Mormons pulling 400,000 youths out of Boy Scouts
KAYSVILLE, Utah — For decades, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday 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.
Wayne Perry, a church member who is a past president of Boy Scouts of America and a current member of its national board, said the end of the long-term alliance will sting and force many regional councils in the U.S. West to lay off employees and sell some camps.
However, Perry said he’s hopeful the Boy Scouts can eventually bring back at least 20% of the Latter-day Saints Scouts who liked the experience and want to keep pursuing merit badges in activities ranging from camping and lifesaving to citizenship.
The church’s new youth program will weave in camping and other outdoor activities in parts of the world where that’s feasible, but there won’t be uniforms or a chance to earn the coveted Eagle Scout rank — the highest in Scouting — that was long seen as a key milestone for teenage boys in the church. The focus will be squarely on religion and spiritual development, with youth working toward achievements that earn them rings, medallions and pendants inscribed with images of church temples.
The split between the Boy Scouts and church ends a nearly century-old relationship between two organizations that were brought together by shared values but have diverged in recent years. Amid declining membership, the Boy Scouts of America opened its arms to openly gay youth members and adult volunteers as well as girls and transgender boys, while the church believes that same-sex intimacy is a sin.
“The reality there is we didn’t really leave them; they kind of left us,” highranking church leader M. Russell Ballard recently said about the split.
His comment upset Boy Scout officials, Perry said, because the organization went to great lengths to ensure the faith still had robust religious liberty protections after the Scouts welcomed openly gay troop members and leaders — even allowing the church to craft the language.
Perry said the organization will now focus on pitching the benefits of Boy Scouts in parts of the U.S. West with many church members, including Utah, Idaho and Arizona.
“We’re going to have to earn our kids,” Perry said.
Church leader Ronald A. Rasband said in an October speech that the faith’s association with Boy Scouts will be ”an important legacy.”
That legacy runs deep in the Francis family in Utah, who are longtime members of the faith. Mark Francis, his two oldest sons, his brothers and his father all have been Eagle Scouts.
He and his wife, Nettie Francis, couldn’t imagine not giving their three youngest sons the same opportunity, so they launched a new Boy Scout troop earlier this year to carry on the tradition after the church alliance ends. Most of its 40 boys are church members and also will participate in the faith’s new youth program.
Nettie Francis said she’s not worried about juggling it all.
“This is like any other extracurricular activity: We make time for things that are important to us,” she said. “For our family, the skills and the leadership opportunities that Scouting offers are just tremendous.”
At a recent troop meeting on a cold, rainy night in Kaysville, Utah, the boys gathered in a barn behind the Francis family’s house and started with a prayer. They closed their eyes and folded their arms as is typical for Latter-day Saints. After belting out the Pledge of Allegiance and Scout oath, they prepared Dutch oven peach cobblers and then went to a nearby assisted living center to sing Christmas carols.
Baden Francis, 12, said he’s happy he can keep going to camp, have fun with friends and hopefully one day become an Eagle Scout like his big brothers.
Mark Francis called the split a good move for both sides. The church gets the global youth program it long wanted, and the Boy Scouts of America gets rid of kids who didn’t like it.
“Scouting will be smaller, but stronger,” he said.
As of 2013, there were more than 430,000 Latterday Saint boys in the Boy Scouts. The latest tally of the Scouts’ total youth membership was about 2.2 million last year, and its press office confirmed that the church exodus would push that number close to 1.8 million.
The Scouts declined to estimate the financial repercussions of the faith’s departure, saying the church paid a flat fee that varied from year to year, rather than paying based on individual membership fees.