For leaders of the organization formerly known as the BOY Scouts, the clock is ticking toward a radically different New Year that will change all kinds of equations in the struggling organization that once occupied the safe middle-ground in American culture.
I am referring to the moment when entire troops of boys in the faith group formerly known as the Mormons will begin hitting the exit doors of Scouting. (Click here for lots of GetReligion posts on this topic.)
This is the kind of symbolic event that deserves a big feature story from the Associated Press — ”Mormons pulling 400,000 youths out of struggling Boy Scouts“ — which will run in mainstream newspapers from coast to coast — as it should.
It’s a good story. The question, for me, is whether it needed to dedicate two or three paragraphs to the big picture — as in other angles linked to religion that will affect Scouting in the near future. Hold that thought, because we will return to it. Meanwhile, here is the overture of this new AP piece:
KAYSVILLE, Utah (AP) — For decades, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of Boy Scouts of America’s greatest allies and the largest sponsor of troops. But on Jan. 1, the Utah-based faith will deliver the latest blow to the struggling organization when it pulls out more than 400,000 young people and moves them into a new global program of its own.
The change brings excitement and some melancholy for members of the faith and may push the Boy Scouts closer to the brink of bankruptcy as it faces a new wave of sex abuse lawsuits.
Losing the church will mean about an 18% drop in Boy Scout youth membership compared with last year’s numbers and mark the first time since the World War II era that the figure will fall below 2 million. At its peak in the 1970s, more than 4 million boys were Scouts.
Wayne Perry, a church member who is a past president of Boy Scouts of America and a current member of its national board, said the end of the long-term alliance will sting and force many regional councils in the U.S. West to lay off employees and sell some camps.
This downward spiral has put some Scouting camps on the chopping block?
Male readers may want to brace themselves before reading on if, like me, they grew up in the Southwest and dreamed of going on the ultimate Scouting adventure. For some reason, the AP team put this bombshell at the end of the feature:
Last month, the Scouts confirmed it had mortgaged one of its most spectacular properties, the vast Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, to help secure a line of credit. The organization said it had no plans to sell and is using the land as collateral to help meet financial needs, including rising insurance costs related to sex abuse litigation.
So why is this happening? The AP feature does a good job covering some of the root causes of this crisis, from a “secular” point of view, as well as trends that have disturbed leaders in some religious groups.
For starters, American children are growing up in an age dominated by circles of glowing screens full of addictive video games and digital superheroes. Lots of teens would rather dig into Mortal Kombat 666 than hike to the point of exhaustion, without smartphones, and then eat charred baked potatoes that were wrapped in foil and tossed into the glowing coals of a campfire. It’s also possible, for many, that Scouting clashed with soccer practices.
There were other issues, of course, for leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in North America and around the world:
The split between the Boy Scouts and church ends a nearly century-old relationship between two organizations that were brought together by shared values but have diverged in recent years. Amid declining membership, the Boy Scouts of America opened its arms to openly gay youth members and adult volunteers as well as girls and transgender boys, while the church believes that same-sex intimacy is a sin.
“The reality there is we didn’t really leave them; they kind of left us,” high-ranking church leader M. Russell Ballard recently said about the split.
But let’s get back to the math that is at the heart of this crisis, now and in the future.
As of 2013, there were more than 430,000 Latter-day Saint boys in the Boy Scouts. The latest tally of the Scouts’ total youth membership was about 2.2 million last year, and its press office confirmed that the church exodus would push that number close to 1.8 million. …
Even with the admission of 150,000 girls, and the extension of the Cub Scout program to kindergartners, there’s been no sign that the decline will end soon.
OK, here are some big questions that loomed over this article, in my opinion.
So there were 4 million Scouts in the mid-1970s — the heyday of mainstream American religion — and there were 2.2 million Scouts last year. What happened during the years before the exodus of the Latter-day Saints?
Also, what about the future? If religious groups have played a pivotal role in Scouting in the past (and they have), then what religious groups remain that can provide a foundation for Scouting in the future?
To be blunt: Who left and who remains? The key: What are United Methodists saying about all of this?
Here is how I stated that in a post earlier this year that ran under a headline that said, “A big news story: Scouting was a mainstream thing, embracing a vague faith. What now?”
Remember these three facts: The Southern Baptists have been bailing out of Scouting for years now. The United Methodists are, well, at war with each other over the same kinds of moral issues that are tearing up the Scouts. And now the Latter-day Saints are opening the exit door and moving on. …
In the old days, the vast majority of Scouting units were based in conservative or centrist religious flocks.
What now? Will liberal Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and Unitarians step up? But how many young children are there, in America’s aging, shrinking flocks of oldline Protestants? At the very least, journalists need to dig into the status of Scouting units in the divided and warring camps of United Methodists. Have they been caught in the crossfire?
I realize that the purpose of this solid AP piece was to cover the big story RIGHT NOW, which is the exodus of the Latter-day Saints.
However, it would have only taken another paragraph or two to note the incredible importance, during Scouting’s decline, of the many United Methodist troops that remain. Are there conservative United Methodists who are worried about the changes? Are United Methodists on the doctrinal left pleased and do they plan to step forward to provide leadership? Will they have the financial resources, and children, that Scouting will need?
Just asking.