John Frame taught me to never claim I had reached my final position on anything, but I have pretty much gotten to where I think I'm going to end up with regard to the membership standards resolution the Boy Scouts of America began implementing on January 1, 2014. (Click on the label "Scouting" for my previous writing on this issue.)
I am what might be called a "double protestant." With the rest of presbyterianism, I trace my lineage back to the Protestant Reformation (and before that, to the Apostolic Church and, even earlier, to the Garden of Eden itself), when our fathers took a stand against the errors infecting the Western Church and were excommunicated for their troubles. The "double" part comes from the 20th century when liberalism overtook many protestant denominations in these United States. When they came to power, the liberals (whether presbyterian, Lutheran, or episcopalian) showed the orthodox the door: sometimes cordially, and sometimes not so much. As an Orthodox Presbyterian, I am acutely aware that many Christians will be asked to choose between loyalty to ecclesiastical institutions and to the apostolic faith. Though born some 34 years after the founding of the OPC, I personally had to choose to leave the churches in which I had been reared in order to find one in which the Biblical Gospel was still preached. I understand loyalty to tradition and family, but I also understand they must be trumped by faithfulness to our Lord and Savior.
Thus, I know what those moments of existential crisis look like, both from personal experience and from observing that of others. For Scouters such as myself, this is one. As I have previously observed, the membership requirements change which allows boys professing homosexual identity to join Scouting units need make no immediate impact on my work as a Scouting leader. (And if I keep on working exclusively with Cub Scouts, it will never make an impact.) If I really wanted to, it seems I could even charter units which would in effect, even if not in stated policy, preserve the old (and when I say "old," I mean "as of seven months ago") membership requirement that a Scout be morally straight. However, a new course for the Boy Scouts of America has been charted, and it's the same course of moral perversity and destruction on which the broader culture has been embarked for quite some time now. I might be able to keep myself and the kids under my leadership secure for a number of years, even a decade or two, but we will nonetheless be associated with a national organization which has repudiated the values on which it was founded. Like it or not, my role as a Scouter makes me morally complicit, at least in that sense.
At the same time, this change came quite suddenly and caught me entirely unprepared. My den is currently working on their Wolf badge, and these second-graders and their parents have made it clear they continue to look to me to lead them through their Cub Scouting experience. I feel abandoned and betrayed by the national leadership, but I will not abandon or betray my Cub Scouts in turn.
While I hope and pray for reform in the Boy Scouts, I know my career as a Scouter is effectively over, and that grieves me. A year ago, I was telling Mrs. Curmudgeon that after I lead my current den (of which Thing 2 is a member) through their Webelos years, I might volunteer to serve as a permanent Tiger Cub leader. It turns out I'm pretty good at recruiting kindergarten boys into Cub Scout packs, and their parents into taking on leadership positions in said packs. Sadly, that's not to be. So long as Thing 2 continues on as a Cub Scout, I will probably continue on as his den leader. Once he's done, though, I'm done.
I wish I knew what could replace this part of my life. I've not had the time or energy to take on a leadership role larger than den leader, but I have assiduously earned three knots as one. I believe in the Boy Scouts of America just about as much as anyone else, and the recent membership requirements change hasn't changed that. While I am a double protestant by existential necessity, this experience has taught me greater sympathy for those who've found themselves unable, despite their better instincts, to make that second protest.
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