The Salvation Army is so bigoted that even many conservative businesses have cut their support. Asheville city council just voted to give them nearly $1 million. How city hall funded an anti-queer hate group

Above: A pride flag flies from Asheville city hall in 2015. File photo by Max Cooper

[This article includes quotes and descriptions of particularly ugly anti-queer and anti-trans bigotry]

The Salvation Army is a longtime enemy of queer and trans people in particular, ever since its origins among fanatics hellbent on imposing the lily-white Victorian brand of Christianity on the impoverished masses like an occupying military force.

As disproportionate numbers of our communities end up poor and on the street, we all face ugly bigotry, this is not some abstract issue.

According to statistics from the National Coalition for the Homeless LGBTQ+ youth are a stunning 120 percent more likely to face homelessness and nearly a fifth of queer folks report being unhoused at some point in their life. Even those of us fortunate to have never been forced into the Salvation Army’s clutches know people who’ve been harassed, hurt or humiliated by what remains, at heart, a far-right cult.

Indeed the organization’s history on this front, from pushing people out on the street to actively advocating for bigoted legislation is so blatant and extensive that in recent years even conservative restaurant chain Chick-fil-A finally stopped funding it.

But last Tuesday, September 12, Asheville city council unanimously, enthusiastically supported giving the Salvation Army a boatload of public cash — at least hundreds of thousands, probably nearly $1 million — to back new shelter beds for a group with a long record of discriminating against impoverished queer and trans people.

This is the story of how city government decided to bankroll a hate group, and how their supposed dedication to queer and trans rights is, once again, a hollow lie.

‘Pie in the sky when you die’

“Scripture opposes homosexual practices by direct comment and also by clearly implied disapproval. The Bible treats such practices as self-evidently abnormal…Attempts to establish or promote such relationships as viable alternatives to heterosexually-based family life do not conform to God’s will for society”
— Salvation Army statement, removed from their website in the mid-2010s. Archived in this history of the group’s anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination

“And the Starvation Army they play
And they sing and they clap and they pray
Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they tell you when you’re on the bum:

You will eat, by and by
In that glorious land in the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die”
– “The Preacher and the Slave,” Joe Hill, 1911

From its founding the Salvation Army’s mission was to harass the poor, punish the marginalized and coerce conversions. They weren’t shy about this. Founder William Booth declared the group’s purpose was to crush the “Three As,” which were “Alcohol, Atheism and Anarchy” and stop the spread of unions and socialist groups fighting for change. In its place they pushed a reactionary version of Christianity that defended capitalism and derided the poor and marginalized as in need of their brand of militant “salvation.”

To this end its social services weren’t offered out of a genuine effort to help those in need, but as a tool of control. As “The Starvation Army,” a leftist look at the many evils of the group, summarized:

“Dispensing the absolute basics of food and temporary housing to the needy was motivated by the need to recruit rather than by anything in the Bible. Any of the poor who were unfortunate enough to go against the Army’s morals were quick to discover themselves on the street, hungry or not.”

Indeed Booth admitted this, declaring that he didn’t care “whether a man died in the poorhouse but if his soul was saved.”

The Salvation Army’s name, motto (“blood and fire”) and military uniforms and rank structure weren’t coincidence. In their early years they routinely attacked gathering places like bars and radical meeting halls. In the long tradition of the far-right everywhere, they called in the police and whined about rioters when locals fought back.

And fight back people did. The group faced opposition from the start, from the anarchic array of local groups in England that called themselves the “Skeleton Army” to unions like the IWW, who dubbed the group the Starvation Army and gave them a whole verse in Joe Hill’s famous song that coined the term “pie in the sky.”

As Britain and America’s colonial empires expanded, the group followed, and they were involved in a list of the worst attempts to crush local cultures, from the Indian subcontinent to aboriginal communities in Australia.

In the latter decades of the 20th century the group consistently opposed efforts in multiple countries to decriminalize queer existence.

This didn’t end with the era of the AIDS genocides (the New Zealand branch was fighting to keep sex between men illegal well into the mid-80s) when they acquired a reputation among queer communities for denying services to those in dire need. In 1995 the group’s “War Cry” newspaper openly declared that “the homosexual lifestyle is simply an invitation to an early grave.”

Three years later the group shut down programs for the homeless and senior citizens in San Francisco, rather than comply with the city government’s requirement that contractors provide equal benefits to same-sex partners.

Sadly the Salvation Army’s decades-long efforts to push out local and radical mutual aid left them one of the largest non-governmental service providers on the planet. In many places they were the only game in town, a result that often proved dire — even potentially fatal — for queer and trans people struggling to survive.

Over the last two decades, worried about losing government and business support, the Salvation Army’s publicly adopted language resembling the “love the sinner hate the sin” fundamentalist line. Those who’ve survived such groups know this for the thin facade it is.

And indeed, the Salvation Army’s actions throughout this period have remained awful as ever.

In the early 2000s the groups faced a bevy of lawsuits from civil liberties groups for trying to enforce their far-right Christianity on those using their services and their own employees. While they would later downplay these practices, they were hellbent on preserving them at the time: the group would fight the lawsuits tooth and nail for over a decade. In 2004 they even threatened to shut down all their services in New York City rather than comply with minimal non-discrimination rules. Around the same time they were caught secretly lobbying the federal government to exempt bigoted churches like theirs from local anti-discrimination laws.

While queer and trans communities had known their evil for years, it received more attention after 2012. That year a high-ranking Australian Salvation Army official admitted that behind its “all are welcome” p.r. the organization’s beliefs included that those in queer relationships deserved execution.

The organization scrambled to publicly denounce him, but their actions continued to tell a very different story. The same year their Vermont branch fired a case worker after discovering she was bisexual, with a spokesperson affirming they still believed queer relationships “against the will of God.”

The next year the U.S. organization was caught approvingly linking to far-right religious groups promoting “conversion therapy.” They blamed it on a computer glitch. In 2014 they denied housing to a trans woman in Dallas.

Over these years the group, on the losing side of a barrage of lawsuits, publicly backed off its requirements that employees follow its far-right beliefs and its longtime practice of compelling the homeless to attend their services to receive aid. But the “officers” that give its marching orders remain exclusively right-wing Christians, and queer people are still barred from their ranks.

Relentless pushback against the group from a wide range of activists and communities had other effects too, as businesses who’d long supported the organization began to feel the heat and backed off. Its bottom line hurt, the Salvation Army upped its charm offensive, declaring that it didn’t oppose queer rights.

But this, like previous attempts, is clearly just spin and damage control.

“These statements completely ignore the reality that the Salvation Army continues to maintain anti-gay theological stances, and continues to discriminate against its own employees and their partners,” trans activist Zinnia Jones wrote in 2016 in a history of the group’s many acts of discrimination. “They also neglect to mention that the organization historically ‘abides’ by anti-discrimination laws by way of shutting down services in areas where such laws apply. The Salvation Army has given no indication that it intends to change any of these anti-LGBT policies.”

Jones continued that supporting the group in any way “means assisting an aggressively anti-gay church in furthering its goals of discrimination.”

While the group may have become quieter about some of its more blatant bigotry, that doesn’t mean it’s gone away. In 2017 the Salvation Army was charged by the New York Commission on Human Rights with “widespread discrimination against trans people” at its drug and alcohol treatment centers. They were eventually found guilty of “gender identity discrimination” as well as “discriminatory housing policies” in violation of the city’s human rights laws.

The same year Heather Snow, a trans woman rendered homeless by mental health issues and a back injury, alleged in a Twitter thread that she was treated as “less than human” by Salvation Army staff at a Portland, Ore. shelter, including poor conditions, blatant discrimination and unusually harsh punishments.

Without breaking confidentiality, I can confirm that among queer and trans people I’ve spoken to who’ve been houseless in Asheville, dealing with the Salvation Army is consistently described as among their ugliest experiences.

Increasingly in the spotlight, in 2018 the group warned its members not to make bigoted statements in public, citing “an increasing number of complaints regarding comments made on social media by Salvation Army officers and staff.” Bluntly it noted that attention to their bigotry was a threat to “our fundraising efforts.” But in the same year the Australian branch of the group backed a law allowing anti-queer discrimination under the cover of freedom of religion.

“The Salvation Army speaks out of both sides of its mouth,” Jacob Meister of the Civil Rights Agenda told Vox in 2019. “They’ll deliver services to LGBTQ folks, but on the other side they are very actively, as a religious organization, opposing marriage rights and a lot of other rights. Transgender issues have been one, particularly, that they have had problems with.”

Even clergy at mainline Christian denominations have called out the group’s claims they’ve turned over a new leaf.

“They are lying,” Kevin Holdsworth, a high-ranking Anglican priest, wrote on Twitter in late 2019. “You can’t be a member of the Salvation Army and wear their uniform or be an officer (like being ordained) if you are gay and married or in a partnership.”

Recent years have seen even the group’s backing among right-wing businesses finally break. In 2019 the notoriously conservative Chick-fil-A chain finally stopped supporting the group. Many mainstream chains had already stopped allowing their bell ringers during the winter holidays, and Macy’s prominently did so in 2022, alluding to its anti-queer stances as one of the major reasons.

But Asheville city officials decided to go in the exact opposite direction. While even the most establishment institutions are distancing themselves from the Salvation Army fast as they can go, city council decided to give them money. A lot of money.

Bankrolling hate

While always hostile to the poor and homeless, in recent years Asheville city government has become downright draconian. This has ranged from destroying camps right before frigid weather, escalating sweeps during the height of the pandemic, arresting mutual aid workers (and Blade journalists) on Christmas 2021 and persecuting volunteers so openly they’ve drawn an ACLU lawsuit. They’ve also shut down a city-owned low barrier shelter to appease the far-right, falsely blamed camps for violence, used federal relief dollars to pay for camp demolitions and increased police patrols primarily intended to harass the unhoused while keeping them out of sight of tourists.

City manager Debra Campbell’s tenure has been marked by open classism and a coziness with ultra-conservative business owners. Lately council seriously considered banning locals from giving cash and supplies to houseless folks from their vehicles. They only showed signs of backing off after widespread public outrage and threats of lawsuits.

A sign of how things have changed came at the Aug. 22 meeting, when longtime far-right harasser Chad Nesbitt, a fringe figure who claimed the tepid liberals of councils past were raging communists, praised the current city government’s crackdown on the poor. Naturally, he said god was blessing them for it.

In this context city hall’s scrambled to look like they’re doing something about homelessness besides just more police violence. So they dipped into what’s left of those relief dollars and coordinated with the county to put together $1.75 million to expand local shelter space, half from each government.

Specifically they decided to work with three religious groups to provide 43 new shelter beds and “preserve” 45 beds “at risk of closure.” The first two groups, Haywood Congregation and Safe Shelter, have no known record of discrimination against queer and trans people.

The third is the Salvation Army.

The group is not a minor partner either, as they’re responsible for nearly half of the new shelter beds and all of the ones the funds are meant to preserve. The latter is a common tactic for the group: threaten to shut down services unless they get government cash on their terms. While the exact distribution of the funds isn’t worked out yet (city hall hates transpareny) they probably stand to rack up at least $800,000 if not a solid $1 million.

It’s worth remembering that in addition to their bigotry and many, many other evils the Salvation Army is a massive organization with a massive budget. Nationally they brought in $2 billion in donations last year alone and are the fourth largest charity in the country. Asheville is one of the least affordable cities in the country.

If the organization wanted to actually expand their shelter space here, if they found the human misery that compelling, they could do so without one dime from city hall.

Asheville’s also riddled with non-profits. There’s no shortage of service organizations that could use the same cash to open shelter beds and don’t have a long record of discrimination that includes their members literally calling for genocide against queer people.

Indeed the number of new beds would just about make up for the number the city removed when they shut down their own shelter last year. Hell, local unhoused folks and mutual aid groups were trying to provide help and places to sleep on public land until they were repeatedly persecuted for their efforts.

Naturally, council was enthusiastic to fund the Salvation Army when the matter came up at its Sept. 12 meeting. Mayor Esther Manheimer noted that one of the main points of the measure was to prop up the group in the face of its other sources of cash drying up.

“Part of this is to shore up their ability to continue to provide services,” she said. “They have a very challenging funding situation.”

It’s worth remembering that every dollar that governments give to the Salvation Army frees up private funds they can use to spread their far-right ideology. City hall’s actions essentially help bail them out at a time when they’re losing private sources of support due to justified outrage at their bigotry.

Also, like crisis pregnancy centers operated by other theocrats, the group’s services help to serve both to coerce the vulnerable and cover up the reality of its beliefs with a veneer of charity.

Given the organization’s awful history, what assurances do locals have that these beds and the services that go with them won’t discriminate against queer and trans people?

Council member Kim Roney, feeling the pressure from locals on this issue since the Salvation Army’s role has become more widely known, asked City attorney Brad Branham about that (though in a garbled way).

“Can you speak to the ability to explicitly name our LGBTQ+ inclusive non-discrimination ordinance for compliance?”

Branham claimed that because the funds were federal, discrimination was prohibited and “in addition to that we are going to also cite the city’s non-discrimination ordinance as a binding effect on this contract as well.”

Emily Ball, city hall’s point person on homelessness, claimed the organizations all had “a strong commitment to equity.”

“I feel confident in their ability to comply with that.”

With that Roney let the measure pass with no objections. The fact that council’s only openly queer member waved through sending hundreds of thousands to a hate group is a stark reminder of how useless most “representation” is.

The idea that words on paper will stop the Salvation Army from discriminating is a goddamn joke. The city’s non-discrimination ordinance was intentionally written to be unenforceable. If the group openly violated it and someone they denied services pressed a complaint (pissing off a large and vindictive organization), and city staff didn’t dismiss it out of hand the organization would be fined a whopping $100. I’m sure that’ll teach ’em.

A Blade investigation last year revealed that in its first year and a half of existence not a single complaint filed under the ordinance moved forward into actual action or penalties for discrimination. In at least one case city staff clearly dismissed a complaint without reading it.

In 2022 the director of Western Carolina Rescue Ministries, whose shelter openly excludes trans people and who’d initially threatened to close if the ordinance passed, told the Mountain Xpress they hadn’t had to change a thing. That gives a pretty clear sign of how much city hall’s rules will bind the Salvation Army.

Nor will federal law do much here, though on paper its protections are more robust. Remember the Salvation Army’s been sued, repeatedly, for breaking discrimination laws local, state and federal. Homeless people don’t exactly have access to lawyers when their rights are blatantly violated. The many cases we’ve mentioned above are, tragically, the tiniest tip of the iceberg of the Salvation Army’s bigotry. Far more go unreported.

Even if they do find an attorney, such lawsuits can drag on for a decade or more. In reality about 99.9 percent of the time the Salvation Army will have near-absolute power over what happens to those in their shelters. They will use that to the detriment of queer and trans people.

If a local government is looking to do its part to ensure that a rampantly bigoted organization doesn’t continue its discrimination, there’s a simple solution: don’t give them money.

A match made in hell

So why is Asheville’s “progressive” city government, which loves to hang pride flags from city hall and wax rhapsodic about how much they love the gays, doing doling out nearly a solid million to a hate group so awful even Chick-fil-A cuts ties?

Well there’s a number of reasons, all of them horrible, but important to delve into.

The first is good, old-fashioned Christian supremacy. This is the bigotry, deeply ingrained in this society, that Christian beliefs and organizations are somehow superior to others. This means that even non-Christians are conditioned to see them as more sincere and less open to scrutiny, skepticism and criticism.

This shows up in Asheville in a number of ways. On the progressive end non-profits and activism are viewed as more genuine and moral if they have preachers up at the front and speak in Christian terms.

There are certainly leftist Christians who genuinely oppose oppression and work hard to fight it, of course, but that’s not who this brand of Christian supremacy favors. Instead it benefits clergy who believed they have an automatic right to tell other activists and groups what to do because they’re clergy, along with liberal religious who discourage direct challenges to the status quo and treat the marginalized as fundraising props.

Among establishment churches Christian supremacy frequently whitewashes sanctimonious corruption. Indeed the Sept. 12 council meeting also saw representatives of the First Baptist Church-backed Project Aspire justify their project — a large for-profit hotel and a paltry percentage of not-really-affordable units sandwiched in a pricey apartment complex — with Bible verses and comparisons to saving refugees in Burundi. No, I’m not making this up.

When it comes to the far-right, like the Salvation Army, Christian supremacy shows up in the idea that hate-filled gibberish suddenly becomes more acceptable if those spouting it say “Jesus” a bunch. In Asheville this combines with the “we can all get along” brand of politics especially prominent in the non-profit complex to form a particularly toxic mix.

A prominent local example showed up in 2021, when county commissioner (and minister) Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, fresh from saying Jesus was ok with directing millions in incentives to a weapons manufacturer, went into tears talking about what good people Christians who opposed gay rights were.

“People of faith land in very different places on many, many issues. That’s part of the great power of this country.”

That will no doubt be of great comfort the next time they threaten to torture and murder us.

This variety is incredibly dangerous, especially in a time where far-right Christian groups are the key part of a growing fascist threat that’s directly targeting queer and trans communities. It also makes it easier to excuse the very real damage organizations like the Salvation Army do as simply a respectful difference of opinion, and to buy their paper-thin claims that they’ve changed. Queers in poverty pay the price.

The second reason is that the Salvation Army is specifically the type of group that city hall wants to support: conservative in its politics, fully embedded in the status quo and dedicated to treating the poor as a problem to be controlled.

I’ve written before how recent years have, despite the progressive facade, seen Asheville city council take a sharply conservative turn.

In 2020, with hotels empty and houseless folks in mortal danger, then-assistant city manager Cathy Ball openly refused the idea of housing them in hotels, declaring that they couldn’t be trusted alone and required 24/7 surveillance.

City hall’s also relentlessly punished mutual aid efforts, which provide help to the homeless as equals without preaching or control. That’s included not just the notorious crackdowns on the Aston Park Build, but the repeated attempts to ban direct mutual aid. Notably, this aid often takes place in full public view, while facilities like the Salvation Army lock the homeless into quasi-prisons firmly out of the sight of tourists.

However much their politics differ on paper, both city council and the “Starvation Army” fully agree on punishing the poor.

This is all, in addition to it human misery it inflicts, a massive waste of money. Starting in 2018 a Vancouver-based study gave homeless people $7,500 with no strings attached found that they’d moved into housing after about three months, kept others housed and actually saved the government money in the process. So if they end up giving the Salvation Army $1 million, they could’ve given 134 homeless locals $7,500 apiece and solve much of the issue in a matter of months.

But the point of Asheville city council’s policies is to punish and control the poor; direct help that actually works is off the table.

The final reason is worth stating directly: Asheville city government does not give a shit about queer and trans people.

They’ll say otherwise, of course, but their record of support is all symbolic steps: proclamations, hollow ordinances, pride flags after a court ruling.

By contrast all its actions that hurt our communities involve actual power and cash: pushing gentrification, hiring more right-wing cops, the relentless persecution of queer and trans protesters, sending their attorney to court to help convict trans and non-binary journalists for doing their jobs and, now, directly funding churches that make our lives hell.

Indeed, this contrast was called out last year, when Youth Outright refused to accept the annual Pride proclamation, citing city government’s incredibly harsh treatment of queer and trans protesters.

When city hall declares their support for the LGBTQ+ communities, they mean for a handful of rich gays and a smattering of non-profit tokens. Those of us without five houses or “director” beside our name will be lucky not to end up on the street. And the second queers here dare to fight back or speak up it’s time for tear gas and jail cells.

The cash city government is set to hand to the Salvation Army will, notably, be far more than they’ve ever directly given to aid queer communities. That fact alone tells you all you need to know about where their priorities are.

The rest of us must, as ever, muster our own strength, with both local government and the “Starvation Army” our enemies to the end.

So it’s worth remembering the final verse of that classic Joe Hill song:

Workers of all countries unite
Side by side for freedom we’ll fight
When the whole world and its wealth we have gained
To the grifters we’ll sing this refrain:

You wlll eat, bye and bye
When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
Then you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye

—

Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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