If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, you’ve heard that yesterday the church announced that it’s cutting ties with Boy Scouts, effective December 31, 2019. It’s also going to drop Personal Progress for girls, effective the same time (as far as I can tell). Most of the commentary I’ve seen is cheering this decision as a great move.
And I think I agree, though perhaps not for the same reasons many are cheering.
See, my Chicago ward hasn’t had a Boy Scout troop since it was formed eight or nine years ago. And neither has the ward I was in previously. As my son is approaching Cub Scout age, we’ve been looking for where to put him in Scouts (right now, we’re deciding between the Catholic pack his best friend goes to or the Lutheran pack that’s a little closer to our home). And as the church parts ways with BSA, it has tacitly approved members making that choice, and sending their sons to packs and troops where they will interact with their neighbors, Mormon or not. It will give them another chance to engage with and learn to love and respect people who are not like them.
And it provides the same opportunity for us as parents: we’ll have the chance to volunteer in the community, to avoid the insularity that our church service, mixed with our finite available time, can lead to. We can meet and serve people not of our faith. (Note that I think this aspect is absolutely critical; there are kids out there who need the role models we can be and the support we can offer, and, unless we put ourselves into positions where those kids can find us, we’ll miss an opportunity to serve, and they’re miss the service they truly need.)
Ditto with dropping Personal Progress. To the extent that was our excuse for not putting our daughters in Girl Scouts, that excuse is gone. We can discover what an amazing program Girl Scouts is, how it teaches our daughters both hard and soft skills, as well as self-worth and independence.[fn1]
I mean, if Scouting had value when it was affiliated with the church (and I think it did), it’s not going to lose that value when it becomes unaffiliated. It will still teach our boys to camp and tie knots and cook and make friends. It will still teach them to set goals, and to achieve those goals. It will still teach them to lead and to follow. It will still provide them with mentors to look up to, and mentees to guide. (And Girl Scouts teaches all of those things, too, ftr.)
And in community troops, it will teach them how to work with people with a wider range of backgrounds, but with similar goals, a lesson that will be invaluable to their future lives.
So: Boy Scouts is dead! Long live Boy (and Girl) Scouts!
[fn1] (Full disclosure, I suppose: my wife is the Troop leader for my daughters’ Girl Scouts. And I assume that, when my son gets to Cubs, I’ll be volunteering with whatever pack we enroll him in.