No more scouting!

So the big news within Mormonism this week is the announcement made yesterday that, effective with the beginning of 2020, the church’s longstanding relationship with the Boy Scouts is over.* I suspect that the long lead time is to allow those boys who were focused on getting their eagle scout award a chance to finish everything up within their current troops, though that’s simply speculation—no idea what the real reason or reasons might be.

And speaking of speculation on the real reason or reasons for things, i find it interesting that some of the analysis of this change (including on National Public Radio’s top-of-the-hour headlines!) draws a connection between the Boy Scouts of America’s announcement just a few days ago that they’re opening their program to girls at all levels and the Mormon Church’s more recent announcement—basically, saying that the Mormon Church wanted to keep their program boys-only, and thus the separation. I have to wonder if the causal chain might have been in the other direction, though—that is, perhaps the Boy Scouts of America either saw the writing on the wall or heard from various sources that the Mormon Church (which is, after all, the source of a lot of their troops and thus income) would be finally fully extricating themselves from scouting, and so it was time to go after market share by expanding their program.

But that is, like i said, all speculation anyway. The one thing i feel pretty certain of, though, is that this wouldn’t have happened under the administration of Thomas S. Monson—he was pretty clearly a fan of the Boy Scouts. Russell M. Nelson, however, well, he may have gone to Mormon Sunday School as a teen but he wasn’t baptized until he reached age 16, and so wasn’t really raised embedded in the traditional youth programs of the church, which means, apparently, that we have the chance to get a fresh perspective on such things from a 93-year-old.

* My wife’s reaction, paraphrased: So does this mean it’s our turn to be happy about something that might push other people to think they might want to leave the church? (I mean, given the number of testimonies of the divine nature of the boy scouting program i’ve heard in my life, it’s not out of the realm of possibility, you know?)

Would anything change?

So the Boy Scouts of America is currently debating a change in policy, so that gay and lesbian individuals could participate in scouting. (Under current policy, homosexual youth and leaders are banned from participating in scouting.) There’s been some whispering around that if their policy is changed, several churches (including the Mormon church) will stop sponsoring scout troops.

Would the Mormon church necessarily have that reaction, though? I mean, according to church dogma, being homosexual (as opposed to participating in homosexual acts) is not sinful. Therefore, why wouldn’t the Mormon church be more than cool with having a celibate homosexual participate in church-sponsored scouting activities?

Why these differences?

So my oldest is a teenager, and as an active teenaged Mormon girl she’s working on her personal progress program (alliteration!), and so this last Sunday i went over the stuff she’s supposed to do for it with her, figuring out what she’s done and what she hasn’t, and so on.

The main thing i learned from this review: Some of the requirements involve some pretty insipid stuff. I mean, don’t get me wrong, some of the things she’ll be doing for this are actually really cool, but nearly all of them are basically to read a bunch of scriptures and reflect on how it’ll relate to your life as a wife and mother. Oh—and then write about it in your journal. If the number of repetitions is indicative of importance, then the most important thing she’ll ever do in her life is write about what she’s thinking in her journal. Gee, excitement. Or something.

Seriously: As long as the program for (most of) the boys of the church involves things like first aid and emergency preparedness and woodcarving and survival skills plus—maybe—some spiritual stuff that gets snuck in here and there, while the program for (all of) the girls of the church involves what it involves, well, some of us are going to continue to be bothered by the disparity.

What’s the fascination with sleeping on dirt?

What’s with the Mormon adoration of camping? I mean, we’ve got scout camp, girls* camp, father-son campouts, ward campouts, relief society retreats (generally involving camping), and so on.

I mean, really—why? Do we really feel that sleeping on dirt helps people commune with the Spirit? Or at least that it helps people be friendlier with each other?

’Cause i don’t. It just tends to make me irritable for having neither easy access to a well-working shower nor a safe place to hide from the mosquitoes—not my idea of happiness in building the Kingdom, you know?

* <ahem /> Young women’s camp, if you don’t mind.

Involvement by assignment

As a bit of a transition out of my last few posts, a thought about boy (and especially cub) scouting and the Mormon church.

Boy scouts makes a big deal about how its leadership is drawn from parent volunteers, and in fact that cub scouts is a primarily parent-driven program. However, adult positions within Mormon-church-affiliated boy and cub scout organizations are issued as “callings”—which means that even though those positions are technically filled by volunteers, they’re actually filled by assignment.

This leads to the issue of people being involved in boy and cub scouting who might not want to be involved in it, or in some other way aren’t invested in it. I’m not certain that this is optimal.

Boys and girls: Adult investment

The structure of cub scouts with lots of age-defined packs within a single den, and the widespread institutional Mormon desire to split things up into small atomic units,* means that 8–11-year-old boys generally end up with more adults directly invested in their midweek activities than the girls of the same age do.

Concrete example, from a ward i’ve recently lived in: Achievement days has about eight girls who attend regularly, with two adults directly involved in running the program.** Cub scouts has about eight boys who attend regularly, with seven adults directly involved in running the program.***

Yeah, that’s balanced.

* Which i really don’t understand—i mean, given the way a decent number of people in any given ward are unwilling or unable to accept callings, you’d think you’d want to combine stuff, not split it up. But there we go, with tiny numbers of kids in primary classes, tiny numbers of kids in cub scout packs, tiny numbers of grownups in any given Sunday School class (aside maybe from gospel doctrine class), and so on.

** That is, one class, not two. This goes against the trend of splitting things up atomically mentioned above, and i have no explanation for that—but even if that was done, it’d probably only be two classes, and so four adults.

*** And i’m not counting people who work with both cub scouts and boy scouts in the count. The seven are one wolf pack leader plus assistant, one bear leader plus assistant, one webelos leader plus assistant, and one cubmaster.

Boys and girls: The purpose of the thing

Once Mormon children turn eight, they get to participate in midweek activities. For the 8- to 11-year-old boys, this means cub scouts—a weekly program with clearly stated aims that moves the boys along in a progressive building of skills with formal recognition of progress made along the way. The 8- to 11-year-old girls are in achievement days, a biweekly* meeting with vague goals that don’t really progress to a specific end and don’t naturally lend themselves to any recognition for intermediate progress.

Of course, my experience with this is in the United States, where the Mormon church and boy scouting are linked to a very high** degree. In some other locations, achievement days is a sex-neutral (though still, as i understand it, sex-segregated) church program. I’m curious how the implementation of the program might differ in those areas.

* In most wards, that is—in my current ward, achievement days occurs weekly. Of course, my current stake has never met a meeting it didn’t like, so this difference makes sense in that context.

** And unhealthy, in my opinion, but that’s just my opinion.

Boys and girls: High adventure

The general policy of the church, as i’ve heard it from multiple bishops in widely dispersed areas, is that a large chunk of a ward’s budget allotment in any given year is supposed to go to the youth. This makes sense to me.

In addition, most bishops try to be fairly evenhanded about the way the budget is allotted*—the same amount of money for the young women as the young men,** or allotting the same amount per individual to each of those groups.

So far, so good. But then there are what might best be called special allotments—and, in my observation, the only one of these for the youth is annual or biennial funding for the priest-age boys to go on a “high adventure” trip.

Yeah, it’s cool that the 16- and 17-year-old boys get to go white-water rafting a few hundred miles away from home, or camping out at a national park none of them have ever gone to, or traveling by horseback through the mountains. But what do the girls get along those lines?

Yep, that’s right—bupkis.

Incidentally, this is a recurrent theme over at the Spanish Fork 401st Ward blog—see, for example, their Young Men/Young Women activities calendar for this past April.

* This is spelled correctly, but doesn’t look like it is to me.

** Not that great of an approach when there are very different numbers of young men and young women, but it’s an easy way of dealing with ward budgets, and having seen ward budgets up close, i’m not going to begrudge making them easier.

Boys and girls: Networking

I am not a fan of boy scouting. Not at all. However, i have to admit that there’s one thing it has going for it: There’s a built-in mechanism for the boys involved in it to meet other boys with similar interests through the institutions of camporees and jamborees.

Girl scouts have similar things, but the church doesn’t sponsor girl scout groups, for whatever reason.* Odd, really, that the church would be linked at the hip with a group that has as a stated purpose the development of boys into strong-willed, independent men, but has nothing to do with a group that has as a stated purpose the development of girls into strong-willed, independent women.

* I’ve heard that this is because of the cookie sale fundraising requirement, but that rings false with me. If fundraising was an issue, the boy scouts wouldn’t be allowed to send people to scout training meetings at Mormon churches to drum up donations—but they do, they most certainly do.

Children have no free will!

I’ve heard it claimed—over the pulpit, and multiple times—that the future church activity of a family’s children is the direct result of whether the family had family home evening when their kids were children and teenagers. I find this amusing, since family home evening was actually pretty rare in my growing up,* but all of my parent’s children married in the temple and are currently active in the church, achievements that can’t be claimed by a number of other people i know who held family home evening every week. This leads to three semi-unrelated thoughts:

1. Claims about correct practice based solely on anecdotal evidence are, if not completely stupid, only a half step removed from complete stupidity.
2. Wouldn’t the vital importance of family home evening make it impossible for converts to the church to remain active?
3. Why do we find it so hard to admit that children have free will no matter what their parents taught them?

* I’m not an eagle scout, either—in fact, i completely dropped out of boy scouting when I was thirteen. Oh, the wickedness!

And no, i don’t have a “testimony of scouting”

I’m tired of sacrament meeting addresses praising Boy Scouting as a wonderful thing because it’s the best preparation out there for being a full-time missionary, since through Scouting you learn things like working with others. (And yes, I’ve heard that multiple times.) After all, you couldn’t ever learn to work well with others by being a drama rat or—heaven forfend!—devoting yourself to non-Mormon-church-based community service. No, no. Never, not at all.