Scouting America, How Have Things Changed?

May 13, 2024

I was eight years old when I joined cub scouts. I remember vividly going to the first meeting and thinking, “This is the best. I’m going to be a boy scout for the rest of my life.” The next year, my mom volunteered to be the Webelos Den leader. She was the best. Mom was always collecting cans of all sizes, card board, toilet paper rolls and anything else she needed for her cool den meetings. One meeting, we made sternos out of tuna cans, filled them with cardboard and then poured wax over them. Then, we took coffee cans and turned them into a grill and cooked hamburgers. They were the best hamburgers ever.

It is almost sixty years later and I am still in Boy Scouts, or as you may have heard, we have a new name, “Scouting America.” A lot has changed over those sixty years. At its core, Scouting America is still about camping, cooking, hiking, fitness, first aid, citizenship, leadership, adventure and earning the highest award in scouting, the Eagle Award. I have heard the Eagle, as it is sometimes called, referred to as the doctorate of high school.

My two sons and I have had amazing scout experiences together. My two daughters were jealous, and would have been great Eagle scouts if the doors had been open to them. In 2018, those doors did open and, the opportunity for girls to earn Eagle scout became a reality. It was too late for my daughters, but the daughters of many of my Eagle scouts couldn’t wait. I was immediately approached by one of my old assistant scoutmasters to start a girl’s troop.

I am very conservative, and most thought I would not like this change in scouting, but I was all for it. In Scouting America, the girl’s troop and the boy’s troop are completely separate. We share equipment and we go on a few adventure events together with two rules. First, events we do together need to have bathroom separate facilities and, second, when we are swimming, the girls have to wear one-piece bathing suits or tankinis. I got a chance to take the girl’s troop on a snorkeling adventure in the Florida Keys. It was a mix of brothers and sisters, dads and moms, and with the rule about bathing suits, all the issues with teenage sexuality went away.

With the help of the traditions established by the boy’s troop, the girl’s troop got established quickly. I am very proud of the five young ladies who have earned their Eagle scout. They have already used their scout skills to make a huge impact on others, including saving one man’s life at scout camp.

One of the things the name change is supposed to signify does concern me. When Roger Krone, the new president of scouting, unveiled the new name he said, “In the next 100 years we want any youth in America to feel very, very welcome to come into our programs,” This has been interpreted by press accounts to mean that Scouting America will continue to seek to encourage teens with gender and sexuality questions to explore scouting.

This concerns me greatly because I have had opportunities to help youth in my troop with all kinds of life issues, including sexuality questions, but these are always handled in the appropriate manner, and confidentially. As a minister, I am trained to help people with these important life questions. When they come up, my assistant scoutmasters find me quickly, and say, “This is an ‘Al’ issue.” To expect volunteer adults to deal with these questions, while publicly encouraging youth with gender and sexuality confusion to be in scouting, is a very dangerous enterprise. Teenagers need safe places to struggle through such issues. I don’t think scouting should even try to be that place for them.

It is also not at the foundation of what scouting is all about. Through the decades, scouting helped to shape me into the adventurer, citizen and believer in God that I am today. My journey to Eagle scout was not about how my uniqueness could affect other scouts, though the lessons I learned did allow me to develop my God given gifts in ways no other organization, even my church experience, could match. I was shaped by scouting, not the other way around.

Over the years, God has directed me to focus more and more on opportunities to teach the twelfth point of the Scout Law, “A Scout is Reverent.” We pray regularly, we see miracles of protection and healing often and I teach the scouts, and their parents, to see God’s hand at work. I believe that Scouting America will continue to have an important impact on our youth and our country into the future, if we can stay focused on teaching the things that have always been at the foundation of scouting, as listed above.