Here's a
fun little story about Mormons and the Boy Scouts of America from 1999:
Boy Scouts Maintains a Firm Hold on Religious Foundation at its Heart
by Mark O'Keefe
The Oregonian
Sunday, July 4, 1999
Mormons are a Driving Force
in the Program
Camp Baldwin -- Justin Hall and Miles McFarland learned how to rescue a drowning swimmer last week, taking turns throwing a lifesaving ring into Lake Hanel.
Miles, dripping and shivering after an encounter with 67-degree water in the chilly altitude of the Mount Hood National Forest, didn't seem to mind. For the 12-year-old, the Boy Scouts of America is about "a lot of boys having fun."
Scouting is also about something that has put the organization into hot water: a requirement to believe in God.
Such belief is OK for a private religious organization, argues the American Civil Liberties Union in separate lawsuits filed in Portland and Chicago, but it's unconstitutional when the Boy Scouts are allowed to recruit in public schools.
Win or lose, the cases could damage the friendly relationship Scouting has with schools, potentially reducing membership, now at 170,000 in Oregon and Washington and 4.8 million nationally. At a time when moral absolutes are not as popular as they once were, the lawsuits could also alter public perception of an 89-year-old institution that's as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July.
For many, the Boy Scouts conjure up images of uniformed boys helping elderly women cross the street or of young men in the wilderness learning to start a fire without matches. Scouting's core values are so traditional it's as if Norman Rockwell painted them on a canvas.
According to the Scout Law, "A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent."
It's that last one that has landed the Boy Scouts, and school districts that support them, in court.
Multnomah County Circuit Judge Joseph Ceniceros will decide the ACLU case against Portland schools later this summer.
But much is clear already. Unlike the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts aren't about to make duty to God optional in their oath. Religion will continue to be a fundamental part of Scouting, whether a boy is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jewish.
A line has been drawn in the dirt around the campfire.
"Will we change?" said Larry Otto, executive director of the Cascade Pacific Council, who is in charge of Scouting in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington. "I think we'd self-destruct if we changed. That would be like taking Jesus out of the church. It's at the core of who we are."
In some cases where the Scouts have been sued for not allowing gays and atheists, the organization has argued it can do so because it is a private, religious organization. The Scouts have won most of those.
But the cases in Portland and Chicago are different because they target schools, not the Scouts. In Portland, Nancy Powell, an atheist, says school officials made a big mistake when they allowed Cub Scout recruiters into Harvey Scott Elementary School, which her son attends.
Powell cites the Oregon Constitution, which restricts religion in public schools more stringently than the federal Constitution. She isn't seeking monetary damages, just to keep the Boy Scouts from recruiting boys during school hours.
Churches at the backbone
That could be devastating to Scouting, Otto said. Schools in Oregon and across the country have routinely allowed recruiting pitches, which typically invite young boys to give Cub Scouts a try.
"You tell me how I tell a kid about Scouting," Otto said. "Put an ad in the newspaper? That won't do it. Run an ad on the radio? That won't do it. Direct mail? Do you understand what that would cost?"
While Scouting depends on public schools, it also relies on religious organizations, particularly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church. Of the roughly 1,600 Cub Scout packs, Boy Scout troops and Explorer posts in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington, 40 percent are sponsored by Mormons. Another 35 percent are sponsored by other religious organizations.
Nationally, the vast majority of support also comes from religious organizations, with the Mormon Church sponsoring almost three times as many Boy Scout groups as the second-ranked religious sponsor, the United Methodist Church.
Scouting is the official youth program for Mormons. Their commitment is so strong that local bishops routinely assign men to become Scout leaders as part of their spiritual calling.
At 658-acre Camp Baldwin, off of Oregon 35, southeast of Hood River and southwest of The Dalles, evidence of religious activity was easy to find last week:
* The six-day camp began with a chapel where a skit illustrated how being friendly to, instead of ridiculing, an improperly dressed Scout was following the Golden Rule.
* Some Mormon-sponsored troops held their own "sacrament services," where bread and water are passed and scripture read.
* Each time one of the 225 kids at camp recited the Scout oath, he raised three fingers for the Scout sign, promising on his honor, "to do my best, to do my duty to God and my country ... "
Eric Lovelin, 16, of Portland said he appreciates all this, because "I need to be religious all the time in order to keep my values up and my faith strong."
A Lutheran, Eric recalled a three-day hike near Mount Jefferson during which he shared a tent with a Catholic friend, Tim Finn, who, like Eric, is just short of attaining the Eagle Scout rank.
Reverence for all faiths
Heavy snowfall put them on their backs inside their tent, talking. The boys discovered that they disagree on some things but agree on essential Christian principles.
Scouting is nonsectarian, refusing to push a specific belief, but both boys said duty to God, however you define God, is essential.
"No one says you have to join Scouting," Tim said. "It's just an option. Plus, a larger percentage of people believe in God than don't."
Michael Levy is a 13-year-old member of Troop 544 in Gresham, sponsored by Mountainview Christian Church. Michael, who is Jewish, said he has been teased in school about his faith, but never in Boy Scouts.
"Every Boy Scout I know has been courteous and reverent of my beliefs," Levy says.
He includes Frank Johnson, 13, the chaplain's aide in Troop 544, an evangelical Christian who has been instructed to be as generic as possible when he prays before meals.
"We have different religions here," Frank said, "but we all believe in God."
The adult overseeing much of this is Barry LeVon, who doesn't attend church and was forced to examine his own spirituality when he became a Scout volunteer nine years ago.
His faith can be summarized, he said, by an experience of walking into a forest, looking at the trees and saying, "Thank you, Supreme Being, for our playground."
LeVon has concluded that the Scouts "aren't preaching religion, just acknowledging belief in God."
A little bit religious?
Yet when schools give access to groups espousing even a general belief in a deity, they find themselves in a constitutional mess, said Andrea Meyer, an ACLU lawyer who is arguing the case against the Portland school district.
"When it comes to entanglement of church and state in our public schools, being a little bit religious is like being a little bit pregnant," Meyer said.
Attorneys for Portland schools, whose fees are being paid in part by the Boy Scouts, have admitted the Scouts are religious. But they argue that the words spoken and Scouting materials distributed at Harvey Scott Elementary were not. In addition, the Boy Scouts are primarily about other things, the lawyers argue, pointing out that only four of 231 pages in the Cub Scout handbook refer to religion.
"There is a lot about Scouting other than the duty-to-God portion of the Boy Scout Oath," said attorney James Westwood. "There's also duty to country, duty to family and duty to self."
The main point, Westwood said, is that it should be left for the school board, not the judge, to decide whether Scouts should continue to have access. The board could decide to ban the Scouts, he said, just as it has banned military recruiters because they discriminate against gays and lesbians.
Otto, the regional Scout director, shook his head in befuddlement. In this season of societal soul-searching after school shootings in Springfield and Littleton, Colo., why would an organization with a proven record of forming young men with strong values be under such attack? It's no accident, he said, that several of the student heroes at Springfield and Littleton were Boy Scouts.*
Yet Scouting finds itself on the defensive because those values are entwined with religion, Otto said.
Otto said he knows there is nothing for the Boy Scouts to be ashamed of, but with these lawsuits, "somehow you feel unclean."
Note that's identified as a reprint of a newspaper article from
The Oregonian.
This is news to me. And that article is from 1999. I do not recall anything at all like this religious infusion at any Scout activity I was ever involved in (mostly on the East coast, in PA, NJ, DE and MD). But I know, I really shouldn't be surprised. Hell, even my Catholic
schooling wasn't rah-rah-religion all the time. This is just disturbing.
Anyway, aside from the overt "Mormon Conspiracy" websites, a further quick search finds all sorts of interesting articles about this connection between the Mormons and the BSA.
This site has more excerpts from newspapers and magazines:
Time Magazine, 5/1/00
But the Boy Scouts of America headquarters in Irving, Texas, is controlled by another faction in the debate, those for whom "morally straight" definitely means sexually straight. In recent years, members of the Mormon church have become a powerful force within scouting.
Today nearly 10% of the members of the Boy Scouts Advisory Council live in Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. The Latter-day Saints constitute less than 2% of the U.S. population but 21% of the boys in the core Boy Scouts program, more than any other group.
The Latter-day Saints have been instrumental in helping defeat pro-gay initiatives in at least three states. [Actually, and technically speaking, they helped to pass anti-gay initiatives.] In 1995 Jack Goaslind Jr., a prominent church member who currently sits on the Scouts advisory council, said the church "would withdraw our charter membership" if scouting were required to admit gays.
========
Salt Lake Tribune, 4/26/00
If the Boy Scouts of America is forced to accept gays as scoutmasters, the LDS Church will withdraw from the organization and take more than 400,000 Scouts with it.
That's the contention of Salt Lake City attorney Von G. Keetch, who has filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting the Boy Scouts' ban on homosexuals on behalf of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and four other religious organizations.
I know these articles are over 10 years old, but most of the more recent items I've found are specificially about stories concerning Mormons/Scouting and sexual abuses (much like the Catholic Church!) Still, there's more out there.
Anyone have more recent numbers of the Mormons and their representation in the BSA, at all levels? Leadership, especially.
Alot of the early founders of Scouts were involved in YMCA.
Your head is humming and it won't go, in case you don't know, the piper's calling you to join him
