Thoughts on Leaving the BSA

That is an important essay, and its true that Mormonism has become less culturally Mormon over my lifetime. Probably for the best, but still regrettable.

Remember President Oaks thing about trying to row against a hard current? We are trying to row against a hard current that men and women are no different. Bottomline that’s the Sexual Revolution right there. We are abandoning the BSA because they gave up rowing upstream. But what happens when you jump out of a canoe in the middle of a river? You get carried downriver too. It’s going to be really hard to do our own thing that teaches that men are men. We are going to get moved downstream. Not even sure we are going to try to resist that hard. Dollars to donuts the new Church program is more unisex than what we currently have. So, yes, its a real tragedy.

I wonder a bit if the BSA knew the Church was working on its own program for awhile, and that’s what made the BSA decide to go full prog to help its membership numbers.

Membership numbers. The falsest of false gods if ever there was one. You sell your soul for membership numbers, and in return you get nothing, especially not membership numbers.

“Dollars to donuts the new Church program is more unisex than what we currently have.”

Yes, I noticed how completely gender neutral the announcements are, and I thought of the current Come, Follow Me outlines where you have to look carefully to find the handful of differences between the YW and AP versions.

It sounds like a complete overhaul is coming, with dropping scouts just a fraction of it. The prophet is a surgeon. Two years ago Russell Nelson conducted a Q&A session with priesthood leaders as part of our stake conference. My question, which I was never called on to voice, was how is the church going to respond to the demographic change that leaves most wards with only a handful of youth? It has become very common for two wards to combine and have between them one youth program and one children’s Primary.

I suspect that President Nelson is in a hurry because he knows he’s only got so much living left to do, and probably he has marching orders from the Lord . . . if I understand what I heard in General Conference right.
The Scouting announcement was bittersweet for our family – my dad has been an avid scouter for his entire life, and he believes that Scouting does boys much good. However, he sees the direction the program has taken and can’t help but agree with the Church’s decision.
I don’t know that the new church programs will be totally gender neutral, but if they are I hope they’ll include teaching useful life skills instead of the busywork activities I remember hating.

Well, relying on a social organization to teach manliness is kinda girl-y. From my perspective, it’s always been part of the call to care for the fatherless, i.e. not the ideal where a father teaches his son how to be manly. I think it’s important to remember that the primary way to care for the fatherless is generally to strive to minimize fatherlessness of various kinds.

Also, I think of John the Baptist. Nothing like a real wilderness to teach a man where to put his trust. So breaking with BSA will help some shatter the illusion of there being a ‘safe’ wilderness for the transition of boy to man. And I definitely think many need to learn this.

A thought that crossed my mind was to hold a final LDS scout campout in November 2019 where all who have one could wear their scout uniforms one last time, tear them from their bodies in gesture of mourning, and cast them on the fire.

New BSA Slogan

“We chased all the scouts away, but we now have more BS than ever before.”

What percent of cub scout units, boy scout units, and venturing (or is it varsity?) units is BSA going to lose with the LDS withdrawal?

And what percentsge of enrollees (kids) in each category will be lost?

I’ve always heard that Mormons are 20% of scouts, and the media is reporting that figure now. I don’t know if that’s an accurate figure, or just an article of faith at this point.

Whatever percentage of scouts are Mormon, the percentage of units is higher, because Mormon units are smaller.

@John Mansfield those are nice shirts though

I am reminded of John Adams’s words excluded from the final draft of the Declaration of Independence, “Together, we might have been a great nation.” Anything that is not purely evil is not wholly irredeemable, and the choice not to redeem it is bittersweet, even if totally justified. Christ met the corruption in Jerusalem with rebuke and physical violence, but still wept for the city. Even an emotionally mature divorce(e) knows that something has been lost in the split they chose, even if for good reason.

Those who are reacting with glee are either too emotionally immature to see what has been lost, or worse, i fear, many don’t value it.

Pres. Nelson is tossing out our old bottles, and there is a lot of work ahead to make new wine.

My impression is that the changes in BSA are only half of the reason for dropping scouts, and not even the most important half. The LDS church has long talked of being a global church. First that meant that we were sending missionaries to every continent, and then it meant that there were stakes in most countries. For some years now, it has meant that fewer than half the members on the roles were baptized in the United States. Maybe we are reaching a stage where fewer than half of those attending church on Sunday are doing so in an American chapel. Besides the international dimension, which the church keeps mentioning in statements about the youth programs, there is the demographic dimension that wards have smaller numbers of youth than they used to. LDS scout troops were already small, but I wonder what the median number of boys is in a deacons’ quorum now.

The demographic and international dimensions might have been worked in a way that included BSA: do scouting on a stake level, embrace a variety of national-level models of LDS youth programs. The changes in BSA made it not worth including BSA in whatever the new overhaul will be.

I am curious what President Nelson has coming for the children and youth and wonder if what we have in five years could be as different from what we’ve had through my lifetime as what we have now is from a century ago. As a reminder of how different the organization of things could be, consider Spencer Kimball. In May 1914 at age 19, he was called to a mission to begin in October. In the months before the mission he was ordained a priest, then an elder three months later (not by his stake president father, but by Bro. S.J. Sims). In September, he was passed upon to be ordained a Seventy at a Priesthood Meeting in Arizona. On Oct. 16 in Salt Lake City, he was endowed in the morning, and ordained in the afternoon by Uncle Golden Kimball as a Seventy in the 89th Quorum of Seventies.

Quorum structure of the Aaronic priesthood is given emphasize periodically, that we can’t just lump all the ward’s deacons, teachers, and priests together, but running separate quorums is not very different from running no quorums when each of them has three or fewer boys.

@Lucinda,
boys are meant to socialize in packs. The gang, the band of brothers, the disciples, are core elements of masculinity. Now that we are all bowling alone, we pretty much ought to be relying on a social organization for this.

@JM,
excellent points, especially about the smaller wards with smaller youth numbers.

@PH,
time will tell.

If anything signifies that today’s youths will be around for the Second Coming, I think this is it.

You all know vastly more about scouting than I do (I’m not a joiner – I was a cub for six months or so aged about 9, but didn’t like it)… but it is worth reflecting on this split from the POV of the BSA.

How many ‘businesses’ would choose to lose-for-sure ?20% of their customers, and probably a great deal more of their active organisers?

Do BSA *really* expect that the new rainbow scouts will recruit more support than they will certainly lose?

If they do, they are either fools – or else they don’t really care. It is the latter.

The decision was made by *management* – and managers are generic, and managers are appointed (in most managerial jobs) to implement political correctness – to make all organisations ‘converge’ onto the left agenda, especially the sexual revolution.

Any organisation that does this can expect all kinds of subsidies – which typically go direct to the management, not the members/ clients. When (not if) the BSA collapses (or is absorbed into some state scheme) the managers who made the decision will be long gone into other organisations which they can exploit.

And this is happening in all organisations. Management parasitizes all social institutions, which is why we have bureaucracy instead of functionality.

And bureaucracy just-is totalitarianism.

BC, you are so right. I’m sure the board of trustees made the final decisions on the homosexual/trans questions. But, higher-up execs at BSA make salaries in the multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

There is an adjunct organization called “Friends of Scouting” that raises money for BSA, but a too-large portion of funds raised go to FoS and BSA corporate exec salaries.

Come to think of it, the board of trustees probably gets salaries too. Can someone verify that?

Books,

Friends of Scouting is a campaign run by each council of BSA, and the money goes directly to the council rather than to national.

(Aside: Making phone calls for FOS last night as part of my calling led to some very interesting conversations.)

FOS money is a significant part of the operational budget of a council, including payroll.

I don’t want to dance on the grave of BSA. Here’s one thing I haven’t noticed people talking about, though. BSA hasn’t been a boys-into-men, wilderness survival, toughen ’em up organization for YEARS. I have five boys, the oldest of whom just got his Eagle. And I value the work he did to earn it, and that of his wonderful leaders. But MUCH of the work he did for merit badges, etc., was…not to put too fine a point on it…garbage. Repeating environment-saving platitudes, anti-bullying platitudes, diversity platitudes…the manly wilderness survival stuff was scant and far-between. Sure, there’s still camping. But the official camps and day camps are laughably safety- and sensitivity-conscious. (Not that I mind safety-conscious! I’m a worrying mom! But I thought the point of scouts was getting them out of the hands of us worrying moms for awhile.)

I was a cub scout leader for a few years. The number of permission/safety forms we had to sign to DRIVE THE BOYS TO A NEARBY CHURCH for a “cub-a-ree” was boggling. For our “hike,” we dumbed it down to a walk around the lake because anything more strenuous had issues. And then what did the cub scout guidelines tell us? We couldn’t have the boys EVEN NEAR WATER (mind you we weren’t swimming…just walking) without an extra set of adult leaders. And more permissions. Most scout leaders I talked to said they were just going to avoid even going anywhere with water nearby, since it was such a pain to do it with the “sanction” of BSA. Easier to drop the “survival” stuff altogether and stay at the church talking about celebrating diversity and making crafts out of recycled materials.

I see the need for boys to do dangerous, manly things in social groups. And to the extent my boys got to do that in scouts, I appreciated it. I think they learned some other worthwhile things too. The animation or art or coding merit badges can be fun and accommodate many interests. But I can’t see that those things are anything close to the “military model” or even the BSA model of days gone by. If we are mourning anything, it’s an ethos that disappeared from BSA long ago.

Amen. I mentally quit Scouts years ago when they came up with a rule against using squirt guns because it was too violent.

There is some sense that this is President Nelson’s doing. However, I was impressed by something he emphasized in Conference when announcing other major changes:

“These modifications have been under study for many months. “

I think President Nelson wished to emphasize that these changes were already in motion well before President Monson was released. It may be that President Monson’s health caused the Brethren to move slowly, and so there was something of a logjam of pending proposals waiting for a better moment. Or it could be that the Lord wished for there to be no question that a big change in direction truly came from the President of the Church. Or it could be that the Lord chuckled at the thought of President Nelson confounding overconfident observers outside the Church who predicted no important changes under the new President. My impression is that the Lord not only has a sense of humor, but He sometimes has a mordant sense of humor — though never cruel. Cruelty is not in His nature.

The bland talk certainly bears the interpretation as bureaucratic pablum-speak. I suspect part of it is the Church’s desire to show an example of civility in a time when pablum-speak is actually less evil than a lot of the current public conversation. I suspect part of it is simple diplomacy, which is easily mistaken for pablum-speak. Part of it is choosing which hill to die on. BSA is frankly not a hill worth dying on any more.

Solid reflections, friend.

I see that BSA raised registration dues by a large percentage again, as it has done every few years for a while. Before 2003 the fee per boy was $7. The schedule of fee changes has been: $10 in 2003, $15 in 2010, $24 in 2014, and now $33 since December 2017. Almost five times what it was 16 years ago. It used to be an almost trivial expense; now it’s on par with the amount wards have to budget for their youth activities for the year.

Mistaben (or anyone else),

Are the salaries of BSA Council execs and other employees public knowledge? How much do the top full-time people in a council make?