This is an older thread here, but I'm bumping it up as last Sunday was apparently Scouting Sunday. The Boy Scout Troop associated with St. Anthony's Church acted as servers for Sunday Mass, and I saw a sign on the First Christian Church noting the same.
I have to admit that I didn't even know that St. Anthony's had a Boy Scout organization, even though I probably should have known that. My guess is that it might be associated in some fashion with St. Anthony's Tri Parish School, although I don't know that for sure. I knew that it had one at one time, as a co-worker of mine told me that he'd first met a late co worker of mine when they were both in Boy Scouts, with my living co worker having been in the St. Mark's Episcopal Church troop, while my late partner was in the St. Anthony's troop. My late partner was a strong supporter of the school, so my supposition is that he attended it. I should have been aware that they still had a Troop, but never having been a Boy Scout, I did not. I did know that the First Christian Church had one, as a co workers of mine is a Scout leader there.
World War One era Boy Scout Liberty Load poster.
Anyhow, I guess that demonstrates the extent to which Boy Scout units were once associated with churches, which is still somewhat true.
Still, I've heard that Scouting has suffered in popularity over the last several decades, which doesn't surprise me. For one thing, it's probably suffered as Americans have generally moved away from organizations of all types. As we've covered in prior posts, Fraternal Organizations have really declined in popularity. But this trend, with some exceptions, goes on beyond that.
Still, I also wonder if Boy Scouts have declines as they've strayed from their original mission, which ironically may be nearly as relevant now as at any time in the past. Scouting was created by Lord Baden Powell as an English movement. He'd been a British career soldiers, served as an unconventional scout in the Boer War, and went on to be the chief of British cavalry. Based upon his Boer War experience, he'd come to believe that British youth had become sort of sissified by city living, and he sought to correct that through exposure to life in the wild and what used to be called "woodcraft".
Scouting, in its heyday, as highly outdoorsy, sometimes agriculturally oriented, highly patriotic and it emphasized Christian virtues. It can still be very outdoorsy, but hat emphasis started to wane in the 1970s, it seems to me. It's also still patriotic and it still emphasizes Christian virtues, but in an age when relativism is the rule of the day, its singular approach to that can draw criticism pretty readily, while at the same time any effort to alter its traditional core values will likewise tend to weaken it a bit. I have to wonder if it still was as rurally oriented as it once was, if it would have declined less, as I suspect that the appeal of that aspect of it is as strong as ever.
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