Posted on 01/02/2019 8:54:39 AM PST by SeekAndFind
What’s left of the Boy Scouts of America (now operating as Scouts BSA) is on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, according to recent news reports. With estimated assets of more than $1 billion, Scouting’s problems go beyond the financial, deep into the problems with America’s civil culture today.
The U.S. Boy Scout movement reached its numerical height in 1969 with 6 million members, in a year with President Richard M. Nixon as honorary head of the Scouts and Eagle Scout astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping out on the moon.
I was a Cub Scout that year, once a week proudly wearing my uniform to Armstrong Elementary School in our Chicago neighborhood, heading to our well-attended den meeting right after school. My liberal Democratic parents signed me up, my dad a World War II veteran supportive of Scouting’s patriotism.
Fast-forward ahead nearly 50 years: Scout membership has dropped toward 2 million. The impending departure of the Latter Day Saints troops this year will drop that total by one-fifth. Our local school district in conservative central Pennsylvania won’t allow promoting Scouting at school. In our college town, many in the woke local elite now despise Scouting as neo-Nazi and white nationalist, despite efforts to change the national movement to please progressives. My son’s local troop closed recently for lack of members, and so did others in the area.
The national organization faces large lawsuits due to alleged cases of sexual abuse as state legislatures change the statute of limitations on such cases. It also faces a lawsuit from the Girl Scouts for poaching on their membership by changing its name recently to Scouts BSA and recruiting girls.
It’s Not Just Financial Bankruptcy The old American Boy Scouts might as well be filing for moral bankruptcy, having lost both its base and elite cultural capital. What used to be an organization designed to help boys become men has now been re-fashioned in line with the new gnosticism of American culture, accepting LGTBQIA ideology, while abandoning its traditional ascetic position about sex and its opposition to atheism.
Next year’s World Scouting Jamboree in West Virginia reportedly will be the first hosted by the former Boy Scouts of America to make condoms available to participants. A 2016 agreement with the Unitarian-Universalists overrode the group’s membership requirement of belief in God by allowing belief in humanism, contrary to the Scout Oath.
The “bowling alone” syndrome of declining civic groups in the United States, over-scheduling of young people, and the weakening of American family models all played a role. In fact, political scientist Paul Kengor of Grove City College has detailed the history of American communists and cultural Marxists’s efforts to target and subvert Scouting in particular, to help undermine American family life.
Yet it was corporate executives and members of the U.S. political establishment (including Scouting leaders such as Rex Tillerson and Robert Gates) on the national board who with progressive staff members agreed to surrender to pressure to sexualize the organization in recent years, despite an earlier hard-fought U.S. Supreme Court victory by the organization to preserve membership rules. In admitting openly gay members and leaders, accepting transgenderism, then admitting girls, Scouting turned its back on a cultural background of Christian teaching on sexuality going back millennia.
The central issue was not admitting openly LGBTQIA-identifying members and leaders, but redefining the group’s value of freedom as self-expression, rather than self-restraint. The latter was the traditional ethos of Scouting, not shaping boys into open heterosexuals or any other type of -sexuals, in the “Mad Men”/Hugh Hefner mold or anything else.
Turning On Historic Christian Morality In Scouting in recent decades, physical edginess and “tough” training requirements also were loosened or removed. The values of a culture dedicated to the human person as totally malleable, based on self-will, took hold. Safety and comfort became increasingly the ultimate values.
Such values, which affected Scouting ultimately more because of changes in in its anchoring mainline Protestant and business cultures than leftist subversion, reject an age-old cultural inheritance of the American republic that regarded virtue and self-restraint as the goals of education of young men, to be leaders of a free society and the families that would continue it.
In the wake of the Neo-Chalcedonianism established by the Fifth Ecumenical Church Council in 553, St. Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century articulated the basis for traditional Christian ascetic approaches to identity as a cosmology, not merely morality. It was a synthesis in part of biblical and Greek philosophical traditions. He wrote of how God created man male and female, but also that there was neither male nor female in Christ.
Maximus’ Christian Byzantine Empire had a performative sense of biological and embodied sexual identity of men and women, with also a third gender or sex, that of both eunuchs and ascetics. Virtuous and holy women could aspire to manliness; men could venerate the Mother of God as the best of saints. Self-restrained and grace-filled chastity, engaged in marriage to the oppose sex or to Christ in monastic community, was seen as leading to the fulfillment of human life in oneness with God’s grace—not essentializing sexual passions by objectifying others.
The complementarity of marriage was a living symbol of the relation of humanity in the universal church to God. Biological sexes of male and female were an embodied sacred iconography to be honored and followed, nurturing trans-generational families in which men could learn to be guardians of peace, husbands who would lay down their lives for their families and country.
That is the deep and complex centuries-old basis for a moral initiation into manhood that dimly still underlay the Boy Scout Oath and Law, a distant cultural inheritance.
Setting Boys Adrift In a Mooring-less Culture Scouts were never a perfect organization. Major problems with sexual abuse and coverups of it show that. They had quasi-Masonic aspects in Order of the Arrow ceremonies and “great Scoutmaster in the sky” language at camp chapel, emerging from an odd crucible of Teddy Roosevelt-style nationalist progressivism and British Empire civics of the early 20th century. Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” also inspired Cub Scout ranks.
But in the lost world of 1969 working-class Chicago neighborhoods, in the heyday of the Boy Scouts of America, I with many other boys before and since learned valuable lessons from Scouting, and however imperfectly kept respect for the virtues of the Scout Oath and Law tucked away with my old copy of the Scout handbook and Scout pocket knife in later years.
Our eldest son found a home in a small rural troop run by dedicated military and law enforcement veterans. I often went along on camping trips as an adult volunteer leader. It was a great experience and a sad day when the troop closed recently due to dwindling membership.
Our family’s relationship with regular Scouting ended around the time our younger son in fifth grade ran to get his copy of Boys Life magazine in the mail only to throw it aside because it was featuring girls, as if photoshopped into Norman Rockwell Scouting art. He lost his enthusiasm, our eldest lost his home troop, and dad didn’t want to send money to a national organization adrift.
Not just the old Boy Scouts but America may need receivership for moral bankruptcy. Either way, the real shame is that it is that much of a harder path today for many American boys without strong male role models to find their way to the freedom of self-restraint in manhood envisioned in that millennia-old tradition.
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Dr. Alfred Kentigern Siewers is the William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life (2018-2019) at the James Madison Program, Princeton University, and associate professor of English at Bucknell University. He is also reader and warden at Holy Protection Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes on Christian literature and ideas of nature, and on public rhetoric related to secularism and faith. His views are his own.
I don’t care what the detractors say, the BSA sold out its principles over 4 years ago and are reaping the inevitable fallout.
I agree. Leting homo leaders take our kids on a camping trip was the end for me. I grew up in the scouts and enjoyed my youth there. That BSA is gone never to return ,to bad good way.
Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of Trail Life USA. The staggering growth of the program from nothing to over 800 chapters nationwide shows that parents and boys yearn for adventure in a strong Christian moral setting.
Moral breakdown frequently leads to social, financial, organizational ruin. Let the BSA go out of business and take your kids to any of the several better, less harmful clubs in town.
In the late 1990s, I put my own sons through the program but it was already in steep decline. Boys weren't even allowed to carry a pocketknife and the mothers went everywhere with them. It was more like helicopter parent scouting.
Read the 1963 communist goals
Undermining all of the institutions that made America great was one of them.
BSA used to be one of those institutions.
Now it’s a casualty.
The headline says it ALL !
He's right. It's not just the queer agenda that has destroyed BSA. The new normal in our culture today is to relegate men (and boys) to a third class status of individuals we should barely tolerate due to their toxic masculinity.
Men are bad, dontcha know.
The United States was founded on a principle of individual freedom, and was built by men who were often unconventional in their thinking and in their business practices. The idea of creating a national organization to establish and reinforce standards of personal behavior that are most effectively promoted through good parenting and personal responsibility surely would have seemed alien to them.
The BSA debacle is a perfect example of a bit of wisdom I learned over the years:
A large organization is much more easily corrupted than a loosely connected group of people.
This!
The BSA didn't even exist until 1910. This country existed without the Boy Scouts for a longer period of time than it existed with them.
“I’m probably in the minority here, but I always saw the BSA as a sign of an unhealthy American culture.”
Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, a BSA troop met in our church one day a week. I guess Dad was prescient, because he told them needed to find another place to meet. He said the direction they were going wasn’t good or Christian, and we wanted no association with them at all. (Little did he know how bad they would become.)
Wow, I must be a total screw up as a Trail Life Leader. We train each boy how to safely use a knife on his first campout. When they hit a certain level, they can carry a sheath knife. Most boys are never without a knife. Same with fires.
Our summer camp last year expended 7000 .22 cartridges and 1500 12 gauge shells.
At a recent recruiting meeting, I had a power point slide with three pictures. One was one of our boys on a climbing wall stretching for a handhold, another was a six year old sporting a BB gun and a happy smile. The third was our FReeper favorite Pajama Boy. I simply asked “Which of these do you want your son to be?”
On the flip side, a buddy was sitting outside his tent one day and they saw two trucks with trailers pull up. Several women got out and started setting up a large group camp. He thought a Girl Scout troop was there to camp and was on the way. The women set up all the tents, the kitchen, cleaning areas etc for a very large group. They got in their truck and left. A few minutes later, a Boy Scout troop arrived. My buddy was speechless. That’s exactly how NOT to do an adventure program.
It was a beneficial organization for most of its history, that was my only point.
It was a great institution. Stopped being that when PC took over. It needs to be dissolved and eliminated.
Yep, that was my response too. At the time, I thought I could continue as Cubmaster in our pack's little bubble of tradition, but they are pushing the girl thing SO HARD and boys will just reject it. What an incredible mis-read of boys and men by the national BSA. They are through.
It is impossible for me to view what is going on and what has happened to the Boy Scouts, and not see that exact parallel in the US Military, and it is being transparently done with many of the same tools of moral corrosion, excavation and destruction that were used to destroy the Boy Scouts.
Of the many things I despise Leftism for, there is a special place in Hell for this effort.
Now, there are 6, and the pack is holding on by a fingernail. I'd guess that it will go under next year. Admitting girls will be the end of it.
The Boy Scout Troop is faring a little better, but with no pack to feed it, I'm dubious as to its survival.
I took over recruiting at exactly the wrong time. We went from dozens of kids showing up at each school we visited, to exactly one kid in attendance out of all 6 schools where we had a "Scout Night". Now, we're not allowed in schools, at all.
So, what's changed? Leaders blame "Changed Families", "Single Parents", "Less Time", "Football", "Karate", "Soccer", "Video Games", and a dozen other things. They're not inaccurate, but they're all wrong.
This author lays the real reasons all out, perfectly. Unfortunate that no one who needs to read it, will.
I went through Cub Scouts and they kept promising us all sorts of great adventures. Twice we set out for different day events and the lady who pretty much ran the Den couldn’t find it so she just took us to the mall and we played on the Hibitrail while she shopped.
Never thought of asking for directions. They can just hide the Battleship Texas anywhere. (I forget the second one) In the entire Cub program, we never actually went anywhere.
First day of Boy Scouts, same place and same “leader.” We made paper puppets out of grocery store bags.
I never went back.
I would have loved to have had the adventures that others talk of.
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