Boy Scouts Can Blame Themselves For Losing Pentagon’s Favor

A young man I know was a fifth-grade Cub Scout when Scouting’s Boys’ Life magazine arrived in the mail for the first time with girls on the cover. He tossed aside the magazine unread, although he had been an avid reader before.

The gender studies era of Scouting’s “Great Awokening” had arrived. Our family’s generations-long involvement in Scouting ended soon after, for a combination of reasons involving the movement’s decline and its reinvention.

The movement, beset by sexual abuse cases and resulting bankruptcy, and declining sharply in numbers for decades, in the past decade expanded membership and leadership to openly LGBTQ youth and adults, prompting the rise of alternative groups such as Latter Day Saints Church programs and Trail Life USA for those seeking more traditional approaches to raising boys.

Now “woke” Scouting is back in the news, thanks to National Public Radio (NPR) obtaining leaked materials and attributing them to U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

The draft memos conclude that preferential government treatment of the remnant of the Scouting movement should come to an end.

Currently, those who achieve Eagle Scout rank in what had been the Boy Scouts still get special treatment when joining the US military, with advanced rank and pay. In addition, the military provides equipment and support for Scouting events not available to other groups. Such perks date back officially to the 1930s New Deal era.

But the leaked memos call today’s Scouting reflective of the type of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ideology that the Trump administration seeks to root out of the military, government agencies, and higher education. They argue that this has contributed to lower standards in Scouting, undermining meritocracy and its original goal to cultivate “masculine values.”

The criticisms raise the question of whether, in today’s culturally divided America, a professed “one-size-fits-all” youth organization like Scouts can merit official treatment amid division over its direction, despite a legacy of enjoying official support for many years.

Opening the Floodgates

The formerly mainstay American institution has had a wild ride in the past two decades. From 6 million members at its height in 1969 as the Boy Scouts of America, what is now called Scouting America currently has about 1 million members, despite the U.S. population growing by more than a third in the intervening time.

Going back to the founding in 1910, Scouts pledged to be “morally straight,” “clean,” and “reverent,” and to maintain “duty to God.” That all was historically understood in straightforward moral terms, including discouragement of sexual behavior outside of traditional marriage, including masturbation and pornography use.

Indeed, the Boy Scouts in 2000 went to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue successfully for its right as a private organization to prohibit expression of gender identity in its units and camps. The central issue was not excluding openly LGBTQIA-identifying members and leaders, but the movement’s underlying definition of freedom as self-restraint rather than self-expression.

The underlying Christian emphasis on self-restraint was the traditional ethos of Scouting, not shaping boys into open heterosexuals or any other type of sexuals, in the Hugh Hefner mold or otherwise. But making condoms available at Scout Jamborees in recent years symbolized the change, alongside in 2016 allowing allegiance to humanism to replace “duty to God” in the Scout Oath.

Early 21st-century American establishment leaders helped to usher in the new era of Scouting sexuality.

Former CEO of Exxon and later Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as the national Boy Scouts of American President, helped lead a 2013 decision to allow openly LGBTQ youths to enter Scouting. Then, under his successor as Scouts President, former CIA Director Bill Gates, in 2016 the Boy Scouts allowed openly LGBTQ adult leaders to serve.

By 2017, the Scouts allowed openly trans boys to join. By 2018, girls were allowed to join Cub Scouts. By 2019, Scouts further shifted, allowing girls to become Eagle Scouts. Certain exceptions from new policies were allowed for objecting religiously sponsored groups. But fundamental changes brought about a name change from Boy Scouts of America to Scouting America. Critics alleged that physical and other standards for promotion and badges were diminished in the process.

Forgetting their Christian Roots

President Theodore Roosevelt praised the movement as assisting a boy to learn to “master his fate,” and described it as “an asset to our country for the development of efficiency, virility, and good citizenship.”

“It is essential that its leaders be men of strong, wholesome character; of unmistakable devotion to our country, its customs and ideals, as well as in soul and by law citizens thereof, whose wholehearted loyalty is given to this nation, and to this nation alone,” Roosevelt said.

The early history of American Scouting was often tied to the so-called Seven Pillar denominations of mainline American Protestantism, although it became closely identified with American Catholic and Mormon communities also. One pillar, the United Methodist Church, historically a large sponsor of Scouting units, shows parallels both in liberalizing attitudes toward anthropology of sex and family, and decline in membership: From 11 million United Methodists in 1968 to 4 million today.

Scouting had a mixed background at its birth, with quasi-Masonic aspects in Order of the Arrow ceremonies, and “great Scoutmaster in the sky” language at camp chapel. It grew from Teddy Roosevelt-style nationalist progressivism and British Empire civics of the early 20th century. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book inspired Cub Scout ranks.

But it undoubtedly helped many American boys on their journey to becoming men.

In my Chicago neighborhood, I wore my Cub Scout uniform to school and trudged home to our basement den meeting, and over to the neighborhood Methodist Church for pack meetings and later Boy Scout troop meetings. Like many boys, I 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.

Our family’s relationship with Scouting ended around the time our younger son threw aside his Boys’ Life with girls on the cover. Our eldest lost his home troop due to dwindling membership. Dad didn’t want to send money to a national organization beset by scandal and changing mores.

However much America lost something with traditional Scouting, its legacy preferred treatment is difficult to justify today.

Dr. Paul Kentigern Siewers is associate professor of English at Bucknell University and was the 2018-2019 William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life at the James Madison Program, Princeton University. He is also a priest at St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He teaches and writes on Christian literature and ideas of nature, and on literary resistance to totalitarianism. His views are his own.