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12 am only counting regular Boy Scouts, not Cubs or Explorers, etc.: There are about 40,000 troops nationwide - 60% of them are Church-affiliated. Thats 24,000 troops. If 50% decide to drop out - thats 12,000 out. According to the BSA, the average troop is 20 Scouts. This means that 240,000 could drop out at the 50% rate. According to the BSA, there are about 800,000 regular Boy Scouts. The loss of 240,000 would mean a 30% loss of membership ...

On 4/19/2013, the BSA National Executive Committee released its summary of the results of 8 different study groups conducted in MAR/APR 2013. ...

The summary of findings said a policy change would cost the Scouts a minimum of 100,000 to 350,000 members (across all programs, i.e., Tiger-Cubs, Cubs, Webelos, Boy Scouts, Varsity Scouts, and Venturers). “It is believed any gain in membership because of a change to the membership policy related to youth and adults would be in the range of 10,000 to 20,000 youth.”

The total BSA membership at the end of 2012 was 2.6 million. So their worst projection was a loss of 13%. It would appear that the BSA National Executive Committee found that level of collateral damage to be acceptable.

Near as I can figure from December 2012 data for ALL BSA units [Cubs, Webelos, Boy Souts, etc.]:

76322 out of 107284 units are church-affiliated.

1646256 out of 2618163 total youths are church-affiliated.

All things being equal, a 50% loss of church-affiliates would be 38166 units and 823128 youths ...

I wonder if any of the “study groups” foresaw a snowball effect? Where a ball of consternation grows and the so called “100th monkey” effect kicks in? (I am not calling conservatives monkeys, but something needs to get them off their dime and maybe this is it, or a piece of it, by divine plan.)