I am a Gold Award Girl Scout, the GSA’s equivalent of the Eagle Award, and I gave the keynote speech at our Girl Scout Council’s Award ceremony when I graduated from high school. I’ve often considered taking on a girl scout troop in my later adulthood, maybe gathering a group of women to do this together. I believe that scouting, that kind of camaraderie and problem solving and intimacy with nature, was formative in my life. I certainly received lessons in citizenship in school and from my family, from my hippie social justice artist parents, but I learned what it meant to work together in a group to make something happen from Girl Scouts.
In my decades long career as a youth minister, I have had the honor to facilitate the BSA’s God and Country badge a couple of times. Parents noticed the Girl Scouts on my church bio, I suppose, and asked me to be their children’s teacher. There were many ways in which this was somewhat of a surreal experience for me. A friend has long called me the most patriotic liberal he knows, but I have always been what is called a Patriot of Principle, someone who loves what we could be.
Dissent is the most patriotic stance for a citizen when an injustice is state sanctioned. This is absolutely what I was taught growing up, and what I have seen work in tandem with other strategies. This almost always places me on the opposite side of the street from the usual clergy voices. So it was strange to be asked to talk openly about the relationship between church and state, especially considering the Boy Scouts of America's complicated history.
I haven’t led one of the classes in a long time, and I recently came across my old Leader’s Guide for the God and Country badge. I was struck that the curriculum reads much like the basic civics I got in school, but that don’t seem to be taught any longer. The current programs are similar, although more tailored. The Boys Scouts of America has been going through its own discernment process of diversity awareness and accountability for several years now. In an attempt to honor the variety of faith traditions reflected in its scouts, BSA spun off the God & Country work to a separate nonprofit, PRAY.
The “God” portions adhere to broad moral principles but are reflective of faith and tradition variations. There are now scores of accepted religious emblems. I find great hope in the fact that the organization that began as a mainline Christian protestant movement to formalize the God and Country badge now administers a robust interfaith civics program for boys and girls around the country. I believe that this shift will be of a great benefit, as the previous associations and alignments have not benefited scouting, or its goals. For example, the close alignment between the BSA and the more conservative wings of Christianity has enabled truly bad and damaging theology to guide policy.
Right now, the BSA is in quite a bit of trouble for mass accounts of abuse against children. The ways in which God and Country are complicit in that situation are messy. The conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia comes from a recent perversion of scripture, in which the admonitions against sexually abusive crimes (gang rape, pederasty, and pedophilia) were converted to admonitions against homosexuality
Before the 20th century, there was no reference to homosexuality in the bible, but for many decades in this country it was an automatic assumption that to be Christian meant to condemn homosexuality. The BSA’s prohibition against gay adult leaders, something I am sure it believed was a choice to protect children, was in fact further endangering them. Virtually all who offend against children do so against children of the opposite gender. As a rule, pedophiles are ‘straight’. I am sure that without the watchful eye of the ousted gay leaders, abusers were free to go wild.
The “Country” portions are just as messy. The curriculum doesn’t go beyond introducing the concept that citizenship is putting your faith in action. There is little talk about how the core principles of American citizenship might be applied, or much information about the various kinds of civic engagement. I too am wholly committed to the concepts of Faith in Action, but there are some things getting in the way of a real exploration and ownership of citizenship in a moral context.
One obstacle is the uncomfortable association between the Boy Scouts and the US military. There is a great deal of toxicity wrapped up in the US military, especially around rape culture. The underlying dependence on violence that permeates any military institution cannot be easily separated. Scouting in America has a surprising amount of access to US military bases and resources. Even if there be no active recruitment of scouts into the military, there is an acclimation, a normalization, that happens by such close association, by this overwhelming model of what service to country can be. This is only one way, but it is the easiest to ‘rely on’ for impact, and so is rarely questioned.
I am glad to be a Girl Scout. The Girl Scouts of America do not have the same close associations with either Christianity or the US military that the Boys do. We are smaller, have fewer resources and less money, but frankly this independence also means the system itself can be healthier. Our associations are less automatic or expected, and can be more intentional, chosen instead of inherited.
And perhaps as the Boy Scouts shrink, which is happening as they begin to change, hold themselves more accountable, and become more expansive in what it means to be a Scout, perhaps they too will return to some fundamentals and question some of these automatic associations.
It’s a dangerous thing for all of us, these poorly considered associations and alignments. We take what we inherit with little critique and that has to stop. It is time to build new things, and these automatic assumptions of access and power will sabotage our efforts. God and Country will always have a relationship. I am both a citizen of my community and an ordained minister of the Gospel. The latter informs how I am the former, to be sure, but even within my own heart, I have to suss out the ties that bind my allegiances.
May it be so for all of us.