You need to tell Salvation Army how you feel. Won’t do any good if they don’t know.
Dear Sirs,
I noted with dismay that the Salvation Army was represented among Christian leaders who met with President Obama at the White House on July 12 to express concerns about the prospect of budget cuts to government welfare. I thought you knew that funds conscripted by force are not charity; indeed, they are destructive to charity, inherently antithetical to its function.
Until the New Deal, government social services were virtually unknown. America relied upon two principal means to provide assistance to those in need: families and local private charities, especially churches. These small private charitable institutions (we are not talking about United Way here) seek one thing in dispensing assistance that government does not:
They desire (if not demand) that the recipient become self-supporting as soon as possible.
Sources of private social services are structurally motivated to help the needy get better (if possible) because they don't want to part with money and effort without cause. If the cause of dependency is voluntary, one should expect that the recipient should repent of counterproductive behavior before offering assistance. That is what the Salvation Army stood for from its inception.
It's truly sad that this can't be said about most government social services agencies, some of which structurally prevent recipients from freeing themselves from public assistance. Similarly, the people who work for these agencies don't have jobs without customers. Without a steady supply of the needy, the criminal, or the sick, social welfare budgets dry up and the jobs blow away. Meanwhile, the extremely wealthy with an interest in government influence end up as the financial beneficiaries of public support for social welfare. Thus, these programs have no reason to discontinue while they impoverish the middle class. To support such policy is immoral.
From Noah ‘finding grace in the sight of the Lord” in Genesis 6 to Christ’s forgiveness of the thief on the cross, without repentance, there is no relief from sin. Never once did Jesus ask if the cause of distress He was to heal was without fault; indeed, He said He often announced that those receiving the Father’s healing were forgiven at the moment they were healed.
Isn’t it obvious that public policies have been destructive to families and private charities? Isn't it obvious that they structurally abet immoral and self destructive behaviors? They have cost America incalculable wealth from which charity originates, whether in lost productivity or the cost of government services simply because of the motivational differences between private social services and a professional bureaucracy. Therefore, this action on the part of the Salvation Army, supposedly on behalf of the poor, is equally self-destructive, destructive to the poor, and especially destructive to America as a whole because of the moral force it has historically exemplified, until now.
I do not support self-destructive and immoral behavior without repentance of it. Hence, I will no longer support the Salvation Army with my donations. It truly saddens me that this great institution of private giving has been reduced to this pass.
Please repent,
Signature