Yes, Virginia, There Can Be Too Much Emphasis On Social Teaching

Quick! If someone comes up to you and says “Salvation Army,” what’s the first think you think of?

Guys on the street corner ringing bells and taking donations at Christmas time, right? Maybe big red trucks coming to cart away furniture and give it to the needy?

That’s the problem.

These things are not what the Salvation Army is about–or at least they shouldn’t be. You see, the Salvation Army is more than a charity.

It’s a church.

But it’s a church that has ruined its witness to Christ by over-emphasis on social teaching. It has allowed itself to become thought of in the public mind as a charity rather than a church, and that’s contrary to what it is to be a church.

People must undertand what we stand for as Christians. When they think of us, they must think of us as followers of Christ first and foremost, not as people who organize charitable events. (Heck, when I was a boy I thought the “Salvation” in their name referred to salvaging furniture that would otherwise be thrown away!)

It’s true that Jesus and his apostles were concerned for the material wellbeing of others and worked to improve it, but this was always subordinate to their concern for people’s spiritual wellbeing, and people knew it. The gospel is about how to get eternal life, not how to keep warm and well fed. While helping someone with the latter is important, it pales in comparison to helping them understand the former.

The Salvation Army has made a fatal mistake by becoming a charity in the mind of the public, which would be a betrayal of what it would be doing if it wants to be a church.

The case of the Salvation Army is a valuable object lesson for those in other churches–including the Catholic Church–to show what can go wrong when a group puts more emphasis on social teaching than on gospel teaching.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

6 thoughts on “Yes, Virginia, There Can Be Too Much Emphasis On Social Teaching”

  2. Ha! That cracked me up – I remember thinking the same thing as a kid. Salvaging Army.
    Makes me remember that show from the 80’s about a junk salavaging company that built a rocket…?

  3. I hate to say it, but we Catholics have probably made a similar mistake. When we say Catholic, people think of a church, rather than ‘followers of Christ’. My experience only, yours may be different.

  4. Francis,
    The point is, the Sallies have as good as lost their “church” status in the public mind. If people hear “Catholic” and think “a church,” we HAVEN’T made a similar mistake. A church is specifically religious; a charitable organization isn’t. The Catholic Church hasn’t lost its specifically religious identity in the public arena; the Sallies have.

  5. You could make the same argument about morality. I have a friend who is a Freemason. His point is that he doesn’t need religion because Freemasonry teaches him how to be nice to other people. But a religion *has* a code of morality, rather than *being* a code of morality! He doesn’t get that point. He thinks religion holds the threat of damnation over peoples’ heads to get them to be nice to each other.

  6. Salvation Army is good, real Christians, stand up for what is right including against Homosexuals

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