The Boy Scouts were founded 114 years ago during another acknowledged crisis for masculinity. Groups such as the YMCA and the Boy Scouts were meant to address what was seen as the de-masculinization of society, as people moved to urban centers and out of the country. The Scouting movement received crucial support from Teddy Roosevelt, America’s most popular president. The mission was “to teach [boys] patriotism, courage, self-reliance, and kindred values.”
In recent decades, the Boy Scouts have, like other all-male groups, been subjected to ideological attack and institutional destruction masquerading as reform. Though the Girl Scouts had long been part of the Scouting movement, the Boy Scouts were opened up to girls years ago. Controversies over homosexual Scouting leaders, expensive lawsuits related to sexual abuse, and the culture wars drove gigantic institutional splits. The Mormon Church, a huge pillar behind the modern Boy Scouts, split off to found its own Scouting organization in 2018, pulling 400,000 boys with them. In recent years, a much declined Boy Scouts was ripped in half.
We are more than a decade into a new panic about boys and men. Unfortunately for boys and men, the current gurus putting themselves forward to save manhood have trouble even justifying to contemporary audiences that boys and men have unique and distinctive emotional, developmental, and spiritual needs. In the absence of this acknowledgment, they cannot justify the existence of institutions built to meet these needs exclusively. No wonder that the Boy Scouts of America has announced its intention to change its name to “Scouting America,” an organization dedicated to progressive values, like all other approved institutions. Of course Scouting America, like churches similarly dedicated to progressive values, offers no compelling reason to join or maintain it. They offer a formation in values that can be had, for example, by watching television commercials. Just interact with all the major corporations and nonprofit foundations, or respond to government-set incentives, and you will get the same moral formation that Scouting America is now presumably dedicated to providing.