Like the BSA, this is very dependent on the troop. The troop I was with through high school was very active outdoors and pretty much rejected anything overly dainty or delicate.
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So, first of all, thanks @beschizza for making it clear that the article is about the Boy Scouts of America and not about Scouting in general. Usually, whenever the BSA is being controversial, the rest of us scouts around the world get negative publicity.
I’m a scouter in Austria. I joined scouting at the age of 8, and as an adult, I stayed on as a volunteer.
Scouting in Austria has been coeducational since 1976, when our national boy scouts and girl scouts associations unified.
We have never had a national “membership policy” of any sort. We’ve always defined ourselves to be inclusive, even before Austria was modern enough for gay youth or transgender boys to even exist in the public consciousness.
Also, scouts were allowed to change the wording of their own Promise according to their own interpretation for a long time. So “duty to God” is an interesting starting point for a discussion about values and the meaning of life, not a way to exclude atheists.
I started out as a nonpracticing Catholic (like the majority of Austrians), and turned atheist at the age of 14 or 15. I never even got the idea that this might be a problem until the internet started bringing me more news about the BSA.
How does this work in the BSA? I see Scouting and Venturing have overlapping age ranges, so it must be different from how we do things in Austria. Here, we have different age-based divisions, and when scouts reach the maximum age for the age division they are in, they move on to the “next” division. Having two different programmes for the age range 14-18 would just not work for us, it would rip the social fabric of the group apart - how do you manage that in the BSA?
Also, how many venturers, as opposed to scouts, made up the US contingent to the 2015 Jamboree in Japan?
Did the venturers wear the same uniforms as the scouts? How many girls were there in the contingent?
Because all I noticed were boys in the usual overly neat, overly decorated, BSA uniforms.
Occasionally displaying creepy levels of discipline: I was shocked to hear a 15-year old say to me, “Yes, sir, my mother has taught me always to obey”. That same guy also fully trusted the wisdom of his parent’s decision not to let him watch “Life of Brian” at such a tender age. But then, him and some other boys from that American troop got along perfectly with the boys and girls from my troop, and I trust their character judgement.
Then again, that Jamboree was big, so I don’t claim to have seen a statistically significant sample of the BSA contingent.
Why does it have to be “registered in a church”? I think the BSA’s “sponsorship” system is part of the problem.
Can’t give you more than one Like for that, sorry.
Do they get to go to the Jamboree?
I think not.
Campfire kids seems like a decent local youth organisation. The BSA are a wayward local branch organisation of the worldwide scout movement. As such, the BSA cannot easily be replaced by something new.
Maybe the most conservative 40% of the BSA could at some point disagree with one of those decisions and form their own organisation in protest, leaving the internationally-recognized rump of the BSA to move back to sanity.
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[quote=“zathras, post:63, topic:93976”]
I’m a scouter in Austria. I joined scouting at the age of 8, and as an adult, I stayed on as a volunteer.Scouting in Austria has been coeducational since 1976, when our national boy scouts and girl scouts associations unified.
[/quote]By funny coincidence, I’m a Scout (From Cubs through to Rovers, and a Queen’s Scout) in Australia. We became co-ed in '71!
But let’s not be too harsh on our…let’s say, wayward cousins. We shan’t give them more than one step, but one step is a step all the same. Encourage them to take more steps. Remember who we are - guiding those who are lost is rather one of our things, isn’t it?
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“I got it”
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i’m personally not quite ready to wade that far into the conspiracy lake just yet.
There is an organization in the US that is the equivalent of co-ed, all-inclusive scouting groups in the rest of the world-the Baden Powell Service Association. The BSA policies have been helping alternative scouting organizations to flourish. These organizations can’t use “scout” in their title because the BSA has that trademarked. The Hacker Scouts found that out a couple of years ago. https://www.bpsa-us.org/
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I hope Venture scouting totally displaces the BSA as I know it in my lifetime.
It doesn’t have to be registered by a church, but there does have to be a sponsoring organization. This link shows that the top three sponsoring organizations are churches, but it starts to diversify after that. (It also demonstrates on how the LDS is the elephant in the room, in that it sponsors 36% of the local organizations, and accounts for fully 15% of the scouts in the program.)
The catch, as noted above, is that there is a mention of “duty to God” in the Scout Oath, so Athiests are in that grey area. I think it largely depends upon your local scoutmaster, though.
If you were to have a scoutmaster that interpreted “god” as “a higher power”, and was willing to accept that you thought that a Grizzly Bear was a greater power than yourself (or whatever other logical leap you’d want to make) you’d be in good shape.
Scouting is only going to be as inclusive and welcoming as the people involved in the organization. I have no doubts that there’s some Troops/Packs that are going to have jerks running them- you don’t have to join them. You can Troop shop, and find one you like- you don’t join the monolithic BSA and get assigned to a troop- you go find a troop you like, and enroll with them.
It’s up to the local leadership to model the BSA values as they see fit. This is part of the reason I’m involved in scouting- I think it’s easier to drive change (or foster a positive environment) from the inside, rather than just surrender the entirety of the organization to those that you disagree with.
I recognize a lot of shortcomings with the BSA, but I think there’s a lot of positivity associated with it as well.
But over the last few years, the inclusivity has gone up quite a bit; if it can drop the mandatory religion, be gender neutral (again, somewhat mitigated by venturers) and drop a the whitewashed native American tributes, I think it’d be firing on all cylinders.
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I don’t
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This is the work of Scouts for Equality. They are a fantastic organization that aims to make scouting inclusive for all.
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The British Scouts seem to have done well enough over the last 25 years since they stopped being exclusively for boys. That seems fairly traditional now.
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It is, although not all sponsoring organizations of the BSA are churches. There are some schools, although that’s problematic as well.
Some schools have refused to host BSA troops because of the organization’s discriminatory policies. In 2001 there was an attempt to take away federal funding from any school that wouldn’t host the BSA.
The good news is it failed.
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The original British Boy Scouts were created when Baden-Powell split away from the Boys Brigade because they were too much like Christian army cadets. He favoured a more progressive attitude (at least for the time).
Ironically, some parts of the BSA do seem like a more authoritarian version of the Boys Brigade. I really don’t know why they didn’t affiliate with the Boys Brigade instead.
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I always though the Boys Brigade were creepy.
I just ignored all the religious stuff in Scouts and then Air Cadets. It wasn’t pushed very hard.
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I hated being a member. It was a very trans unfriendly environment. I used to live in fear about them discovering my gender identity and that I would have prefered to have been in the guides instead. Did I mention they were sexist too?
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My son turned down the Eagle for that reason. He did the whole schtick, including the project (built a nice new deck for a local school) and then refused to do the final board of review because he said it was discriminatory against atheists and gays.
Weirdly, the BSA doesn’t know enough about religion to actually keep atheists out; for example, they consider Jains theists which is pretty arguable, and Hindus as well, despite there being several atheistic Hindu sects. Basically if you have a religion, they assume you must be a theist :giant eyeroll:
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I thought it a bit strange that the National Jamboree had such a jingoistic vibe, My troop (late eighties) kept it pretty low key. Its sponsor was a liberal protestant church,
I suppose it depends on how forcefully the national organization imposes its will on the individual councils, and how forcefully they in turn impose their wills on the troops. It probably got a lot worse after the BSA started chanting “Hey Hey, we’re anti gay” at the Supreme Court.
If a troop (in my day) wanted to be right wing christian, there were probably a lot of tools in the Scouting ideology. If it just wanted to focus on camping, it could do that too. But right now-- yeah, I’d think that joining a troop means joining a exclusionary organization that does not reflect my values.
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I’m just all rattled - don’t trust these people any more than my local tax office.
One of my exes was (among other things) jointly the first girl to join the Scouts in the UK. I remember seeing her interviewed on Blue Peter about a decade before I met her.
While the BSA probably wins on the batshit scale, the UK Scouts have been known to exclude atheist children (they seem to accept any deist religion so a bit like the Freemasons in that respect) so it’s not all sweetness and light here either. In addition they have alpha-fuckwit Bear Grylls as chief scout these days.
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Still not something that I’d be entirely happy with.
It’s nice to have a scoutmaster who has your back, who will make silly excuses for you, but I’d rather not need to hide my beliefs / my world view behind such silly excuses.
I fully approve. Keep up the good work!
As I mentioned above, the Austrian scouts do also have an explicit reference to God in their “default text” for the Promise also includes a reference to God, it has “always” (well, as long as I remember) been OK for scouts to modify the wording.
Still, when I was born, 85% of Austrians were members of the Catholic Church, so there was a strong Catholic influence even though we were officially independent of religion. Some individual scout handbooks contained statements saying that a belief in God was necessary, but no such statement or policy was officially on the books.
The percentage of unbelievers in society rose, and so did the percentage of unbelievers among scouts and scouters. In typically Austrian fashion, we grumbled a bit, the religious hardliners grumbled a bit, but for the most part we just avoided the subject and got along fine.
Over time, a new consensus developed, and in October 2015, our national organisation published a position paper that, as far as I can tell, everyone is happy with. Below is a translation of that position paper, in the hopes that it will inspire some American scoutmasters who come across it:
From https://www.ppoe.at/leiter/ausbildung/fachwissen/doc/Spiritualität.htm, translation by Google with heavy corrections and partial rewrites by me (machine translation is still far from replacing human translators):
Position Paper “Duty to God”, Addendum to the statutes of the Scouts of Austria (PPÖ, Pfadfinder und Pfadfinderinnen Österreichs)
Spirituality
The scout movement is based on the three basic principles “Duty to God”, “Duty to Others” and “Duty to Self” formulated by Baden Powell. They are linked to each other and are mutually dependent on each other. Our effort to realize and live the three principles makes us scouts. Therefore, based on a common understanding, the PPÖ want to provide spaces and tools to enable children, youths and adults to experience “Duty to God”.
“Duty to God” at WOSM and WAGGGS
WOSM describes “Duty to God” as “Adherence to spiritual principles, loyalty to the religion that expresses them and acceptance of the duties resulting therefrom”. [1]
WAGGGS describes “Duty to God” as “The essence of Duty to God is the acknowledgement of the necessity for a search for a faith in God, in a Supreme Being, and the acknowledgment of a force higher than man of the highest Spiritual Principles” . [2]
WOSM categorizes the development of children and adolescents in five dimensions: “Duty to Self” affects the emotional, intellectual and physical dimension. “Duty to Others” refers to the social dimension and “Duty to God” to the spiritual dimension.
“Duty to God” in the understanding of the PPÖ
For the PPÖ, the spiritual dimension is part of the holistic education and development of an individual. It is a fixed component of our pedagogical work. There is a personal responsibility for spiritual development.
As PPÖ, we are, on the basis of our values, open for all religions and world views. Their diversity is an enrichment and is recognized and valued by the PPÖ.
The basic questions of man
Every human is unique and has his or her own form of searching for meaning. We are all connected by the need to consciously ask the questions about where, where and why, and to actively seek answers, regardless of whether these answers are found in a religion, represent an individual spirituality, or lead to the realization that there is no such thing as “the meaning”.
Children & Youth
The PPÖ promote holistic development in all its aspects. This means that we are not only constantly developing physically, socially, intellectually and emotionally, but also spiritually.
From the wide range of possible choices, children and adolescents should autonomously, critically and self-confidently choose the one that is appropriate for their life.
Scout leaders
They are a model, inspiration and rubbing surface* and offer children and young people the best possible environment for their spiritual development, independent of their own spirituality.
Scout leaders should be aware of their own spiritual development and engage in spiritual reflection. Within the scope of their possibilities, they address the questions and needs of children and young people. They do not try to convince children and young people of their own ideas, nor do they need to hide them.
[1] Fundamental Principles. The basic ideas underlying the Scout Movement , WOSM, 1992.
[2] “Exploring Spirituality - Resource Material for Girl Guides and Girl Scouts” , WAGGGS, 2000.
Translating is hard. Especially the fuzzy concepts here do not have one-to-one equivalents between German and English.
* rubbing surface: literal translation of Reibefläche. I’m not sure if that metaphor exists in English. The intended meaning is that young people will test authority with their ideas, and being a target for that rebellion is part of the job description of the scoutmaster.
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