racism, rather than the dominance of fatherless families among African Americans, a phenomenon which also drives the black crime rate, the black unemployment rate, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate, and the rate of drug abuse in the inner cities.

Seen through the lens of white privilege and black victimization, everything becomes a matter of race. In classical Marxism, the only solution to worker exploitation is abolishing capitalism. In racial Marxism, the only solution to racism (always white) and exploitation is to bring down the entire system, including representative government and our free-market economy.

Hence hundreds of business districts in flames last year, open borders (it's racist to keep out people of color), a revolving-door criminal justice system, soaring crime rates, and public-school indoctrination.

It should come as no surprise that Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors confessed in a 2015 interview that she and her fellow organizers were "trained Marxists."

An online petition by Color Us United, calling for ditching the "Let's Talk About Racism" curriculum, which has garnered 12,200 signatures, notes: "Despite being a historically apolitical organization, the Salvation Army has recently been promoting controversial political and racial ideologies under the banner of its International Social Justice Commission." (It's said a number of SA captains were involved in drafting the petition.)

"The Study Guide on Racism" also encourages whites to read "How to Be an Antiracist," by notorious CRT huckster Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo's "White Fragility: Why It's so hard for White People to Talk about Racism." Because we're expected to grovel?

Christian apologist and radio talk-show host Greg Koukl warns: "In my estimation, CRT (which the Army is now pushing) is a Trojan Horse taking in well-intentioned Christian enterprises that — because they care about justice and oppose oppression — naively promote the most serious threat to biblical Christianity in 50 years" — and the gravest threat to America in my lifetime.

The Army is beginning to feel the heat. On Tuesday, Salvation Army Commissioner Kenneth Hodder, while lying about the Study Guide not being anti-white, said it has been withdrawn "for appropriate review." But this is probably just a public relations move.

For all of the good the Army has done over the past 156 years, in the great struggle to save America, it's now on the side of the devils of racial discord (subject to "appropriate review"). Unless it totally repudiates the Study Guide, and the ideology that spawned it — it's spitting in the faces of the very middle-class people it counts on for support.