The end of Scouting, as I've been told for decades
Or, "Okay, but this time I KNOW I'm right..."
Sigh. I have been working on a post, now already in two parts, under the heading “Reframing Disciples decline” which is meant to follow “Misunderstanding Disciples decline” from earlier in April, that was part of my response to essays published recently about both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Methodist Church (UMC). That earlier post is here:
https://knapsack.substack.com/p/misunderstanding-disciples-decline
The response to that post has been the biggest and most complex I’ve ever had on social media, and my own reply had to wait for the end of the UMC General Conference on May 3, and the conclusion of a class I was teaching on Disciples history & polity later that week. As I said, the follow-up is now in two parts and will be posted shortly.
It gives me some cover that my regional minister, Rev. Allen Harris, has done a great job on this topic in a cogent and concise fashion, and I commend his essay to you all to start with:
However.
https://www.scoutingnewsroom.org/press-releases/boy-scouts-of-america-to-become-scouting-america/
I had gotten word through the Scouting grapevine last week this was coming, either Monday or Tuesday of this week. My first reaction was “oh, Scouting/USA?” Because we had launched that re-branding in 1976, and I knew Scouting still owned that mark, but I heard “nope, Scouting America.” Which is easier to replace onto signage where it had said “Boy Scouts of America” into “Scouting America” I suppose.
On one level, it’s much ado about not much. National did have a package ready on that issue, which you can see at work here:
What it did, to no one’s real surprise, was reawaken the angst and tsuris about women and girls in “the Boy Scouts.” In today’s culture wars landscape, it was a flare over the battlefield for the usual mortars and howitzers to sight in on.
The problem with much of the objections I saw is that they’re reacting to developments that are literally decades old. If you’re directly involved in unit service let alone district or council life in Scouting (which is what we all have called the BSA in wider or national terms for some time now, not “the Boy Scout national administrative offices” or even “Boy Scouting”), you know having women directly involved at all levels is old news.
One adult colleague posted in a comment on something I’d tried to say about all this the following:
Women were already admitted as leaders (commissioners to den leaders) back in 1973, arguably to save the institution due to lack of male volunteers. Girls being allowed into scouting more recently recognized that society as a whole has changed, and that girls can benefit from the program as well as boys can. It was also due to declining membership, and a desire again to keep the institution alive.
My daughter attended Cub Scout day camp with her brothers for years, and did everything they did as a “sibling camper”. My wife then tried to create a Girl Scout troop for her to belong to, and discovered pretty big differences in both how the National programs worked, but also the issues with clique’ish behavior of some Girl Scout troops that allowed parent leaders to simply turn kids away. Cub and Scout troops simply don’t work this way, and we couldn’t have been happier when our daughter got the opportunity to officially join. The BSA’s program was simply better for our daughter, and obviously a lot of other girls today.
At fifteen years of age, she will likely have her Eagle within a year, and is getting ready to start her second year on staff at a summer camp. She has learned to be self sufficient, be more confident, and be a responsible member of her community (she gets pretty angry when she sees an American flag be mistreated). It seems to me we all should want this opportunity for all of our kids, regardless of their gender.
I’m happy to salute that comment. What got me thinking about the history of how we got here is his opening aside about admitting women “arguably to save the institution due to lack of male volunteers.” That’s where the story of church activity in general as well as youth programming in faith communities, and the transitions Scouting has gone through, have some common features. So it seems worth delaying my “Reframing Disciples decline” posts to trace that narrative.
From 1910, no doubt, the Boy Scouts of America were an all-male preserve. Like many aspects of US culture, BSA was for boys as member Scouts, and for adult males as advisors or “Scouters.” As to girls, it was said in 1909 in Scouting’s birthplace, Great Britain: "If a girl is not allowed to run, or even hurry, to swim, ride a bike, or raise her arms above her head, how can she become a Scout?” Cultural norms about young womanhood meant they literally couldn’t pass the requirements for Scouting in the early handbooks, which is why Baden-Powell helped to organize Girl Guides in 1910 for Great Britain, and the Girl Scouts of America in 1912.
Where things began to change dramatically was with the launch of Cub Scouting in the US. There had been younger scout programs in Great Britain and the US from 1918, but it wasn’t until 1930 a fully developed Cub Scout program was launched, which had pack meetings and within the pack, den meetings, which could be led by a den mother. It worked about the way you’d assume; the Cub Scout den I joined in 1969 met in a garage down the block, with a mom leading our twice a month meetings, then a male Cubmaster leading the pack meeting once a month at a downtown church.
It was in 1967, just before I joined, that den mother was changed to “den leader,” and women could serve as both den leaders, and as assistant Cubmasters. In 1969, Explorer posts for older youth were launched, and girls could join those as youth “affiliate” members. The fuse, if you will, was lit there, in the last years of the 1960s.
My friend’s assertion that women were admitted “arguably to save the institution due to lack of male volunteers” might trace back to Cub Scout role den mothers played. In my own experience, you got moms in Wolf & Bear years, then a man was the Webelos leader who oversaw the transition from Cubs into Boy Scouts, just as the public face of the pack, your Cubmaster, was always male. But without den mothers, you had no Cub Scouts.
And here’s where the arguments begin. I knew old school Scouters in the 1970s & 80s as I made my own shift from youth Scout to adult Scouter, who still argued quite strongly that Cub Scouting was a bad idea, that you’d “burn kids out” on the program, and that younger kids didn’t belong out of doors with knives and axes and BB guns, and if you weren’t outside doing that kind of stuff, it wasn’t Scouting.
Suffice it to say they lost that argument, but I recall no small amount of sulking, at least up into around 1990 when I heard the effective last of it. However, as a minister I heard some very impassioned echoes with the introduction of Junior or Partnership Camp into the church camp world, with 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders given a chance to go sleep in bunks and eat in dining halls (no knives, axes, or BB guns, to be sure): they said this is a BAD idea, or some old school church camp leaders maintained. You’ll burn kids out on camp if you start too young, and they’re not ready for it anyhow.
I had my first exposure to Junior Camp in church life at Merom Conference Center with the Disciples & UCC in Indiana during the summers of 1988 & 1989; on arriving in Ohio, I was quickly co-opted to assist in bringing Junior Camp to Templed Hills with Disciples & UCC involvement during the pilot summer of 1990. Both Indiana & Ohio regional leaders heard some pushback on what is now an anchor program for church camp, and it was hotly debated until around 2000 when it quietly became what we’d always done. Was it a mistake to launch Cub Scouts in 1930 or Junior Camp in the 1980s? Or was the nature and maturity of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders changing, meaning they were ready to take up the challenge? Obviously I think the latter is the case, but it’s absolutely true that you could do neither program, church or Scouts, with solely male leadership. Not that they were disappearing, but because there weren’t enough men only to pick up the slack. So women came into leadership.
Meanwhile, back to Scouting: in 1976, as I noted above, “Scouting/BSA” showed up as a service mark and the actual name in red thread over the green shirt pocket, next to a red fleur-de-lis. This was the culmination of a series of adaptations in the Scouting program from 1972, trying to reach both urban (and often minority) youth where the term “boy” was fraught with unpleasant meaning, and also as more youth were in suburbs which frankly was a context the program was slow to understand. Scouting had a solid history in both city settings and rural communities, but suburban life was a puzzle the BSA had to wrestle with, and arguably is still wrestling with.
The revised Scouting program meant that from 1972, it’s been the Scout Handbook. “Boy” has been steadily avoided in most cases, though the 1976 “Scouting/BSA” service mark was retired within two years; changes in advancement were largely maintained but Eagle required merit badges were pulled back to 21 (they’d been 24 for a few years) but the alternatives which made Eagle more “urban friendly” were kept. Meanwhile, almost silently, women were allowed to become troop committee members, assistant Scoutmasters, and in some communities, women were de facto Scoutmasters . . . though none would be formally recognized as such until 1988.
The biggest earthquake in Scouting I recall from 1982, which might not be when it actually began but was when it reached northern Indiana and southwestern Michigan, was two-fold. Women were to be allowed at resident camps as adult leaders, and two-deep leadership was to be observed at all times. I think, in keeping with my friend’s observation first noted, the two are somewhat related. The bottom line was no troop, even if it was just five or six boys, would have a single adult overnight in the campsite, or doing a personal growth conference for rank advancement. This was a change, and not a few long-standing troops had been accustomed to a single adult leader at summer camp, given that a week of vacation had to be taken.
Let’s just say no one comes out looking to good in that summer, as I was in my first adult staff role in Scouting, and I caught a major facefull of unhappiness from men who had been adult leaders in Scouting longer than I’d been alive. Two-deep leadership meant no long heart-to-heart conversations during long walks in the woods. I know, today in 2024, it sounds even worse, but I could feel the ick as a 21 year old left in charge of a Scout reservation and running the adult leader meetings on many Sunday and Friday nights during the six week season, as they ranted at me about what they sincerely believed they and “their boys” were losing. These veteran Scoutmasters — and many were veterans in both senses of the term — had been doing their conferences a certain way for decades, and they knew they were good people, and it was up to Scouting to keep the creeps out, but not to restrict their way of molding young lives.
It was, however, my job to tell them they had to change. Two-deep leadership was taught at National Camp School (NCS), part of our certification, and I understood it, agreed with it, and enforced it . . . sometimes with grown men bellowing into my face, and I learned a new degree of facial control as I let them bellow until exhausted, then repeated as calmly as I could “this is a national standard which we will follow, no exceptions.”
Again, somewhat silently, the pressures around two-deep leadership opened the door more for women as at least assistant Scoutmasters, and I saw more than a few de facto Scoutmasters who were women. One week I was asked by a disgruntled leader if Troop 000 in campsite X “had any leaders in camp with them this week?” I said I believed they had three; he replied “I know the troop has three women there, but where’s their leader.” Ahem.
By the late 1980s, Scouting had introduced Youth Protection Training, or YPT, as a required training experience for unit leaders. Having gotten an early version of it for three summers at different National Camp Schools, as summer staff were required to take it, I was a district YPT trainer doing the two hour training in person for many years; my role shifted to facilitator with a video tape standard training in the 1990s, later replaced with a DVD. By the 2010s the training had migrated online, and I did my last in-person YPT. It was stated from around 1999 that the plan was to require any adult staying overnight with youth to be YPT trained, but not stringently enforced until more recently. Today, you cannot stay overnight on a Scout property without having a valid adult registration and YPT certification.
I won’t further clutter this trip down memory lane than saying I have vivid memories of older Scouters ranting and raving at me about the stupidity of YPT, and the increasing pressure on more adult leaders to take it. It was unnecessary, unhelpful, and had nothing to do with “us.” It was “those people” by which they usually meant the people we were keeping out of leadership. I backed into my advocacy of changing the leadership standards of the BSA, to be perfectly honest, by way of realizing that a large number of adult leaders thought if we kept LGBT people out of Scouting leadership we wouldn’t have child molestation. This kept me going on doing the hundreds of YPT trainings I led, week after week, to try and drive home the message that THIS was not THAT. Abusers were and are abusers, period. LGBT folk? Most of the worst cases I have ever dealt with, and I can tell too many stories, friends, were men with wives at home and children. Keeping LGBT people out of adult leadership was a mistake on multiple levels, but a major problem was how some kept thinking that eliminating LGBT persons equalled keeping out molestation.
In any case, I recall too many long conversations where I was trying to explain to an argumentative leader why they had to do what was required, but I wanted them to understand and accept YPT, not just tolerate it. However, I’ve buried the lede somewhat. I’ve avoided pronouns here, but the reality is — I have NEVER had a woman adult leader say to me they thought YPT was stupid. I have had too, too many male adults say that. I’m sure they exist, I'm aware in the literature that there are women who have violated YPT guidelines. But I’ve never seen it.
And so many times, I’ve had people come up after a YPT training and tell me their story. Not all, but many were women, and they thanked me for my commitment and engagement with the subject, because they knew from painful experience that this was important. Let’s just say these conversations only solidified my support for having women in Scouting leadership.
By the time I left summer camp management and moved into district level leadership, in 1990, Explorer posts had gone to ages 14 to 21 for male and female alike, and many “high adventure” posts were standing up, more than the formerly more common firehouse or law enforcement career posts. Young women wanted activities outdoors, camping and backpacking, and they wanted to go to places like Philmont. I’d seen female Explorers in their dark green uniforms at the 1977 National Jamboree, but I knew little about what they were doing.
In 1998, the high adventure or outdoor focused Explorer posts were converted to the Venturing program, still young men and women 14 to 21, still in the dark green uniform shirt; Venturing quickly eclipsed career based Exploring, hinting at the market opportunity out there. I saw a similar pressure at work in Cub Scouts, as I began to serve as a regular staffer for Cub Day Camp from 1994 up until 2019: sisters would come, and want to participate. Some were in Girl Scouts but wanted the outdoor activity we offered, many just wanted to join us and launch water rockets or paddle canoes and do archery and everything else the Cubs were doing. Depending on staffing and that year’s director, often a woman, the girls would be allowed to join the ad hoc day camp dens.
Women began to be allowed officially to be Scoutmasters in 1988; I believe they had all but officially been permitted as Cubmasters some years previously. In both cases, they were serving de facto some years before. Any BSA summer camp knew from the 1980s onwards that you had to have shower and bathroom facilities for a significant number of female leaders, not just the shower stall in the dining hall as had been all they were permitted to use up until the 1970s.
Where my eyes were dramatically opened was as an adult adviser with a Philmont crew in 2013. We had two all male crews, or what I would have called the typical Philmont trail experience. What it turns out was already the long-standing typical Philmont trail experience was being greeted at staffed camps by 50% female staff. That’s across five or six: at French Henry, it was 100%, and that was a five or six staffer location.
On the trail, I estimate a third of the other trekkers were female; some female crews, some mixed (remember, they’re mostly Venturers, 14-21). And keep in mind this is over a decade ago now. But I came home with a new realization of the presence of women in Scouting.
As most experienced Scouters today know, it was in 2013 the national program voted to allow LGBT youth to be Scouts in all programs, and in 2015 changed the leadership standards barring LGBT adults from leadership roles. In each case, local councils were given the mandate from national; locally, we had been campaigning for the changes for some time, but were bound by national charter guidelines. Local units could still restrict adult leadership on any number of grounds, as has long been the case under the chartering organizations guidelines.
Then in 2017 the announcement of how females would be allowed into the “traditional” Scouting programs, or Scouts BSA & Cub Scouts BSA, with the first all-girl troops starting in February of 2019. COVID slowed, but did not even remotely stop any of the all-girl Scout troops I knew were launching in my district. I’ve had the honor of serving on launch committees for new female Scout troops and advising a young woman on her trail to Eagle. I will admit, none of this was something I saw clearly coming as I sat being yelled at by a roomful of angry men in the summer of 1982, but there’s a through line here.
And I have long been aware that while Girl Guides and Girl Scouts have a history and proud set of traditions all their own around the world, the World Organization of the Scouting Movement in over 170 countries has about a dozen countries where the main national Scout organization is male-only, and that list includes Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Papua New Guinea. When international Scouts came to visit leadership training programs or summer camps I was at from the 1970s forward, NYLT, NCS, and at Philmont on now multiple trips back, they talk about their co-educational program. The rules about how you structure and manage them varies, as do the ages of entry or transition to adult leader, or the names of their version of the Eagle as their highest rank, but they almost all are in general co-ed.
Scouting America has been co-ed for five years now (I would have been fine with Scouting/USA, but that train left the station 48 years ago, I realize to my horror). “Boy Scouts of America” is a proud historical label, but in all seriousness, we stopped using it in most settings in 1972, which is 52 years ago, when we became much more intentionally inclusive of groups which heard the word “boy” and winced. I think we were smart to do that.
There’s nothing wrong with boys, but we need to be smart about how we talk about young men today, and we need to acknowledge they live in a world where, unlike 1972, women are allowed in Kiwanis (1987) and Rotary (1989), where women are in executive leadership in a variety of settings, let alone allowed by law to hold a credit card in their name even if married (1974). I think we need to have single-sex opportunities and programs for young boys, and I plan to keep watching and working to provide those, but keeping girls out of Scouting isn’t the best way to do that in the long term. I believe we can have more vital single-sex settings within a healthy organization which, in sum, includes everyone, and so has room within it for a variety of subgroups. But the “boys only” approach I think is doomed, because of the history it grows out of, where the male domination of society did not play out in a way that was good for men or women, and is not an era I have any intention of going back to. (I can watch “Mad Men” for that.)
Soon I will get back to talking about the decline and reasons for it of my religious tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and God willing, what we can do about it. Scouting America hit a peak of 6.2 million youth members in . . . yep, 1972 . . . and today, we have about a million, with almost 200,000 of them female. Did Scouting shrink after 1972 because of changes we made, or were those leaders in the program looking ahead to try to navigate the obvious and imminent declines demographically of the end of the Baby Boom generation, whose last year of 1963 meant the end of the Boomer crest hit nine years old in 1972. It may be no coincidence that 1972 is when broadcast and production standards meant a majority of US households had color television, too.
I think there are a number of interesting comparisons between the situation and circumstances of groups like the BSA aka Scouting America, and churches like the Disciples of Christ. 1972 was a high-water mark for a variety of expressions of mass culture, and ten years later the tide started to go out, but it was setting away from familiar shores almost as soon as the peak was reached.
The Wikipedia entry for the history of Scouting says about 1972: “The changes in the advancement requirements were a disastrous failure for Scouting and membership plummeted.” There’s correlation, and that statement implies an assumed causation. I’m not so sure. My next posts will ask the parallel question in reference to my church, but for me, the interest in the present reality and future hopes of both my church and Scouting are always going to be closely linked.
Super insightful. Thank you!