The Evangelical Scouts of America

Today's news has a headline that the FBI is investigating the Boy Scouts. According to a copyright AP story, the FBI is investigating the Greater Alabama Council headquartered in Birmingham to see if they fraudulently padded their membership roles to secure larger funding amounts from the United Way and other donors. The story also mentions an independent audit going on in Atlanta to see if they inflated their black Scout enrollment by 20,000, just to get more donations.

This makes me sad. I was an Eagle Scout. I was picked as the National Boy Scout of the Year when I was a senior in high school. And I always thought that the first point of the Scout Law was "A Scout is Trustworthy."

What has happened?

Well, I can tell you that corporate Scouting has changed. Since the LDS church adopted their own flavor of Scouting as a mandatory church youth program, they have gained more and more influence on council, region, and national boards. The councils cater to the Mormons, cause they have a lot of boys in the program. The other two biggest sponsors of Scout troops are the Roman Catholic and United Methodist churches. Back when the BSA had its most recent U.S. Supreme Court "victory" allowing it to discriminate against and exclude gay boys and adult leaders, pursuing that case to "victory" had been a big goal of the Mormons, Catholics, and Methodists on the national board. Did they need to do that? No. One of the interesting things about Scouting is that the units—packs, troops, teams, posts, etc.—are not controlled by the central organization, but they are "owned" if you will by the sponsoring institution. That means that if a Mormon church sponsors a troop, they can select their own adult leaders and excommunicate any of the boys they think are too gay to keep.

As a result of that supreme court "victory," all kinds of sponsoring institutions with anti-discrimination policies, from PTAs to mainstream liberal protestant churches like the Episcopalians and Unitarians to city police departments, began to cancel their sponsorship and involvement with the Boy Scouts. United Way contributions in some communities went down, cause they fund the Scouts—a "bigotted institution." Many intelligent, highly educated, open-minded parents began to think that the institutionalized homophobia of the Boy Scouts was just not the kind of thing to which they wanted to expose their sons. And the membership rolls began to dive.

Of course, an organization like Scouting has to have members, and it has to have growth. The more kids the council serves, the more money it can request from donors. And, as the liberals began to leave, the Mormons, Catholics, and Methodists went from being major blocks of Scouting to the vast majority of Scouting. They couldn't deal with looking bad, with looking like they'd ruined an esteemed, century-old, civic institution, with looking like their bigotted evangelical Christian perspective was no longer mainstream America. Atlanta and Birmingham are in the heart of the Bible Belt, so I'm not surprised the forces and pressures there caused them to fall into this level of hamartia, this "missing the mark," this sin. And all because the evangelical church leaders can't bring themselves to love their homosexual neighbors.

Softly falls the light of day,
As our Scout troop fades away.......