The Institution Nobody Recognizes

I’ve recently gotten back into a case involving the Salvation Army. I’d worked with them before, years ago, but it had been some time—and going through the material again, it was like a switch flipped. Because here’s the thing most people don’t know, including me, the first time I encountered them: the Salvation Army is a church.

I thought it was a charity. Everybody thinks it’s a charity. You see the red kettles at Christmas, you see the thrift stores, you see the shelters—and you assume it’s just a nonprofit that helps homeless people. It’s not. It’s a Protestant Christian denomination, organized in London in the 1860s, with actual doctrine, actual clergy, and an actual hierarchy of religious authority.

And that’s the part that really gets people: they call themselves an army, and they’re not being cute about it. They’re structured like one. Ranks, uniforms, a chain of command—except every one of those ranks corresponds to a position of religious and pastoral authority. A “Major” isn’t a military officer. A “Major” is clergy. That structure is deliberate. It was built in the 1800s to project discipline and order, and it still shapes how the organization handles internal problems today—including abuse.

Part of why nobody clocks this is the money. In 2004, the Salvation Army received the largest single charitable gift in American history—over a billion and a half dollars—from Joan Kroc, the widow of Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald’s into a global chain. That gift built community centers all over the country that bear the Kroc name. People walk into a Kroc Center for a swim class or a gym membership and have no idea they’re standing inside a facility owned and run by a church.

So you’ve got a religious institution operating with the public image of a secular charity, organized with military-style command structure, sitting on a Kroc-funded endowment—and running youth programs, shelters, and rehabilitation services that put staff and volunteers in direct, unsupervised contact with vulnerable people. That’s the setup.

And here’s what going back through this material reminded me of: these institutions—whether it’s the Salvation Army, whether it’s a church I’ve litigated against before—they don’t actually learn. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say they forget. There’s a pattern. At the start, they deny responsibility—”not our fault, not our problem.” Then a case lands, a verdict lands, a settlement lands—and suddenly they take accountability, because the number got big enough to get their attention. Then time passes. The people who wrote those checks move on. And the institution forgets why it was writing them in the first place. So it stops taking things seriously—until it gets hit again. Because apparently that’s what it takes to remind them.

That’s the story. Not just what happened, but why the same institutions keep needing to be reminded.

—Tim Kosnoff