Author: Aren Cambre

Scouting America (nee Boy Scouts of America) will likely have a large 2024 youth-membership loss. It’s likely due to its new rolling-membership scheme.

By December 31, 2024, BSA SA will likely have a 2.4% member loss. If nothing changes, it will reach 14% by April 2025!

SA could have avoided this with a subscription model.

(Important data note: All member counts in this document are of youth members. Adults are not represented in any counts.)

What’s changed

On August 1, 2023, SA switched from a fixed-membership scheme¹ to a rolling-membership scheme (what these mean).

While rolling memberships are a conceptual improvement, renewals appear to be shockingly low.

The old way: fixed memberships

In the old, fixed-membership system, well-run Scout units reached out to all members to secure renewals. Paying for renewal was easy.

Let’s use Cub Scout Pack 123 as an example.

Each year, Pack 123 pays $100 to renew its charter. The charter is a license for the pack to operate. Renewing this charter is called “rechartering”.

Most unit charters expire on December 31. Therefore, by December 31, Pack 123 must pay for the next year.

All Pack 123 members have their own SA memberships. When Pack 123 recharters, in addition to paying its own $100 fee, it pays SA annual membership fees on behalf of its members.

Suppose Pack 123 has 20 youth members and 10 adult members. The pack will pay SA $2450² for next year’s memberships:

• $100: Pack 123’s annual-charter fee
• $1700: SA’s $85 fee for each of Pack 123’s 20 youth members
• $650: SA’s $65 fee for each of Pack 123’s 10 adult leaders

As wise stewards of limited funds, Pack 123 prefers not to pay SA’s fee for youth or adults who stopped participating. Therefore, before paying $2450, a Pack 123 volunteer reached out to all families to assure they are renewing and to collect funds.

Also, a Pack 123 volunteer managed the friction of dealing with SA’s burdensome recharter process. Families did not deal with that burden. They only needed to send a payment to Pack 123. Easy.

A detail: New members had prorated memberships. Sally Smith, who is new to SA, joined Pack 123 in September, 2022. Since Pack 123’s charter cycle begins on January 1, Sally only paid for four months of SA membership: September 2022 through December 2022. When Pack 123 submitted its recharter, it paid $85 on Sally’s behalf for her 2023 SA membership.

The new way: rolling memberships

On August 1, 2023, SA switched to a rolling-membership model. All new members pay a full year upon joining. Their memberships expire next year, on the last day of their join month.

Suppose Timmy Smith joined Pack 123 on September 15, 2023. His SA membership renewal is due September 30, 2024.

SA disconnected individual memberships from the unit-recharter process. When Pack 123 recharters, it no longer manages Timmy’s annual SA membership. Instead, by the time Pack 123 starts thinking about its January 1 renewal, Timmy is not on their minds. Since Timmy’s membership expired on September 30, Timmy’s parents should have already renewed his SA membership through SA’s website.

Problem 1: SA removed a crucial touch point

In the old system, Pack 123 contacted all families regarding SA-membership renewal.

The new system breaks this personal touch. Since Timmy’s SA-membership renewal is divorced from Pack 123’s recharter, Pack 123 no longer needs to reach out to Timmy’s family regarding renewal.

Problem 2: Burdening parents

Parents now directly deal with SA’s processes.

SA’s main objective is to get parents to toss $85 over the fence once a year.

SA makes this hard. The main problem is red tape. Online renewal requires parents to digitally sign a thick, 1,197-word document! It takes around 9 minutes to read: while 1,197 words have a baseline estimate of 6 minutes to read³, this document will take longer:

• It is written poorly, at a “difficult to read”level⁴.
• It has formatting problems.

I am estimating 50% longer due to re-reads of difficult sentences or pauses to comprehend. That means 9 minutes to read the document.

Also, I imagine for most parents, logging into a SA system is a rare event, possibly only for each annual renewal. A once-every-year system will induce friction simply because each year, the parent has to re-learn it and possibly go through the password-reset exercise. I estimate this will induce 5 more minutes of delays.

Beyond remembering how to log in and reading the agreement, I estimate 5 more minutes to navigate the form start to end.

5 + 9 + 5 = 19 minutes! SA is asking parents to go through a 19-minute, bureaucratic exercise just for the privilege of throwing $85 at SA!

Families are rejecting this burden. Below I show how a shocking percent of rolling memberships are not being renewed!

Considerations for how 2024 may end up

This section is insufferably boring. Sane people may wish to skip to the next major section.

We can use December 16, 2024’s numbers to predict how 2024 will end up. On that day, SA had 1,007,482 youth members⁵, falling into these categories:

• 874,014 (87%) with current memberships⁶
• 133,468 (13%) with lapsed memberships⁷

“Lapsed” means a membership that recently expired. SA includes lapsed members in its membership counts. More on this later.

First, we need to talk nerdy.

Limitations on predictors

I prefer to use several years’ data to guide predictions. For SA, I only feel comfortable using 2022 and 2023 as predictors.

SA’s annual cycles have had recent disruptions:

• 2019: This was the last year that the Mormons ran Scout units. Nearly all their units fizzled on January 1, 2020, removing about 1/3 of SA’s youth.
• 2020: The COVID pandemic decimated SA’s ability to recruit and retain, causing another 1/3 membership loss.
• 2021: More of a pandemic-emergence phase, this is an abnormal year.

In addition to major shifts in numbers, these disruptions changed how new members appear in the annual cycle. Most new SA youth join in the fall, part of grade-based cohorts. Mormons instead used age, so join dates for their youth were distributed across the whole year. We no longer have this effect.

Even if the above reasons are insufficient to avoid using years before 2022, I further theorize that the pandemic shifted society’s approach to youth programs. That should also be evaluated before adding pre-2022 predictors.

Lapsing: an explainer

SA’s recharter process is burdensome. This is why many units are late on rechartering.

In the old, fixed-membership model, a unit being late with its recharter means it’s also late on paying SA’s annual fee for each of its members. Nominally, a late recharter means a unit has to stop operating and that all its people have expired SA memberships.

Enter “lapsing”: This is where SA gives expired units and their members a two-month grace period (it’s now longer–more later). Lapsed units and members are still treated as active. They can still participate in all Scouting activities.

Units must resolve their charters within that two-month lapsed period. On the first day of the third month, lapsed units and members become dropped. That is when non-renewed units must stop operating and when the individual memberships are expired.

Annual cycles

Most units’ charter cycle begins January 1. In the fixed-membership system, the vast majority of lapses also happened on January 1, due to late recharters.

This had some predictable effects on youth memberships:

• December 31’s membership number approximated an annual high-water mark.
• January 1 brings a surge of lapses, partly fueled by late unit recharters.
• By March 1, all these January 1 lapses had converted to paid renewals or drops. That approximated SA’s annual low-water mark.

Relevant 2022 and 2023 data:

Milestone	2022	2023
Dec. 31 youth membership count	1,042,860	1,015,028
March 318 (next year) membership count (after the Jan. 1 lapses converted to renewals or drops)	792,908 (March 31, 2023)	805,209 (March 31, 2024)
Change from December peak to March valley	-249,952	-209,819
% change from December peak to March valley	-24.0%	-20.7%

We can use means of 2022 and 2023 numbers as predictors. Had we continued with the fixed-membership model, we may expect to drop 230,000 youth in the spring. That is about 22.4% of the Dec. 31 membership number. (Math note: Below, I will use 230,000 to predict expected drops for 2024 and use 22.4% when I need to estimate drops from subsets.)

Expected drops for Aug. – Sept. 2023 new youth

New youth who joined on or after August 1, 2023 are on SA’s new rolling-membership model. These youth are especially important for predicting how 2024 will end up.

Here’s our 2023 new youth for SA’s key growth months:

• August 2023: 31,442⁹ (expires Aug. 31, 2024)
• September 2023: 75,104 (expires Sept. 30, 2024)
• October 2023: 53,225 (expires Oct. 31, 2024)
• Total (Aug. – Oct. 2023): 159771

Using our 22.4% predictor of drops, 35,779 of these new youth will drop.

The real drop number is much worse.

Aside: Do new youth drop at the same rate?

Nearly all youth who joined on the rolling-membership scheme–starting August 1, 2023–will be new youth; few will be dropped youth who rejoin.¹⁰ Therefore, the first wave of rolling-renewal drops will be almost entirely of youth in their first year of SA.

The 22.4% drop rate applies to all youth, both new and renewing youth. Is that the right number if we’re only assessing drops for new youth?

The number of members in SA, categorized by age, increases through age 9, and most recruitment happens in early years:

The combination of these factors suggests low drop rates for young new youth.

However, the drop rate is not 0.

As a Cubmaster of a huge, successful pack, I saw attrition from new youth after their initial, prorated-membership period. I roughly recall it being 10% – 20%. While I don’t have broader data, I assume this is a general phenomenon.

When I was District Commissioner, my PDS-score¹¹-addled District Executives kept starting new units that quickly flopped. This inflated the new-youth counts.

I further theorize that retention is poorer the older new recruits are, especially with new Scouts BSA recruits¹², which further increases the new-youth drop percent.

Also, with how the rolling-membership scheme forces everyone to prepay for a year upfront, those who quit quickly after joining can no longer be represented in the data.

The data is messier than I prefer. While it is possible that the new-youth drop rate may be different than 22.4%, I theorize that it’s close, and I lack a basis to use a different number. While I am open to an update here, unless the correct figure is tremendously different than this estimate, it won’t have a major impact on this article’s major findings.

Fall 2024’s actual numbers

A detail: SA increased lapsed period 50%

First, a crucial detail that will be relevant later: SA recently increased its lapsed period 50%, from two months to three months. I think that change was made in October 2024 or November 2024.

With the old, two-month lapsed period, Sept. 2023’s non-renewing, new members become lapses on Oct. 1 and drops on Dec. 1. By increasing the lapsed period 50%, Sept. 2023’s lapses don’t become drops until Jan. 1, 2025.

Did you see that? SA shifted the peak recruitment month’s drops–September 2023’s drops–into 2025!

Below I’ll share how shockingly few rolling-membership youth are renewing. It seems odd that national’s new lapsing scheme causes its December 31 to include 100% of who joined in 2023’s peak membership month, even though few are renewing.

The numbers are scary

Let’s review retention of new youth we added in our peak 2023 recruitment months: August, September, and October. They are the first batch of members who will renew rolling memberships in 2024.¹³

SA’s November 30, 2024 number of lapsed youth will only include those whose memberships expired on Aug. 31, Sept. 30, or Oct. 31. In other words, it accounts for all members in the first three months of the new, rolling-membership scheme!

The bottom number in the first column will help us get there:

This means 153,405 lapses are attributable to memberships expiring in August, September, and October. (July’s lapsed memberships are already washed out of this number, having converted to drops on Nov. 1.)

But these are not just rolling-membership lapses!

While most units appear to renew on December 31, some renew on other months. Therefore, late recharters will trigger lapses of fixed-membership youth in all months of the year. That is the 19,379¹⁴ number on the second column–the lapses we had in November 2023. We should expect similar numbers for 2024, so I will just subtract 19,379 from 153,405, yielding 134,026 excess lapses (84% of the 159,771 new Scouts in Aug. – Oct. 2023) attributable to the rolling-membership system.

A detail: This Nov. 30 number is favorable to SA. SA had one to three months to convert all non-renewed August, September, and October lapses to paid renewals.

Wait, lapses aren’t drops!

Above, I gave numbers for new Aug. – Oct. 2023 youth from different dimensions:

• 35,779 anticipated drops
• 134,026 estimated lapses

Recall that lapsing is a grace period before a drop. Some lapsed members pay to resume their membership. All others are dropped.

It is my understanding that someone emerges from the lapsed category in one of two ways:

• immediately, by paying for a membership
• when the clock strikes midnight at the end of the last day of a month, when the lapsed member becomes dropped

Therefore, members removed from the lapsed category during the month indicate renewals. We can estimate how many lapsed members renewed in a month by comparing the beginning and end of a month:

• November 1, 2024 lapsed-member count: 160,607¹⁵
• November 30, 2024 lapsed-member count: 153,405

This means SA can convert 7,202 lapsed members to paid renewals in a month. To be fair, November included Thanksgiving, which is often a dead week for families. Let’s be generous and round up to 8,000 lapsed-member recoveries a month.¹⁶ Compared to the November start of 160,607 lapses, SA’s conversion of lapses to paid memberships is 5.0% per month.

Now I need to construct a model to translate lapses into expected drops.

We can calculate the percent contribution that Aug. – Oct. 2023 made to the 159,771 total new youth membership in that period:

• August 2023: 31,442 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 20%
• September 2023: 75,104 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 47%
• October 2023: 53,225 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 33%

Using all this, I can create a rough estimate for what drops we should expect. This is a rough estimate because the Nov. 30 lapse count–my starting point for this calculation–represents 3 months of trying to renew August lapses, 2 months of trying to renew September lapses, and 1 month of trying to renew October lapses, so each month’s contribution to that lapsed-member count has shifted from its contribution to total members. However, given a 5% monthly reduction in lapses–a small number to begin with–the distortion will be of a low magnitude. I do not see a way of untangling these numbers with the reports available to my source, so my inability to tease that out is an acknowledged source of error, albeit an error that is small compared to the big numbers it’s being compared to.

Starting with the Nov. 30, 2024 new-member lapse count of 134,026:

• December 1: August’s share of the Nov. 30 count, 20%, will convert to 26,805 drops.¹⁷ The remainder, 107,221 lapses attributable to September and October, will continue in December.
• December 31: The monthly 5% reduction will cause the December 1 number to reduce to 101,860.
• January 1: September 2023’s share of remaining lapses (59%¹⁸), 60,097, convert to drops. The remainder, 41,763 lapses attributable to October, continue in January.
• January 31: The monthly 5% reduction will cause the January 1 lapsed number to reduce to 39,675.
• February 1: All that’s left are October 2023’s remaining lapses that weren’t converted, 39,675. All these convert to drops.

The sum of drops are 25,465 + 60,445 + 40,553 = 126,577.

Here’s what’s alarming: drops represent 79% of the new youth from August, September, and October 2023!

Drops for rolling-membership youth are 253% higher than the expected 35,779!

Predicting end-of-year 2024 numbers

We can predict end-of-year numbers for 2024 by summing these:

• Dec. 16’s youth count¹⁹
• Expected new members for December

Expected additional, new December youth

Here’s past growth for Decembers²⁰:

• December 2022 new members: 30,597
• December 2023 new members: 23,499

Using the mean, we should expect 27,048 new members for December 2024.

Above, I shared a member count as of December 16. As of that day, 15 days were left in December, or 48%. Therefore, I will scale this predictor of new members down by 52%, arriving at an expected gain of 12,983 members between December 16, 2024 and December 31, 2024. This predicted gain is likely to overstate SA’s true gain in this period as the last several days of December are holidays or travel seasons.

Projected December 31, 2024 youth count

1,007,482 (December 16 youth count) + 12,983 (expected new-youth growth for remainder of December) = 1,020,465 youth members on December 31.

Superficially, that’s a 0.5% increase from 2023’s 1,015,028 count. But it’s inflated.

December 31, 2024’s number inflates member count

The December 31, 2024 number will indicate on-paper retention for 100% of new youth from September 2023 – December 2024. This inflates the numbers!

Remember Sally, who above joined in September 2022 under the prior, fixed-membership scheme? Her twin Oscar also joined at the same time. In November 2022, Oscar decided that Scouting is not right for him, so he quit.

Because Oscar quit before Pack 123 requested everyone’s fee for 2023, Oscar’s 2023 membership fee was not paid.²¹ Therefore, Oscar counts towards SA’s December 31, 2022 number but not SA’s December 31, 2023 number.

Sally’s friend Rebecca joined in September 2023, after the start of the rolling-membership model. That means Rebecca’s parents paid for a year of membership upfront. Rebecca’s membership expires the end of September 2024.

By November 2023, Rebecca decided Scouting is not right for her. She quits. Remember that Rebecca’s membership goes through September 30, 2024. Her lapsed period lasts until January 1, 2025. Therefore, even though Rebecca quit Scouts in November 2023, she counts towards the December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2024 numbers!

See the difference? Even though Oscar and Rebecca joined in September and quit two months later:

• Oscar, who joined under the fixed-membership scheme, only contributed to SA’s member count for his join year.
• Rebecca, who joined under the rolling-membership scheme, contributed to SA’s member count for her join year and the following year.

2024 is that “following year” for all who joined in the first few months of the rolling-membership system: Aug. 1 – Dec. 31, 2023! Therefore, SA’s December 31, 2024 number is inflated when compared to prior years!

The real December 31, 2024 number

I expect SA to do its usual, which is to pull a number off the same report it used in past years. If so, it will be an inflated number, as per the prior section, as the report is unlikely to be adjusted for the new membership model.

If we are to do an apples-to-apples comparison–exclude those who joined after August 1, 2023 but quit before they would have paid for 2024 under the old system–then December 31, 2024’s number, the high-water mark, will lower than the report’s number.

We can estimate that! From the 1,020,465 Scouts, subtract the 22.4% estimated drops from the fall 2023 rolling-renewal growth. That nominally means you’d remove anticipated drops from everyone who joined between August 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.

Before we do the math, a few exceptions:

• For those who joined in August 2023, their non-renewed lapses became drops on December 1, 2024. Therefore, they are already removed from our numbers.
• In the old system, I believe that those joining for two or fewer months before their unit’s recharter date had to purchase membership through the end of the following recharter period. (Is this correct? Leave a comment!) As most units’ charter cycles start January 1, this usually affected only November and December joins. For example, someone joining in November 2022 would typically pay 14 months, taking that person through the end of 2023. Therefore, such people, even in the old system, appeared in their join year’s count and in their next year’s count. In the interest of an apples-to-apples comparison, I will not deduct any Scouts who joined in November 2023 and December 2023.

I therefore will only use September 2023 and October 2023 for this calculation.

• September 2023 + October 2023 new members = 128,328
• Expected drops from that pool in the old system: 22.4% of 128,328, which is 28,745.

Subtract the estimated drops from the end-of-2024 estimate, and you get 1,020,465 – 28,745 = 991,720 members on December 31, a year-over-year drop of 2.2%! (Note: In addition for being a more realistic number, this also corrects for the distortion caused by increasing the lapsed period to three months.)

February 2025 update: how close were my predictions?

Above, I estimated that SA’s end-of-year number would be 1,020,465. It ended up being 1,030,862. I was within 1%.

Re-running the above math with the new number, an apples-to-apples comparison would be 1,002,117, which means 2024 had a 1.3% decline from 2023.

But wait, there’s less!

The December 31 number omits a crucial part of the story. Given high non-renewals of rolling-scheme members, our spring low-water mark is likely to be far worse than last year.

The real story comes after the January 1 lapse surge works out. This surge is induced by two longstanding factors:

1. Late recharters causing lapsed memberships. Typically, most youth in a unit renew, so most of these convert to paid memberships once units submit late charters.
2. Members who were non-renewed by their units, typically because the person quit SA.

Per numbers shared above, if this was a pre-rolling-scheme year, the January 1 lapse surge would land on about 230,000 drops. After our spring lapse surge is completed, we would have 1,020,465²² – 230,000 = 790,465 members.

But it will be much worse. When 79% of rolling-membership youth are not renewing their SA membership, you’re going to take a bath! We need to figure out the rolling-renewal members’ contribution to the total-membership picture, then adjust the expected spring drops to reflect the far higher rate of renewals of rolling-membership youth.

August 2023’s lapses converted to drops on December 1, so they are already flushed out. That means we need to add up the new members from September, October, November, and December 2023 and figure out their contribution to drops. The counts of those new members are:

• September 2023: 75,104 (you saw this same number above)
• October 2023: 53,225 (you saw this same number above)
• November 2023: 26,632
• December 2023: 23,499
• Total: 178,460, which is 18% of the 1,015,028 total from December 31, 2024

The 82% who are not part of the Sept. – Dec. 2023 cohort will drop at the expected rate. We need to scale the 230,000 expected drops down to 82%, resulting in 188,600 drops from all those who didn’t join in Sept. – Dec. 2023.

Oops, remember that I wrote that August’s drops are washed out already? That means the new-as-of-August 2023 people, who renewed (not quitting), are still in the big number. Therefore, the estimated 188,600 drops inadvertently includes 22.4% of these not-quitting August 2023 people! Let’s add them back. August 2023 brought us 31,442 new Scouts. Earlier I projected that 26,805 of them dropped, leaving us with 4,637 who will remain. Let’s add 22.4% of them back, or 1,039, so our 188,600 drop number declines a little to 187,561.

I estimated that rolling-renewal members are dropping a 79% rate. Of the 178,460 who joined Sept. – Dec. 2023, 140,983 will drop.

Add them up, we expect to see 187,561 + 140,983 = 328,544 drops by April 1, 2025. That means SA’s low-water mark for 2025 is only 691,921, or 14% fewer than 2024’s low-water mark!

UPDATE: BSA “only” shrunk by 9.5% (more info). Even though it’s better than my projection, it’s a terrible number.

All are now on rolling memberships

To avoid muddying waters, I characterized SA members that first joined before August 1, 2023 as still being on the fixed-membership scheme.

There is no more fixed-membership scheme. All members are on the rolling-membership scheme. Those who joined before August 1, 2023 have membership periods that coincide with the charter cycle of their Scout unit.

These members can now pay for annual membership directly to SA. As long as their Scout unit is willing, they can instead continue as if the old model was still effective by paying their Scout unit, and the unit remits the annual SA fee on their behalf.

How SA can fix this

Get the members back

Nothing has changed about the Scouting program that would cause non-renewals to surge to 79%. It’s hard to pin that on anything but the rolling-renewal scheme.

How do we get these Scouts back? My son’s membership expires on December 31. I’ve intentionally allowed it to not renew to see what kinds of contacts I get. So far, it has just been a single, easily missed email on November 1! National isn’t even trying.

Are gold loopers yet again asleep at the wheel? (I know that many in Irving are not asleep at the wheel and are genuinely concerned about this. They are hamstrung by how SA’s bureaucracy resembles a patronage system, causing employees and volunteers to be promoted far beyond their Peter-principle limit, so people with poor performance and bad ideas have outsized influence in Irving.)

We should have had a higher renewal rate than 21%! What are we doing to gain conversions back to renewals?²³

Add a subscription model

It beggars belief that a subscription model wasn’t done from the start. Monthly bills are as American as apple pie. Internet, cell phone, Spotify, Netflix, rent or mortgage payments, etc., monthly payments are ubiquitous! It is unusual for a service to have a one-time fee!

Why did SA not see this? A subscription model removes the barriers of the annual-renewal blunder! Once you join, you begin paying $7 a month ($84 a year). This is on autopilot until you decide to quit. What this means:

• The lack of an annual touch point will not induce expiring memberships.
• The family’s administrative burden is resolved upon joining, a process all new families already suffer through.

While not an objective of a subscription model, SA may enjoy enhanced revenue from non-participating members who, due to the set-and-forget nature of monthly subscriptions, do not cancel the payments when they quit Scouting.

While some fear the revenue effect of families canceling their memberships, I find that fear to be misplaced. Even in the old system, a great number of youth dropped in their prorated period, denying SA the next year’s membership revenue. And if I had to make a choice, I’ll take the risk of less predictable cancellations over the 79% drop rate the annual system caused!

Fix the annual-renewal form

While I think we need to pivot from annual renewals, some will prefer that over a subscription model, so this still needs improvement.

The form is too hard! It needs to get as close to a click-and-submit form as possible.

It starts with trashing that dumbass, 1,197 word document. The way that dumbass document was written, and the idea that parents must sign it, is contemptuous of the base. If Irving bureaucrats cared about the base, they would never shove such a long, thick, dumbass document into an ordinary transaction. And the fact that we are expected to sign such a detailed, dumbass document reveals a national organization so arrogant, it believes we are so misaligned with its goals that it’s entitled to shove our noses in its goals annually.

E.g., why does national include the excerpt from the Declaration of Religious Principle in its bloated, dumbass document? Because despite that most SA members are Christian–in practice or culture–SA insists on its members mocking Jesus, and it insists on shoving our nose in it repetitively.

Come on, Irving bureaucrats, a renewing member does not need to sign your dumbass document!

Beyond that, there are other improvements that could be made. For example, the emailed notice should have had a unique link that takes one to a click-and-submit form, pre-authenticated for that member, that needs little info beyond the credit card number! The emailed notice could be sent more often. Other lines of communication could be used.

1. While SA’s prior membership scheme was a fixed-membership model, SA offered prorated memberships to new members, providing them membership through the end of the fixed-membership cycle that they joined in. Not long before the start of the next membership cycle, the new members would pay for a full year’s membership. ↩︎
2. This does not include local-council fees, which vary and can be hefty. ↩︎
3. In How to Determine Average Reading Time, the Public Relations Society of America recommends Roy Peter Clark‘s method for estimating time-to-read: divide the word count by 200. ↩︎
4. This document’s reading-ease score is only 42.8, which is considered “difficult” per How to Write Plain English by the University of Canterbury. ↩︎
5. This number, and all other numbers in this report (unless otherwise indicated), come from SA’s “summary” dashboard. ↩︎
6. Calculated by getting youth count using SA’s default filter but unchecking any lapsed membership categories. The remaining default- filter membership categories include “CrossOver, paid”, “Member Without a Unit”, “Multiple”, “New, multiple”, “New, paid”, “ReRegistered, multiple”, “ReRegistered, paid”, “Transfer In, paid”, and “Transfer, multiple”. Note that the report being used appears to have already filtered out some of these types. E.g., deselecting any of the “multiple” types has no effect on the count. ↩︎
7. Calculated by filtering to membership types that are lapsed. ↩︎
8. When you select a [Month] [Year] report in SA’s reporting system for the Month Year field, you are getting a report for the last day of that month. The only exception is when Current Month is selected, you are getting the data as of the day the data is viewed; that is how I got data for days other than the last day of a month. ↩︎
9. These number come from a different dashboard.
   
   If using the “summary” dashboard, these numbers come from a field that purportedly is cumulative. In theory, to get August 2023’s new-member growth, you subtract the August 2023 report’s number (total for Jan. 1 – Aug. 31) from the July 2023 report’s number (total for Jan. 1 – July 31) while filtering the report to “New, paid” youth memberships.
   
   However, on closer inspection, there is an anomaly: January 2023’s new-youth number is 95,385, and February 2023’s number is 79,111. A cumulative field won’t have a month-over-month decline!
   
   It was later discovered that the new-member stats shared by SA officials match those on a different dashboard that shows registration status by month, filtered to “new, paid”. I will therefore use that other dashboard for new-youth data. ↩︎
10. In my experience, it is rare for dropped youth to rejoin the program. ↩︎
11. PDS scores are part of SA’s hazing ritual for District Executives (DEs). This scoring system emphasizes goosing current-year numbers with little regard for future sustainability. Setting up new units, and, when feasible, obscuring true program costs with donor funds, appears to inordinately help PDS scores, but whether the units are around in the future hardly matters: short DE tenures, institutional silos, and an obsolete model for commissioner service makes it difficult to have great success with these new units, especially outside of areas experiencing natural growth of families with Scouting-friendly demographics. ↩︎
12. Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. I therefore expect high rates of attrition for new, older middle schoolers, who are joining a program they will quickly outgrow, or for high schoolers, who are infantilized by a program designed for the prior age cohort. ↩︎
13. While true in the big picture, SA’s numbers suggest a very small number of members may have been on the rolling-renewal system in the year or so before August 1, 2023. I suspect these were test users. ↩︎
14. I think the 2024 number will actually be lower than this as some of the fixed-membership lapses are displaced by new, rolling-scheme members whose membership periods coincide with their unit’s charter period. Still, I have no better number than the 2023 number, and as that number likely modestly overstates the fixed-membership lapses, it bends my math in SA’s favor. ↩︎
15. This number was obtained by visiting the summary dashboard on this day. Otherwise, when selecting a month and a year of any prior month, the user gets a figure for the last day of that month. ↩︎
16. I used 29 as the denominator. The difference between Nov. 1 and 30 is 29 days. ↩︎
17. Small, potential source of error: This probably does not include conversions that occurred on November 30. I think they show in the December 1 numbers. However, November 30, 2024 is a Saturday in a long, holiday weekend, so I doubt there is any movement. ↩︎
18. 59% comes from dividing September 2023’s new members by the sum of September 2023 and October 2023 new members. ↩︎
19. Recall that SA includes lapsed members in its total-youth count. All as-of-Dec. 16 lapsed members stay on the roll through the end of the month. While conversions of lapsed members back to paid are good, they don’t change the end-of-month number. ↩︎
20. As with the previous new-member numbers, these come from the dashboard that shows registration status by month. ↩︎
21. In that year, Oscar became lapsed on January 1, 2023 and dropped on March 1, 2023. ↩︎
22. Here, I went back to the end-of-2024 number that I called inflated. The adjusted number that I calculated later was to provide an apples-to-apples comparison to contrived numbers from prior years. The “inflated” number is my prediction of a point-in-time count in the current system, so it the correct one to use for projections for the spring. ↩︎
23. There appears to be a piecemeal measures being enacted or considered, but I need to maintain confidentiality. SA, you need to be public and open about your strategy! ↩︎

The Order of the Arrow, a weird, racist, secret society in Scouting America (SA), is self immolating.

Despite increasing scrutiny over its 109 years of mockery of American Indians, OA clings to racist playing-Indian activities. Its recent pattern is to express interest in correcting its sins, only to take de minimis measures unguided by strategy.

OA has good reason to be clingy. OA gets woo from its playing-Indian activities. This woo papers over that OA is just a collection of poorly related activities. Removing OA’s woo reveals its incoherence!

OA has no future. It’s time to abolish it. If we quit while we’re ahead, BSA can retain OA’s useful parts.

Background

The Order of the Arrow was founded in 1915, when the USA’s attempts to decimate American Indian tribes were at peak. The then-in-vogue notion was that Indians that we didn’t manage to kill were to be forcibly Westernized.

The goal was debasement of all American Indian tribes. That would have removed tribal customs from any sense of ownership, eliminating moral quandaries about remixing tribal customs for one’s own profit.

And profiting from an inauthentic remix is what OA did. In its early days, OA brewed legends and ceremonies from a mishmash of Western stereotypes of tribes. Much of this is phony stories of real tribes or real historical figures mixed with Western fantasy fiction rich with noble-savage stereotypes.

This is racism. I am not faulting OA’s founders for having used racist practices. In their time, racist campaigns against American Indians, like forced assimilation, were viewed as noble. I doubt they understood their art as racism. Regardless of original intent, we now know better. OA’s founding and its contemporary playing-Indian activities rest on racist ideology.

The USA started pivoting from racist practices against American Indians in the middle of the 20th century. Unlike the USA, OA clings to its racist legacy.

Cynically, it makes sense. OA profits on the woo of its racist legacy. Take the woo from OA, and you’re left with an organization no sane person would design: a collection of poorly related activities.

OA’s new mission and values

OA’s July 18, 2024 mission and values is a tacit admission: OA is incoherent.

OA’s new mission and values have four points. On a thin read, these points sound reasonable. The problem comes when OA lays out how the points are relevant, in a four-point list of “meaningful changes”. Two changes are contemptuous of high schoolers. The other two reflect features that should be part of SA‘s mainline programs.

In other words, OA’s own change agenda validates that it should not exist!

Change 1: Retention in Scouts BSA

OA’s first change is “a specific commitment to retention in Scouts BSA”. In saying this, OA is admitting it’s a tool to encourage high schoolers to linger in SA‘s middle-school program, Scouts BSA.

Even though it’s open to youth through age 17, Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. I will write more about this in a future article, but the capsule summary is that Scout BSA’s original design was for ages 11-14, and its program strengths still speak mainly to middle schoolers. Most high schoolers have rejected this middle-school program, fleeing SA.

For 114 years, insiders have called SA’s high-school-retention failure the “older [youth] problem”. Because SA is so bound by inertia, it is willfully blind to any strategy other than retaining high schoolers in its middle-school program. It has therefore facilitated 114 years of failure in solving this problem. (Also a topic for a future article: 114 years is enough time. The experiment has failed. Let’s move on. SA must move all high schoolers to Venturing. This will catch SA up to USA’s cultural norms and nearly all of our international Scouting peer programs.)

The centerpiece of SA’s failed high-school-retention strategy is adding bells and whistles to its middle-school program. Camp staff, high-adventure programs, and OA are the main bells and whistles.

The problem is that once the bell-and-whistle activity is done, the high schooler returns to babysitting duties in the middle-school program. Yuck!

Order has meaning. By making this the first listed change, OA’s leadership conveys that OA’s main job is to help SA avoid admitting the failure of its 114-year-old high-school-retention experiment.

Change 2: Broader service to all of SA

In this part, OA pledges to extend its high-school-level leadership training and programming beyond its own popularity-contest-gated membership. In other words, it’s seeking to be simply another program offering available to all age-eligible BSA members.

Hold on a second, let’s ask something: Which would do best at delivering leadership programming and conferences to high schoolers?

• A weird, racist, secret society that is unwilling to shuck its racist, playing-Indian crap.
• Venturing, SA’s high-school program

Of course, the answer is the high-school program!

See why this is a threat to OA’s relevance? Why would a weird, racist, secret society do better at high-school programming than a mainline program designed for high schoolers? (Hint: It can’t.)

But wait, there’s more!

OA ran an experiment in summer 2024, and it had a great outcome! The 2024 National Order of the Arrow Conference was a dramatically-reduced-racism environment. And it succeeded! The conference was great!

While about 15 instructional sessions at NOAC 2024 still promoted OA’s racist ideology, It would be trivial to trash them. We can easily eliminate from NOAC all remaining vestiges of OA’s racist activities!

SA must liberate high-school-oriented programs from its weird, racist, secret society. Venturing, SA’s mainline high-school program, is a much better fit for this!

Change 3: Emphasis on peer leadership

The point of this is OA sees itself as a place where high schoolers can “[have] the opportunity to lead their peers as opposed to younger Scouts”.

Um, we already have that. It’s called Venturing. That’s where high schoolers can lead their own peers.

Really, this is just a repetition of change 1. OA sees itself as a shiny object, distracting high schoolers from how SA’s wants them stuck in middle-school purgatory. As soon as the OA peer-leadership experience is done, guess where that high schooler goes back to? Babysitting middle schoolers.

The best way to deliver this promise is with Venturing. A weird, racist, secret society adds no value over Venturing.

Change 4: Recognition for Scouts and Scouters

This change makes little sense. SA has robust recognition opportunities in its mainline programs. Why do we need a weird, racist, secret society for that? (Hint: we don’t.)

Back to the purpose

These four changes were how OA plans to alter itself to align with its new purpose. Let’s get into that new purpose.

Sadly, points 1, 2, and 4 of the new purpose are undifferentiated from what should be normative in mainline SA programs:

• Recognize those who exemplify the Scout Oath and Law in their daily lives, and, through that recognition, cause others to act in the same way
• Reinforce a life purpose of leadership in cheerful service to others
• Be an integral part of Scouting America and encourage participation in all it offers through units, outdoor adventures, and national events to further the Scouting experience

Points 1, 2, and 4 of OA’s purpose, as of July 2024

None of these are enhanced by a weird, racist, secret society.

Point 3 usurps what Venturing already excels at:

• Create and deliver peer-led, adult-guided, advanced leadership experiences for Scouts and Scouters that positively impact their unit, community, and ultimately our nation

Point 3 of OA’s purpose, as of July 2024

“Advanced” here is a comparison to Scouts BSA’s middle-school-oriented experiences. It’s coded language for how OA offers programs targeted to high schoolers.

Venturing is SA’s high-school program. That is the best place to deliver high-school-targeted activities.

OA is still a secret society

OA was founded in 1915 as a secret society. To its credit, OA reduced its secrecy over time. But just as reduced-racism does not make OA not-racist, reduced-secrecy does not make OA not-secret.

To shuck the racist and secret labels, OA must drop all racism and all secrecy. It has declined to do either.

On secrecy specifically, I have two examples.

First is its Safeguarded Material practice. This is just a fancy label for how OA keeps core ceremony scripts secret. (The scripts’ passwords are ahoalton, itisonlyright, and leadershipinservice, respectively.) (By the way, in the context of SA, “safeguarding” refers to abuse prevention. Why does OA use that word for its secrecy-preservation scheme?)

Second, the National Order of the Arrow Committee has been extraordinarily secret on how it will deal with its playing-Indian problem.

I am old. When I was a youth, OA’s playing-Indian problem was widely known.

Here I am decades later, and OA’s playing-Indian problem remains unresolved. While some piecemeal action has happened, they are piecemeal, disconnected from any strategy, such as the 2019 prohibition on redface cosplay during Arrow of Light or crossover ceremonies for Cub Scouts. As I write this in September 2024, I still wonder what OA’s plan is, noting that a two-year, “very detailed and methodical evaluation” recently culminated in “minor changes” to its core ceremonies, which still contain a laundry list of racist, pretendian material.

Again, for OA to not be a secret society, it has to stop keeping secrets. Stop adding passwords to your documents. Stop the extreme secrecy of the National Order of the Arrow Committee. And importantly, stop the legacy of secrecy in your sayings, actions, and culture.

OA is weird

Why do I use “weird” to describe OA?

When talking about OA, we’re referring to a 109-year old secretive organization, whose incoherence is only masked by woo from playing-Indian activities, that through its own admission mainly exists to keep high schoolers in a middle-school program, and that in 2024 clings to racist activities long rejected by society.

How is that not weird?

OA has no future

In my past pieces (article 1, article 2), I held out optimism that OA may have a path forward.

I no longer believe that.

OA refuses to change. And I get it now. It can’t change! Its most urgently needed reform–dropping its racist, pretendian practices–will reveal an amalgam of unrelated activities, with access gated by a popularity contest.

Who needs that?

OA’s 110th birthday is in 2025. The best way to celebrate this is to quickly abolish OA while it can still happen in an orderly process. Some of OA’s programs have value, and we can preserve their legacy by reassigning them to Venturing.

Doing anything else is allowing OA’s slow suicide. If allowed to persist, OA will slowly self-immolate in a cauldron of conflict, dragging into chaos the parts that had value.

It’s time to move on. None of SA’s WOSM peers have a weird, racist, secret society. I am unaware of any USA youth-serving organization other than SA with a weird, racist, secret society.

All of SA’s energy needs to be focused on creating a better future. To succeed, we must eliminate all distractions, like OA.

Appendix: How about cheerful service?

This article focuses on the youth-serving aspects of OA. What about “cheerful service”?

While OA claims a character-development aspect of service, especially influenced by the Billy Clark story, the notion of youth providing community service needs to be engrained at all levels, not something claimed by a weird, racist, secret society.

I therefore do not feel it’s a strongly addressable need in the context of this article. Service must be an emphasis of all of BSA’s programs!

However, camp service remains valuable. I hear too many stories of how it enhances councils’ ability to deliver programs.

I recommend creating a new council-camp-service society. It must not be a renewed OA: No mockery of American Indians, no secrecy, no gating by a popularity contest, no national committee moated off from the base. It would be a clean-sheet society open to all who wish to serve.

An achievement system, whose main input is service hours, could be the recognition system. Councils would be well advised to develop appreciation systems to recognize camp-service achievements.

Boy Scouts of America recently chose a new name, Scouting America (SA). This will be a doing-business-as arrangement (DBA), so the underlying corporate name says the same.

SA means sexual assault.

With its new name, BSA spotlights its devastating past. That past is why it just made a $2.4 billion bankruptcy settlement.

BSA’s marketers ham-fistedly insisted on no abbreviations. Sorry, Scouting America will be abbreviated to SA. 66% fewer syllables and 89% fewer characters is too strong a pull. And BSA initializes so much, it’s a longstanding pattern: BSA, NYLT, NAYLE, OA, PLC, ILST, AOL, DYLC, NESA, NCAP, et al. It’s a Sisyphean quest to stamp out initializing this corporate name.

SA means sexual assault:

• SA means sexual assault on YouTube
• SA means sexual assault to the Minnesota Coalition Against Sexual Assault
• SA means sexual assault in research generated by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine
• SA means sexual assault at Tualatin High School
• SA means sexual assault at Brunel University
• SA means sexual assault to Voices for the Truth
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the University of Washington and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• SA means sexual assault to the Washington Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs
• SA means sexual assault to Sitkans Against Domestic Violence
• SA means sexual assault to the North Carolina Coalition Against Sexual Assault
• SA means sexual assault to the Michigan Coalition to End Domestic & Sexual Violence
• SA means sexual assault to the Winnipeg Health Sciences Center
• SA means sexual assault to Joseph L. Jordan, attorney
• SA means sexual assault to researchers from Western Michigan University
• SA means sexual assault in trigger warnings (example)
• SA means sexual assault to the Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault
• SA means sexual assault to the City of Alexandria, Virginia
• SA means sexual assault to the City of New Orleans
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Stanford University School of Medicine, VA Boston Healthcare System, Boston University School of Medicine, and Duke Health
• SA means sexual assault to the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence
• SA means sexual assault to the Illinois Coalition Against Sexual Assault
• SA means sexual assault to the Association of American Medical Colleges
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, the University of Barcelona, the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute, and the Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona Children’s Hospital
• SA means sexual assault to the Community Solutions to Sexual and Domestic Violence: Virginia
• SA means sexual assault to LifeSpan
• SA means sexual assault to the Ohio Department of Health
• SA means sexual assault to the Andersen Air Force Base
• SA means sexual assault to the Illinois Infonet Data Collection & Reporting System
• SA means sexual assault to the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence
• SA means sexual assault to the South Central Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the Brigham Young University College of Nursing
• SA means sexual assault in the Wisconsin Sexual Assault & Domestic Violence CCR Toolkit
• SA means sexual assault to the City of Philadelphia
• SA means sexual assault to the Women’s Center
• SA means sexual assault to Westchester County
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the University of Lethbridge and the University of Calgary
• SA means sexual assault to the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the University of Michigan and the Henry Ford Hospital
• SA means sexual assault to McMaster University
• SA means sexual assault to My Sister’s Place
• SA means sexual assault to Australia’s Government of Northwest Territories
• SA means sexual assault to the Oregon SATF
• SA means sexual assault to Kennesaw State University
• SA means sexual assault in research produced by the State University of New York at Buffalo
• SA means sexual assault to a Scout who was recently sexually assaulted

I could go on. Simple searches turn up so many more references to SA = sexual assault.

SA means sexual assault!

This is yet another bunder, on top of a pile of blunders, foisted on Scouting by its national organization.

Blunders will continue until people at the top declare they’ve had enough. What are you waiting on?

P.S., Scouts USA or Scouting USA make more sense. It reflects our country name instead of usurping the name of two continents, and it fits the naming convention of many of our WOSM peers.

The Order of the Arrow’s core ceremonies–the call outs and inductions–are pretendian parodies of American Indians and their culture.

The USA has a racist legacy of destroying American Indian tribes with forced Westernization. While that failed, OA’s core ceremonies celebrate the racist legacy’s goal: a dystopia with fully debased tribes, with nobody to own tribal customs.

If we want a useful OA, it must stop mocking American Indians, and it must stop celebrating our country’s cruel, racist sins.

A crucial step is eliminating all American Indian theming in the core ceremonies, just as national youth OA leadership asked.

(Technical note: This article is not about OA’s American Indian Activities (AIA), which are nominally authentic. Unlike the core ceremonies, AIA may have a path forward when it is done in collaboration with tribes.)

The core ceremonies are fake

In OA’s pretendian parodies, Scouts act out fake stories that were created by Westerners, done while employing a mishmash of language, themes, names, and clothing appropriated from American Indian tribes They also incorporate elements of freemasonry.

Even worse, the ceremonies are often delivered with gross Western stereotypes of Indians: garbled with Tonto-talk pidgin, the phony stories are rich with noble-savage tropes.

The ceremonies celebrate the end game of racist oppression

Some defend OA’s pretendian parodies as “respect” or “honor”. In fact, these ceremonies validate our country’s horrible sins.

Our country has a legacy of racist oppression of American Indians. This includes Indian removal, boarding schools, and much, much more. Among the goals of this oppression was to “White”-wash all American Indians: Through forced Westernization, the USA tried to destroy tribes. Had this succeeded, an outcome would have been divorcing tribal customs from any sense of ownership.

If you can’t change them, absorb them until they simply disappear into the mainstream culture…. In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.

Republican Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (source, emphasis added)

OA’s founding was in 1915. Then, the USA was still deep in its racist suppression of tribes. For example, re-education camps Indian boarding schools were still active. Oppressive official acts would continue decades longer, such as the Indian termination policy, which started in the 1940s, and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956.

In the time of OA’s founding, there was likely little moral qualm about treating tribal customs as if they are obsolete, public-domain artifacts.

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one…

In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

Richard H. Pratt, founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (source, emphasis added)

Thankfully, our country’s racist oppression failed. Tribes are now strengthening their communities, cultures, and identities through tribal self-determination, which started before the mid-20th century and become federal policy in the 1970s.

The ceremonies perpetuate racism

An OA interested in respect and honor would seek authenticity and support tribal self-determination. Instead, with its mocking and appropriation continuing even now, OA acts as if our country’s repudiated, racist agenda actually worked.

“Respect” and “honor” is the opposite of perpetuating a repudiated, racist past. It is the opposite of corrupting young minds, presenting pretendian parodies as if they were authentic.

If respect and honor were OA’s priorities, it would:

• Support tribal ownership of their own customs.
• Only share truth about American Indians and tribes.
• Not mock tribes.

An Order of the Arrow that respects and honors American Indians has no pretendian parodies!

It’s still going on

Racist or tribe-mocking practices remain normative in OA. In the context of pretendian parodies that are portrayed as authentic:

• They use brownface cosplay. In fact, their placement as the first suggestion in Approved Attire for Order of the Arrow Ceremonies shows that OA still encourages costumes that parody American Indians. By only constraining limitations with “should” statements, OA winks at those who wish to cling to appropriation.
• Ceremonialists play fictitious American Indian characters invented by Westerners, such as Allowat Sakima (Chief of the Fire) or Meteu (Medicine Man).
• The ceremonies mention fake characters as if they are historical, such as Chingachgook.
• A phony legend about a real tribe continues to be read. Adapted from the 1826 romance novel Last of the Mohicans, the legend is a fiction written about the Mohicans that OA assigned to the Lenape, a different tribe!
• They falsely convey that historical characters from different tribes, such as Uncas, who was Mohegan, are part of Lenape history.
• The ceremonies continue to use words appropriated from the Lenape tribe.
• The characters speak mostly noble-savage tropes garbled with Tonto-talk pidgin.

Further reinforcing its desire to cling to racist practices, OA will train for and host performances of its predendian parodies at its 2024 national conference at University of Colorado Boulder. Many sessions that perpetuate core ceremonies are in the conference program guide:

• Brotherhood Ceremony Evaluations (p. 40)
• Brotherhood: The Legend Continues (p. 40)
• Evaluating Ceremonies (p. 41)
• Exemplar Brotherhood Ceremony Viewing Session (p. 41)
• Exemplar pre-Ordeal Ceremony Viewing Session (p. 42)
• Exemplar Program (p. 42)
• Individual and Team Coaching (p. 43)
• Inductions Advising (p. 43)
• Inside the Ordeal Ceremony (p. 45)
• Inside the pre-Ordeal Ceremony (p. 45)
• Introduction to Ceremonial Skills Workshop (p. 45)
• Pre-Ordeal Ceremony Evaluations (p. 46)
• The Ceremonial Multiverse (p. 49)
• The Vigil Honor Experience: Beyond the Triangle (p. 50)
• Vigil Honor Ceremony Evaluations (p. 51)

What if we flipped the tables?

Let’s suppose that BSA was destroyed. Further suppose that soccer clubs, to given a sense of woo to their elite players, set up a secret society. The induction ceremony has performers dress up in tan shirts and campaign hats, wear our Eagle Scout and Arrow of Light symbols, and do a parody of a court of honor.

Would any sane person allege that honors BSA? Of course not. In the same sense, OA’s parodies of American Indians is neither honor nor respect.

Core ceremonies are irredeemable

Since I was a youth, OA swam in local allegations of American Indian endorsement of core ceremonies. I still hear it today. They typically invoke some random oral blessing from a mysterious American Indian from years prior.

These alleged endorsements cannot be differentiated from the “my Canadian girlfriend” trope. Why? Because they are probably phony. (I would be happy for someone to provide a link to a lodge website where it hosts a copy of an endorsement from a local tribe for its core ceremonies. Leave a comment if you know of one!)

Well, shouldn’t we try to get tribal endorsement of our core ceremonies? That would be inappropriate!

These ceremonies are amalgams of Western stereotypes and Western fictions, employing stories, characters, outfits, and traditions of multiple tribes.

As such, an endorsement would have to come from some group that represents over 2,000 tribes. Given the diversity of American Indians thought, practice, and belief, merely believing such an organization could exist would suggest foundational ignorance of American Indians.

OK, let’s suppose we inventoried every last part of our ceremonies and identify the tribe we stole each part from. The clothing, the language, the themes, etc. That is a herculean task that I doubt is feasible. But what if some amazing soul did it? We would have to approach each tribe and ask for their endorsement of their share of our Western parody that was built on theft. Simply asking that of a tribe is an insult!

Out of respect for the American Indian people and tribes, we must acknowledge racist parodies for what they are: irredeemable celebrations of tribal debasement.

It must stop

Racist and inauthentic, OA’s core ceremonies have no path to redemption. They have to stop.

Recent OA national youth leaders “wholeheartedly support ending the use of American Indian iconography and activities in our programs”.

Can they be reimagined? GIED to the rescue!

A major feature of the Order of the Arrow’s Ordeal experience is the elangomat system. The elangomat is a helpful guide to Scouts who are going through the Ordeal, a joining rite of Order of the Arrow.

I mention this to introduce Bill Hartman, who invented the elangomat system. Bill has a rich history with the Order of the Arrow, and his service continues: Bill leads the Guild of Inductions Experience Designers (GIED), a passion project where he and a team are reimagining Order of the Arrow’s core ceremonies. Among GIED’s goals are to remove cultural appropriation from the ceremonies.

GIED honors OA’s founder, E. Urner Goodman

In addition to disassociating OA from our country’s legacy racism, eliminating cultural appropriation honors a later-life admission of E. Urner Goodman, OA’s founder.

In 1970s living-room conversations with Urner, Bill Hartman recounts him lamenting his “biggest mistake” in founding the Order: utilizing fake legends in the context of naïve Scouts who mistakenly believe they are real history. (To be clear, Urner was only commenting on the factual legitimacy of the stories. Bill does not recall Urner otherwise commenting on the ceremonies’ ethics.)

In addition to providing OA a respectful exit from racism, the GIED’s work addresses E. Urner Goodman’s regret.

The National Order of the Arrow Committee could care less

I have documented several examples of cultural rot of BSA’s national organization. Prominent in the rot are arrogance, a bureaucratic culture of inertia and ineffectiveness, and hostility to outside views. OA’s national committee appears to be no different. In addition to its poor transparency, it’s hostile to outside views.

In a rational world, a long-tenured member who invented a crucial part of inductions would be a valued contributor. His group’s passion project would be given weight. That is the case for the GIED.

The National Order of the Arrow Committee is in a different world. When the GIED’s work was shared with a portion of this committee, a committee member write this to all committee members:

Living up to the cultural rot of the national organization, the committee is actively moating itself off from mere peasants. Of course, everything good that BSA has ever done has been invented from within by a gold looper, right? Of course that’s true. Peasants must know their place, which is to shut up and receive wisdom from wise elites who know better.

Additionally, this reveals that a team has spent two years secretly pondering the ceremonies. That is far too much time, so this committee is obviously engaged in bureaucratic stalling tactics to delay reform further.

Wait, there’s more! The ceremony revisions were finally published in December 2023. Sadly, all the problems with the Ordeal ceremony I identified above are from this revision. (The passwords on the ceremony docs are ahoalton, itisonlyright, and leadershipinservice. Secrets in Scouting are bad, you know?) If this is the result of over two years of work, it’s clear evidence that OA is unserious about fixing its cultural-appropriation issues.

GIED’s works should be considered. There may also be other proposals worthy of consideration. Whatever it does, OA must pivot from the national organization’s norms: Instead of acting elitist, it must stop moating itself off from the base.

Limited patience warranted

A key reason individuals become pretendians, like Elizabeth Warren, Iron Eyes Cody, and Johnny Depp, is “[p]ersonal gain and material advantage” (source, p. 15). OA’s pretendian parodies have given it gain and advantage: a shortcut to creating a uniting theme. This uniting theme substitutes for OA’s raison d’etre. Without the woo from the ceremonies, OA is just a collection of weakly related activities.

OA is facing an existential crisis. Discerning a raison d’etre is hard. Patience is needed while OA improves.

The patience must be limited. OA’s national leadership has only given us decades of stalling. Continued stalling isn’t the answer, but bureaucratic stalling tactics are the national organization’s preferred answer to nearly anything it faces.

Transparent improvement must start now. We need a clear-eyed, open acknowledgement of the inappropriateness of OA’s pretendian parodies. We also need a firm, time-boxed goal for OA to clean up its act.

So far, OA’s leadership has not differentiated itself from national’s cultural rot. For example, in the nine months between a major survey and the AIA announcement, it stonewalled the public, and it still has not shared the survey results.

Again, patience is limited. Should the culture of BSA’s national organization–stalling, hostility to outsiders, intransparency, low performance, and resistance to accountability–continue to be OA’s methods, that signals a lack of seriousness. A lack of seriousness will only lead to OA’s dissolution.

Appendix: Thanking hobbyists

I want to make a brief mention of the Indian hobbyist movement. The USA’s racist attempts to “White”-wash American Indians and destroy tribes succeeded to a degree, quashing some tribes, leaving nobody to carry on their customs.

In some cases, Whites took up the traditions and, to the best of their ability, kept them alive. That was the Indian hobbyist movement.

There was a time and place for the Indian hobbyist movement. Those who kept traditions alive deserve thanks. But that was a century ago. Tribes are strengthening, in some cases re-forming, and reasserting themselves through tribal self-determination.

Today, it is most sound when non-American Indians limit their American Indian performance art to that which is directly sanctioned through the tribe that owns the art. For BSA’s institutional purposes, that sanctioning needs to be explicit and transparent.

All that said, there is no ethical argument for perpetuation of pretendian parodies within an organization that claims to build character.

BSA’s Summit Bechtel Reserve (SBR) is a fantastic spot for quadrennial Jamborees.

It has a dark side. Protecting BSA’s bigotry is its raison d’etre. With program revenue a tiny fraction of expectations and staggering debt, it’s worth less than zero and is a major fiscal strain on BSA’s fragile national organization.

BSA has never shared a plan to turn SBR around. As a Scouting-themed amusement park in a remote location that lacks national-scope repute, a turnround seems extraordinarily challenging.

Bigots love BSA’s leadership vacuum

BSA has a decades-long leadership vacuum. Special-interest groups filled this vacuum, freely using BSA as a tool in their culture wars. They are why BSA have squandered so much treasure and goodwill on membership controversies.

Special-interest groups are also why BSA became a stalwart of immorality, aggressively litigating a right to be bigoted all the way to the Supreme Court. And it won this shit prize in 2000.

BSA’s bigoted flex put it at odds with society. Government agencies, pivoting from discrimination, were increasingly resistant to associate with an organization that was openly bigoted on gender, sexual orientation, and religion.

BSA’s bigotry endangered its ability to use government facilities for Jamborees. Seeing this, Congress twice protected BSA’s access to government facilities. The 2002 Boy Scouts of America Equal Access Act provided general protection, and the 2005 Support Our Scouts Act protected the Jamboree.

BSA’s reaction? Walk away.

Preserving bigotry: SBR’s main point

Here’s the irony: BSA used Fort Walker for Jamborees 1981-2010. Then, it was named named Fort A. P. Hill. A Confederate, A. P. Hill was a traitorous scoundrel and fool. Hill and his co-conspirators waged an illegal rebellion, bankrupting southern states to engage in a devastating, bloody war of choice, just to preserve bigotry.

Acolytes of special-interest groups follow Hill’s example, morally and fiscally bankrupting BSA so that they can wage war against society, in interest of promoting their bigotry.

An outcome of the special-interest groups’ bigoted flex: SBR! Yup, BSA built SBR to preserve its bigotry!

Former Chief Scout Executive Robert Mazzuca, one of a succession of incompetent CEOs, spills the beans in the first few seconds of this video:

Robert’s admission: “taking our destiny back and seeing if we couldn’t find a place and a home for our new Jamboree”. (I am certain he said “new” in the wrong place, meaning to say “new home for our Jamboree” SBR is the new home for the traditional, not-new Jamboree.)

Why would you need to find a new home for the Jamboree? Why do you need to take your destiny back? It’s because, despite two acts of Congress, BSA still feared that its bigotry would end access to Fort Walker, its Jamboree home since 1981.

BSA could have dropped its immorality. Instead, BSA made foolish fiscal choices, just to perpetuate bigotry.

None of the other reasons make sense

In the above video, other gold loopers gave flimsy, alternate excuses for developing SBR. They were shared starting at 1:01:

• Summer camp
• High-adventure base
• Leadership center

These are affirmed by SBR’s website, which lists these three uses, along with a “Family Adventure Camp”.

None of these uses make sense.

Summer camp makes no sense

BSA had no need for another summer camp.

Thanks to the BSA national organization’s war of attrition against its own membership, by 2010, BSA’s market share of youth had shrunk 46% from its 1971 peak. We had well under-grown our infrastructure, which was affirmed in a late 2010s speech by former Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh. (As of the end of 2023, we’re down an astounding 80%!)

In this context of decline, how is the base served when national competes with declining council summer camps?

Leadership center makes no sense

The leadership center may be the dumbest excuse to build SBR. It was not needed, and it’s too remote.

Again, thanks to its decades-long war against its own membership, BSA has been under-growing a diverse array of national and council facilities since 1971: camps, office buildings, and more. In fact, BSA had so much surplus capacity, it sold a silly, Westlake, Texas training facility to contribute funds to the bankruptcy settlement.

There was no need for more training space in 2010. Yet we solve that phony problem with an expensive, new facility in the middle of nowhere?

Regarding “middle of nowhere”, let’s review the trip plans of those who attended the January 2024 separate-but-equal Wood Badge¹ at SBR and used Amtrak or flights:

• Amtrak to Prince, WV, then 0.4 hour drive: 2
• Flew to Yeager, then 1 hour drive: 12
• Flew to Dulles, then 5 hour drive: 5
• Flew to Charlotte Douglas, then 3.5 hour drive: 5
• Flew to John Glenn Columbus, then 3.5 hour drive: 2
• Flew to Raleigh-Durham, then 4 hour drive: 1
• Number needing BSA-provided shuttle assistance: 14

Contrast this to, say, BSA’s Irving headquarters, where the trip choices would mainly be:

• Amtrak to Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, then 0.3 hour drive
• Flew to Dallas-Forth Worth, then 0.2 hour drive
• Flew to Love, then 0.3 hour drive

Oh, wait, need a camp facility with an option of bunk houses? Got you covered. Let’s go to Camp Wisdom! What that would look like:

• Amtrak to Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station, then 0.3 hour drive
• Flew to Dallas-Forth Worth, then 0.5 hour drive
• Flew to Love, then 0.5 hour drive

We add value to an unneeded training facility by hiding it in a remote location?

High adventure makes no sense

Nothing done at SBR is high adventure.

BSA’s description of high adventure:

A high-adventure trek is a joyous opportunity—beyond the scope of the routine. It is more than just a scenic outdoor experience. It is more than just a physical challenge. It is an experience in living and cooperating with others to meet an exciting challenge. It is learning to overcome difficulties and learning to live in harmony with nature.

Passport to Adventure, Boy Scouts of America, 2011 printing, p. 4 (emphasis added)

The last phrase is key: “learning to live in harmony with nature”. That crucial context colors what you get at BSA’s genuine high-adventure bases, which are at the Florida Keys, Rocky Mountains, and northern boundary waters.

SBR is phony high-adventure: A Scouting-themed amusement park built on an area already terraformed by extensive surface coal mining, SBR defies nature! Those enjoying SBR’s headline attractions are using man-made facilities on a scraped landscape.

78% of SBR’s 2023 attendees attended its middle-school summer camp program or programs focused on SBR’s amusement-park rides:

• Summit Experience (31%)
• Polaris ATV (5%)
• Marksman (4%)
• Summer Camp (38%)

Only 22% of SBR attendees are doing high-adventure:

• Pack N Paddle (2%)
• New River Experience (20%)

“Hold on a second, didn’t you say no high adventure was done at SBR?” Correct! Attending a high-adventure program at SBR means you leave SBR, instead going to New River Gorge National Park or adjacent areas!

The New River Gorge National Park did not need a nearby, $439,000,000 white elephant for Scouts to enjoy it. If SBR was never developed, then New River Gorge National Park would be like a regular national park: fully available for Scouting adventure!

Poorly utilized

Those percentages I wrote about in the prior section? They split a tiny number.

Back to the video shared earlier, starting at 1:44, a gold looper shares that SBR will be a “high-utilization site” with projected usage to be “somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand kids a summer”.

Let’s split the difference at 75,000 kids. What was the 2023 utilization? 2,428 kids, 97% less than projected.

Might as well be zero!

Of those 2,428 kids:

• 921 did summer camp (That means attendance at all summer-camp sessions was comparable to my council’s single week of winter camp!)
• 535 departed SBR to do high adventure
• 972 focused on amusement-park rides

That giant sucking sound: massive financial failures

SBR’s financial piggishness started in its infancy.

Per a 2013 Reuters exposé, SBR’s actual cost was 99% higher than estimated, accompanied by a 32% fundraising shortfall. Given a $439 million facility with a $343 million fundraising goal, this means a $220 million cost overrun met by a $108 million fundraising shortfall.

Now let me admit limitations of these numbers: This is from a mid-2013 article. BSA is invited to share if it got closer to fundraising goals or meaningfully addressed the overruns (unlikely given massive bond debt outstanding; see below). But it will take tremendous shifts from the Reuters article’s numbers to get out of clown-show territory.

More sucking: a SBR-sized heap of debt

(This section is complicated. The main point: Arrow WV, Inc. is a nonprofit controlled by BSA, and it owns The Summit. Arrow WV likely owes Boy Scouts of America, Inc. well over $350 million. It does not seem likely Arrow WV can ever pay this back. BSA reports this amount owed to it as an asset, and that one asset accounts for 41% of all of BSA’s assets!)

SBR is underwater, and the negative fiscal trends are accelerating.

More info on the financial numbers below and the meaning of Arrow WV, Inc.

SBR is owned by Arrow WV, Inc., a nonprofit controlled by BSA. Numbers specific to SBR come from Arrow WV’s IRS Form 990s.

Numbers specific to BSA come from BSA’s IRS Form 990s.

As of press time, the latest Form 990 available covers 2022. Unless specified otherwise, the numbers are as of the end of the 2022 fiscal year.

Thanks to steadily increasing liabilities, Arrow WV, SBR’s owner, went underwater in 2022 with a net worth of -$1,742,989²:

This is fueled by annual operating losses:

Let’s look more into the liabilities.

For 2022, Arrow WV had total liabilities of $370,598,250³. Of that, $783 is “Accounts payable and accrued expenses”, and the remaining $370,597,467 is an intercompany payable.

This intercompany payable is funds that Arrow WV owes to other entities within the BSA family. This common accounting tactic means 1. that other corporations within BSA’s family spotted Arrow WV $370 million to cover its shortfalls and 2. Arrow WV is expected to pay them back.

Boy Scouts of America, Inc.–the main corporation in this family of entities–has an intercompany receivable of $356,180,280⁴. Reported as an asset, it’s money owed to BSA. It’s likely that all, or nearly all, of this is money owed to BSA by Arrow WV. (BSA’s intercompany receivable is about $14 million less than Arrow WV’s intercompany payable. This suggests that Arrow WV owes at around $14 million to other corporations in BSA’s family.)

Let’s assume all of BSA’s intercompany receivable is from Arrow WV. About half that receivable is BSA’s guarantee on county bonds issued to finance SBR’s construction. Fayette County, WV issued $225,000,000 of bonds⁵ in 2010⁶ and 2012⁷. As they are guaranteed by BSA, BSA must pay them off. As of the end of 2022, the bonds still have an outstanding balance of $185,799,385⁸.

Subtract the bonds from the intercompany receivable, and this means Arrow WV–AKA, SBR–owes BSA $170,380,895⁹ for other reasons.

I suspect these “other reasons” fall into two categories:

1. BSA covering for Arrow WV’s start-up expenses that weren’t covered by bonds or donor funds.
2. Daddy BSA paying for things each year that Arrow WV can’t afford.

The expectation may have been that Arrow WV pays this back. But it hasn’t, and it can’t due to staggering annual losses. Arrow WV’s intercompany payable (amounts owed) keeps growing, which is not surprising given its large deficits.

Of BSA’s $902,582,447 of total assets¹⁰, 41% are that intercompany receivable. (Yes, corporations can report money owed to them as assets.) In other words, 41% of BSA’s assets may be worthless!

$18 of youth membership fees = SBR deficit

BSA’s annual youth member fee has had meteoric increases:

If BSA produces any significant savings, its first priority is to provide relief to its youth members from the staggering annual fee increases.

Let’s suppose BSA sold SBR and paid off the bonds. This means BSA no longer incurs about $18,344,608 of annual losses¹¹ related to SBR.

Divide that $18,344,608 savings by BSA’s 1,015,056 youth members, and you get $18 per Scout.

Think about it: $18 per Scout is equivalent to the deficits of a failing facility that few will ever use. If we had no SBR obligations, BSA could reduce the annual youth membership fee from $85 to $67.

Yeah, I know, bean counters may spin some yarn about a corporate accounting trick that disassociates member fees from SBR. I could care less. The loss is real, reported on Arrow WV’s own IRS 990 form. No accounting trick takes away that the highest priority for operational revenue savings needs to be relieving youth from exorbitant national-fee increases.

I had a great time at the 2017 Jamboree

I was a Scoutmaster of 2017 National Scout Jamboree’s Troop 4116. SBR is an outstanding facility for Jamborees! I loved my time there.

But my fondness cannot change that SBR is a failed, money-losing pig.

Closing thought

The Army removed names of Confederate scoundrels from many facilities. We need to follow the Army’s example and remove bigoted culture from BSA. If only we had started that decades ago…

Wishful thinking can’t change today’s reality. We now own this white elephant, courtesy of special-interest groups. And it’s proposed as the home of the 2031 World Jamboree. (Nov. 26, 2024 update: This bid fell through.)

I encourage BSA to reconsider the vision of a gold-looper who helped found SBR:

The key to [SBR] is, from an operating perspective, … that it will sustain itself economically in perpetuity.

-[name redacted], at 7:00 in the above video

Those who like SBR, who want to keep it for perpetuity, the onus is on you to fix its finances, to hold SBR responsible for its “key” promise. What’s your plan?

For sure, the plan isn’t what steampunk Baden-Powell’s ghost shared with gold loopers in the 2000s:

1. You read that right. Grown-ass adults had to pretend that fragile males had to be protected from being “disadvantaged” by females by cosplaying BSA’s separate-but-equal regime! ↩︎
2. Arrow WV’s 2022 Form 990, line 20 (total assets) minus line 21 (total liabilities) (page 1) ↩︎
3. Arrow WV’s 2022 Form 990, line 21 (total liabilities) (page 1) ↩︎
4. BSA’s 2022 Form 990, Schedule D, Part IX, line 1 (page 48) ↩︎
5. BSA’s 2022 Form 990, Schedule K, Part II, line 3, add columns A and B (page 67) ↩︎
6. BSA’s 2022 Form 990, Schedule K, Part I, line A, column (d) (page 67) ↩︎
7. BSA’s 2022 Form 990, Schedule K, Part I, line B, column (d) (page 67) ↩︎
8. BSA’s 2022 Form 990, Schedule K, Part II, add both numbers in line 3, then subtract from that sum both numbers in line 1 (page 67) ↩︎
9. This is calculated by subtracting the amount outstanding on SBR bonds from BSA’s intercompany-receivable asset. ↩︎
10. BSA’s 2022 Form 990, Part X, line 16 (rightmost column) (page 24) ↩︎
11. This is from Arrow WV’s 2022 Form 990, line 19. ↩︎

BSA uses its Declaration of Religious Principle (DRP) to bar atheists and agnostics. This graceless, bigoted policy is offensive to Christianity.

Jesus’s words and deeds command Christians to radical grace, compassion, and inclusion. Those are the opposite of BSA’s Declaration. Those who follow Jesus cannot support a policy of excluding those who are different.

(This article speaks to what I know, a Christian perspective. If you have a different faith perspective that leads to inclusion and tolerance, leave a comment!)

The Declaration’s contemporary point: bigotry

Religious observance, faith exploration, and tolerance have been encouraged since 1911 by the “Reverent” Scout Law (source, see page 10). That law gives full justification to features like the Religious Emblems Program or the Scouts’ Own concept.

Supplemental language that largely resembles today’s DRP was created around the same time. In its context–the tail end of the Third Great Awakening–the DRP was almost certainly intended as a magnanimous statement reflecting then-contemporary norms.

Religious extremists have warped the DRP into a statement of religious bigotry. This was affirmed by BSA’s litigation team.

The point of this article is that today’s religious-extremist interpretation of the DRP forces Christians to contradict Jesus’s words and deeds. Christians who prefer not to slap Jesus cannot align with the extremists’ interpretation of the DRP. That is the focus of this article.

The Greatest Commandment and Golden Rule: core to Christianity

Crucial to Christian faith are the Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule:

1. The Greatest Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
2. The Golden Rule: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Source: Matthew 22:35-40. (The added boldface will be relevant later.)

Jesus commands you to love your God and love your neighbor. Any Christian belief or practice that contradicts this is heretical.

The next sections explain why Christians who value Jesus’s “main point” cannot support the DRP.

We must love the despised

The Parable of the Good Samaritan is Jesus’s first expansion on the Golden Rule.

In this parable, someone is severely injured by robbers. He is left lying on the side of the road.

A priest and Levite pass the injured man, leaving him for dead. In those days, priests and Levites believed they would be defiled if they touched a corpse. By moving to the other side of the road before passing the injured man, these two avoided becoming unclean.

Then comes a Samaritan, the Good Samaritan. He rendered aid and paid for the victim to convalesce at an inn.

Back then, Jews violently hated the Samaritans. The Jews believed the Samaritans had corrupted their worship of God and added false gods into the mix. The Jews felt they would be contaminated by Samaritans even with indirect contact, such as by using a dish once touched by a Samaritan. The hatred was worse than the worst modern societal conflict that crosses Americans’ minds. Like BSA’s DRP, maximal separation from a hated group was the goal.

Yet Jesus illustrated his Great Commandment with a story featuring a Samaritan as the good guy! The Samaritan was not to be hated. The Samaritan was worthy of grace and love! A dreg of humanity acted better than the the priests and Levites, holiest of society!

If we take Jesus’s words seriously, we can’t act as if atheists’ and agnostics’ presence defiles us. But we play that stupid game, acting like the priest and Levite, when we support the DRP.

When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re copying the sins of those who Jesus condemned.

We must not harm children

The Declaration of Religious Principle is kin punishment, punishing children for a grievance against the parents.

Civilized societies have long moved past kin punishment. BSA’s DRP sends us back centuries, punishing innocent children over an alleged sin of the parent.

Belief systems of youth are mainly their parents’ beliefs:

• Minors generally reflect the religious beliefs of their parents.
• Parents have a general right to educate their children according to their own religious conviction, and children generally lack a right to resist reasonable religious practices (or non-practices!) ordained by their parents. (While beyond the scope of this article, I encourage a read of Children as Believers: Minors’ Free Exercise Rights and the Psychology of Religious Development, Harvard Law Review, June 2022.)

Therefore, BSA’s Declaration slaps innocent children.

Contrast BSA’s approach to Jesus’s: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:14)

Jesus was not barbaric. He did not impose a religious test. He ministered to all. BSA could learn from Jesus.

When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re harming children.

We must not be rulemongers

Jesus’s Great Commandment was in response to a question from a Pharisaic “expert in the law” (a lawyer). Notable about the Pharisees was their obsession with rules, especially ones concerning purity.

Jesus’s responses to Pharisaical interrogations often illustrate how their rulemongering distracts them from what’s important. Tragically, the Woes of the Pharisees align with the woes that underly BSA’s Declaration, an obsession with outward appearance and superficiality.

Jesus told the Parable of the Good Samaritan in response to questioning of another “expert in the law”. Jesus was once again addressing someone obsessed with rules.

And in that parable, the priest and Levite were examples of people who were so rulebound, they missed opportunities to minister.

If Christians take Jesus seriously, we need to avoid the Woes of the Pharisees. We need to avoid allowing an obsession over rules to cause us to miss opportunities to grace and ministry. Essentially a Pharisaical document, BSA’s Declaration can’t be reconciled with Jesus’s own teachings.

When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re missing opportunities to minister due to our rulemongering, a trap Jesus warned us about.

We must show grace towards the vulnerable

People are complex. Simple decisions can mask difficult circumstances leading to them.

Many atheists or agnostics are recovering from harms caused by past church experience. Avoiding the institution that caused harm could be a crucial part of that person’s recovery.

As an example, let’s use United Methodist Minister Teresa MacBain. In the nine years of her ministry, spiritual malpractice she experienced in her childhood–problematic biblical teachings from a different denomination–haunted her, creating questions so immense, the only reasonable path forward for her was to renounce religion entirely, becoming an atheist.

But Teresa’s story does not end there. A few years later, she came back to faith.

And who demonstrated the same gracelessness as BSA’s Declaration? The prominent atheist, former-clergy group she was in.

In addition to slapping Jesus and innocent children, BSA’s Declaration slaps adults who may simply be doing their best to overcome spiritual malpractice.

When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re contravening the Golden Rule, which Jesus said is one of two most important commandments.

We must not compel faith tests outside of church

In the Greatest Commandment and the Golden Rule, Jesus used second-person pronouns, “your” and “yourself”. It’s hard to miss what it emphasizes: Your faith expression is your own private, personal, and core matter. Jesus’s key concern is your own faith, not how you coerced your neighbor.

This doesn’t mean your can’t share your faith. For example, a mainstream Christian practice is corporate worship experiences. You know, going to church. Regularly attending a church conveys to that congregation, and anyone who sees you walking in the door, your alignment with that church’s beliefs.

But how about outside of a voluntary, religious setting? That is where we find secular organizations, like BSA. In Matthew 6, Jesus cautions against demonstrations of religiosity in the secular world:

• Don’t practice righteousness in front of others.
• Gifts to the needy are to be done in secret.
• Don’t be like the “hypocrites” who visibly pray. Instead, pray in secret, behind closed doors.
• Don’t pray loudly by “babbling like pagans”.
• Don’t put on a show of somberness while fasting.

He follows with the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer again emphasizes the individual’s own relationship with God: individual reflection and individual acts. Corporate petitions (“our”) are on behalf of the voluntarily aligned in a religious community.

There’s much more to unpack from Matthew 6. But further exegesis won’t change Jesus’s strong preference for private religiosity and a focus on one’s own faith life. Jesus was deeply skeptical, sometimes condemnatory, of open demonstrations of religiosity, especially when one uses public religiosity to seek affirmation of others.

Let’s recap. Jesus exhorts us to a faith that focuses on the individual’s private relationship with God.

Religious tests in a secular organization oppose this. These tests are one party compelling a demonstration of religiosity out of another party. This isn’t the same as respectfully participating in a prayer at a Scout event. It is a test of an individual’s private matter.

It is difficult to reconcile a zeal for Jesus’s words and deeds with support of compelled religious tests in a secular organization.

When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re disrespecting those who prefer to obey Jesus’s expectations for how individuals are to conduct faith practices and relate to others of faith.

We must offer immense grace

Another parable on grace is a cautionary tale. Jesus’s Parable of the Unmerciful Servant describes a servant who had received unexpected, undeserved grace in the form of cancellation of a massive debt. Shortly after that debt cancellation, the servant demanded payback from a peer who owned him money. Due to his lack of grace, the servant’s debt was un-canceled, and he was thrown in jail until he could pay it back.

Part of Christian theology includes a Christian’s receipt of wholly unmerited salvation. That is a profound act of grace given to us. We are expected to emit at least that much grace: “Not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (source)

We are to show unimaginably vast grace to our fellow man. That starkly contrasts seeking to exclude others from a secular organization over a mere lack of outward religious signs.

Christians who use the Declaration to exclude others are not showing 77x grace or even 7x grace; they are sucking grace out of the room!

Part of grace is setting aside one’s pride and compassionately engaging with people unlike you. That includes theists doing the opposite of BSA’s Declaration: engaging with with and ministering to atheists and agnostics.

When we use the Declaration for its main purpose–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–instead of loving God and others, we’re declining to show grace, contravening Jesus’s expectation of us to show 77 times as much grace as we receive!

We must serve society

Religiously unaffiliated people are already a large plurality that will keep growing:

Religiously unaffiliated are a mix of beliefs, occupying a spectrum from atheist to non-participating traditionalist. But 37% of religious “nones” are identify as atheist or agnostic (source):

Also, for 67% of religious “nones”, “disbelief/doubt/skepticism” is an “extremely or very important reason” for why they are a none (source).

By banning a large and growing percent of society, the DRP’s bigotry and gracelessness cause BSA’s irrelevance.

If society shifts, relevant organizations must shift with it. BSA has already shown the folly of trying to change society: costly, harmful, and stupid membership controversies that still sully BSA’s reputation.

BSA can be relevant by deleting the DRP and instead promoting tolerance and understanding in the world it inhabits. Or BSA can cling to the bigoted, harmful, backwards DRP and accelerate its decline.

A note about bigotry

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines bigotry as “blindly devoted to some creed, opinion, or practice” along with “having or showing an attitude of hatred or intolerance toward the members of a particular group…”

Just like BSA’s old gay ban and its “separate but equal” regime for girls, the Declaration of Religious Principle is bigotry.

“Legal” and “morally straight” are different

Private, secular, membership organizations, like BSA, have a Constitutional right to slap Jesus. BSA squandered enormous funds and goodwill to preserve this right, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court with BSA v. Dale.

But “legally permitted” and “morally straight” are different. A mentally awake and morally straight Christian cannot support a secular organization’s Jesus-slapping religious test.

Summary for Christians

When we use the Declaration for what religious extremists want–to discriminate against atheists and agnostics–we’re rejecting what Jesus said is the most important of all: loving God and others.

How we solve this

While the DRP was originally a magnanimous statement, religious extremists have warped it to suit their agenda. It is now poisonous, warped beyond recovery.

We don’t need the DRP! We already have the “Reverent” Scout law. That alone is sufficient to justify appropriate, voluntary observations of faith in BSA’s programs.

The DRP must go. Just delete it.

Families must be entrusted to define “Reverent” in the way that makes sense for them. And BSA must stop compelling Christians to behave in ways that contravene Jesus’s words and example.

Finally, BSA’s own mission statement calls it to “prepare young people … by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law”. BSA’s bigotry countermand this, limiting access to those who have already reached some preferred answer. If we’re serious about the instilling part, we have to be open to all, even to those with whom we disagree, with those whose answer is different than our preferences. Otherwise, we’re failing our mission.

Acknowledging my bias

I am a practicing Christian, a lifelong United Methodist. My view of the DRP is expressed through that lens.

As Christianity is the dominant religion in the USA, and certainly of BSA members, it has pervasive influence. I therefore find it helpful to review this Declaration through a Christian lens.

This is not out of disrespect to other religious traditions. It is me expressing myself authentically and avoiding speaking for others.

If you have a different faith perspective that leads you to grace and inclusion, I’d love to hear it! Share your vision for overcoming the DRP’s bigotry in a comment.