Scouting

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Scouting membership numbers collapse: AP totally ignores role of religion in this drama

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Scouting membership numbers collapse: AP totally ignores role of religion in this drama

It’s the question that I have been trying to answer for 40 years or so: Why do news organizations ignore basic religion facts and trends when it is clear they are relevant in a major news story?

Ever since the first GetReligion post, back in 2004, we’ve been talking about religion “ghosts” in mainstream news coverage. Some “ghosts” are rather subtle and, frankly, it’s easy to understand why journalists with zero religion-beat experience would miss some facts and trends linked to religious law, history or doctrine.

But then you have “ghosts” — super ghosts, maybe — that are much, much more obvious and harder to explain. Consider, for example, the Associated Press story that came out the other day with this headline: “Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts suffer huge declines in membership.” Here’s the overture:

America’s most iconic youth organizations — the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of the USA — have been jolted by unprecedented one-year drops in membership, due partly to the pandemic, and partly to social trends that have been shrinking their ranks for decades.

While both organizations insist they’ll survive, the dramatic declines raise questions about how effectively they’ll be able to carry out their time-honored missions. … Membership for the BSA’s flagship Cub Scouts and Scouts BSA programs dropped from 1.97 million in 2019 to 1.12 million in 2020, a 43% plunge, according to figures provided to The Associated Press. Court records show membership has fallen further since then, to about 762,000.

Other than the COVID-19 crisis, what else caused this massive drop?

Reasons for the drop include competition from sports leagues, a perception by some families that they are old-fashioned, and busy family schedules. The pandemic brought a particular challenge.

Wait a minute. Parents were worried that the Scouts are “old-fashioned,” which implies that Scouting would be growing if its leaders made more efforts to modernize their methods and beliefs?

Then again, maybe it would help if the story mentioned decisions by leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to cut ties to the Boy Scouts (click here for AP story on that bombshell) because of changes linked to gender and sexuality in the name of becoming more modern and, well, woke? Not that long ago, LDS congregations hosted 37% of all Scout troops. At the same time, many — perhaps most — Southern Baptist Convention churches have dropped out of Scouting for the same reasons.


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Members, money and math: Are sex-abuse lawsuits the only cause of Scouting woes?

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When it comes to the ongoing crisis facing Scouting — previously the Boy Scouts of America — it’s obvious that the big headline right now is the decision to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

I get that. However, I would like to ask a question once again about this complex story about an organization that, for decades, was a powerful sign of unity in mainstream American culture.

Has this bankruptcy been caused by waves of child-abuse allegations, alone? See the wording in the headline atop a massive USA Today feature the other day: “Boy Scouts files Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the face of thousands of child abuse allegations.”

Here’s another basic question: Would Scouting leaders be in better financial shape if their membership totals were way up above 4 million, where they were in the 1970s, as opposed to just under 2 million participants today? Would Scouting be better off if supporters in many large conservative religious groups — think the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and many Southern Baptist congregations — hadn’t hit the exit doors in the past decade or so? Do the math?

Yes, note that there is a religion-news component to this missing part of the story. If Scouting is going to survive, who will host these activities and provide the volunteers (and children) they need to thrive?

There is next to nothing about this side of the story in that long USA Today feature. Here is the overture:

Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy protection … amid declining membership and a drumbeat of child sexual abuse allegations that have illuminated the depth of the problem within the organization and Scouts’ failure to get a handle on it.

After months of speculation and mounting civil litigation, the Chapter 11 filing by the scouting organization's national body was unprecedented in both scope and complexity. It was filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware overnight.

The exact effects on Boy Scouts' future operations are unknown, leading to speculation about the organization's odds for survival, the impact on local troops and how bankruptcy could change the dynamic for abuse survivors who have yet to come forward.

The story never focuses on membership trends and some of the changes in Scouting that critics link to the falling numbers.


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Latter-day Saints march out: AP needed to talk to religious groups that still back Scouting

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For leaders of the organization formerly known as the BOY Scouts, the clock is ticking toward a radically different New Year that will change all kinds of equations in the struggling organization that once occupied the safe middle-ground in American culture.

I am referring to the moment when entire troops of boys in the faith group formerly known as the Mormons will begin hitting the exit doors of Scouting. (Click here for lots of GetReligion posts on this topic.)

This is the kind of symbolic event that deserves a big feature story from the Associated Press — ”Mormons pulling 400,000 youths out of struggling Boy Scouts“ — which will run in mainstream newspapers from coast to coast — as it should.

It’s a good story. The question, for me, is whether it needed to dedicate two or three paragraphs to the big picture — as in other angles linked to religion that will affect Scouting in the near future. Hold that thought, because we will return to it. Meanwhile, here is the overture of this new AP piece:

KAYSVILLE, Utah (AP) — For decades, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of Boy Scouts of America’s greatest allies and the largest sponsor of troops. But on Jan. 1, the Utah-based faith will deliver the latest blow to the struggling organization when it pulls out more than 400,000 young people and moves them into a new global program of its own.

The change brings excitement and some melancholy for members of the faith and may push the Boy Scouts closer to the brink of bankruptcy as it faces a new wave of sex abuse lawsuits. 

Losing the church will mean about an 18% drop in Boy Scout youth membership compared with last year’s numbers and mark the first time since the World War II era that the figure will fall below 2 million. At its peak in the 1970s, more than 4 million boys were Scouts.


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USA Today hunts for 'The Priest Next Door,' in sex abuse feature that breaks little new ground

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If you follow mainstream news coverage of clergy sexual abuse cases in the Catholic church, you know that there are two common errors that journalists keep making when dealing with this hellish subject.

First, there is the timeline issue. Many editors seem convinced that the public first learned about this crisis through the epic Boston Globe “Spotlight” series that ran in 2002.

This may have been when Hollywood grasped the size of this story, but religion beat reporters and many other journalists had been following the scandal since the Louisiana accusations against the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, which made national headlines in 1984. Jason Berry’s trailblazing book “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” was published in 1992. Reporters covering the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops chased this story all through the 1980s.

Does this error matter? I guess it only matters if editors care about accuracy and they truly want readers to understand how long these horrors have poisoned life for many Catholics. After all, the cover-ups are as important as the crimes.

Thus, it’s disappointing to dig into the new USA Today feature on this topic — “The Priest Next Door” — and hit the following summary material:

During its nine-month investigation, the USA TODAY Network tracked down last known addresses for nearly 700 former priests who have been publicly accused of sexual abuse. Then, 38 reporters knocked on more than 100 doors across the country, from Portland, Oregon, to Long Island, New York, with stops in Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, Miami and more. They talked with accused priests, as well as neighbors, school officials, employers, church leaders and victims. They reviewed court records, social media accounts and church documents in piecing together a nationwide accounting of what happened after priests were accused of abuse, left their positions in the church and were essentially allowed to go free. 

Since the scandal first exploded into public view in Boston almost 20 years ago, the church has financially settled with thousands of victims, claimed bankruptcy at parishes across the country and watched disaffected congregants flee its pews. The church has promised change, with parishes posting guidelines aimed at protecting children and dioceses releasing names of credibly accused priests — many of whom were defrocked, or laicized, meaning they no longer work with the church.

The second problem that keeps showing up in stories of this kind? That would be covering sexual-abuse scandals among Catholics without mentioning that similar issues exist in other religious flocks — as well as in public schools, sports programs, nonprofit agencies (think Scouting) and other secular settings.


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Friday Five: Forgiveness and justice, Scouting and faith, Tree of Life anniversary, Eric Metaxas

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I’m back home in Oklahoma after a two-week trip that took me from Las Vegas (for the Religion News Association annual meeting) to Searcy, Ark. (for the 96th Bible lectureship at Harding University, the alma mater of Botham Jean).

Other stops along the way included Los Angeles, a Rust Belt town in Ohio and Chick-fil-A drive-thru lines in at least three states.

I’m looking forward to resting up a bit this weekend.

First, though, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: I highlighted the viral story of “The hug seen around the world: Botham Jean's brother forgives ex-officer who killed his brother” in a post Thursday.

I focused on a splendid front-page story in the Dallas Morning News. Among the plethora of coverage by major media, another good piece was this one in the Washington Post looking at the debate over forgiveness that the hug ignited.

My post noted that the brother wasn’t the only person to hug convicted murder Amber Guyger. The judge did, too, and gave her a Bible.

I wrote:


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A big news story: Scouting was a mainstream thing, embracing a vague faith. What now?

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A big news story: Scouting was a mainstream thing, embracing a vague faith. What now?

If you grew up male in the 1950s and ‘60s — especially in the American heartland and the Bible Belt — the odds were good that you knew the following by memory: “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.”

If you grew up as a Texas Baptist, as I did, then Scouting was another one of those church things, but it wasn’t totally a church thing.

You knew that the Boy Scout oath mentioned “God,” but not “Jesus,” and you knew that this meant Scouting was interfaith. You knew that when you went to big Scouting events you would meet boys from other flocks — Methodist, Church of Christ, Assemblies of God, Catholic, etc. This was one of the first settings in which you met guys active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Scouting was an “American” thing, a perfect example of what scholars would call “civil religion,” with a lowest-common-denominator creed that united as many people as possible. That was back when you could say “morally straight” without people flinching.

So Scouting was a religious thing — but not too religious. That’s the paradox at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), which grew out of my recent post: “Do generic Scouts have a future? (Wait! What was that about Latter-day Saints cutting ties?).” Here’s a key chunk of that post, focusing on basic Scouting math, religious groups and the movement’s attempts to survive the Sexual Revolution:

So, 71 percent of all Scout units were, at that time, linked to faith-based groups, with the LDS ranked No. 1 and the United Methodists No. 2. And what about the Baptists? As of two years ago — when the Boy Scouts decided to accept girls who identify as boys — the Association of Baptists for Scouting (ABS) reported that it had nearly 2.3 million members. At that time, about 60 percent of the association’s members were Southern Baptists.

It would appear that it is hard to ponder Scouting’s future without considering the impact of the movement’s policies on sex and gender and its standing among religious groups — especially the United Methodists and various kinds of Baptists. And the believers formerly known as Mormons?


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