Does scouting really need the Boy Scouts?

Thirty years ago this summer, I spent two weeks backpacking across Philmont, a 140,000-acre expanse of New Mexico owned by the Boy Scouts of America. Most people who trek Philmont say it changed their life; a few years later, I became an Eagle Scout — still one of my proudest achievements.

On Tuesday, the Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy, seeking, in part, protection from mounting costs involving several hundred sexual abuse lawsuits. The filing is a defensive move, and the organization may yet survive. But enrollment is plummeting and sponsors are dropping out; the future doesn’t look good.

For a long time, I’ve wrestled with some complicated feelings about the Boy Scouts.

Scouting is a valuable, even vital idea; the Boy Scouts, though, is quite toxic. For scouting to survive, the Boy Scouts of America may have to go.

The Boy Scouts of America was founded in 1910, and almost from the beginning it has had a sexual abuse problem. Since at least the 1940s, it kept a list of red flag cases — known, grotesquely, as the “perversion files” — which were supposed to block abusers from further participation in Scouts. But the list didn’t do its job, nor did it save the organization from a steady drip of lawsuits.

It’s hard to square all this with the scouting I remember. My troop, in Nashville, was sponsored by a local congregation of the Disciples of Christ, a liberal, mainline denomination with just a bit more Jesus than the Unitarian Universalists. Our adult leaders were good men — funny, kind, wise, gruff — and the boys came from all around: white, black, brown, well off, working class. We hiked, we goofed off, we got away from our parents and we became like brothers.

Is it possible to have scouting without the Boy Scouts? Of course it is, just as we don’t need the NFL to play football.

Scouting began in Britain, under the leadership of Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell, a career army officer. In 1908 he founded the Boy Scouts; two years later he and his sister created the Girl Guides. The movement spread quickly around the world.

The Boy Scouts is by far the largest scouting organization in America, but historically, it hasn’t been the only one. Recently, the Baden-Powell Service Association has emerged as a coed, nonreligious alternative. And of course there’s the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., founded in 1912 as the American branch of the Girl Guides.

At its height in the early 1970s, the Boy Scouts had more than four million youth; now it’s about 2.2 million — still about twice as many boys as play high school football. The Girl Scouts has 1.7 million youth members.

Clearly, there’s a demand and need for something like Boy Scouts.

At its core, scouting offers a dual education in civics and self-reliance. Scouting is where I learned the importance of voting, conservation and civil rights. I also learned to pitch a tent, tie knots, purify water, climb a cliff and perform CPR. It’s this combo of values and skills, and the overarching idea that they go hand in hand, that makes scouting so valuable.

I’m grateful to the Boy Scouts. But my wife and I recently enrolled my kids in the Baden-Powell Service Association. We love it. They get outdoors, go camping, learn about their community.

It’s progressive — coed, secular — and maybe not for everyone. Still, as a vision for what scouting could look like after the Boy Scouts, it’s heartening. The Boy Scouts of America may have entered its final chapter. But as my children will tell you, the joy of scouting continues.

Clay Risen is an opinion writer for the New York Times.