Back to the Brigade?

Written on June 19, 2018. A follow-up post will arrive after sufficient research.

In recent years, there have been numerous groups that have claimed that the Boy Scouts of America have lost their claim to be "morally straight" and formed their own organizations. This is, of course, their right. The phenomenon is fascinating, but scarcely new. One feature I have noted that these organizations share are that they are implicitly or explicitly religious-based, specifically Christian, if not even more narrowly denominational. These groups are, in fact, correct in claiming that they hearken back to the early days of youth organizations, but they are wrong (for the most part) in claiming that this Christian youth group mentality was the purpose of the BSA.

Many of the original troops were groups of boys from the YMCA, which at that time was a Protestant organization, but the primary motivator here was threefold: first, that's where the boys were; second, that's where pre-built facilities were; third, the YMCA was already an organization committed to the moral improvement of young men. This was functionally no different than the current reasoning that encourages troops and crews to use church basements and social halls as meeting spaces. The perceived Protestant element was so strong, however, that the Catholic Church forbade its boys from joining until 1913.

The Scouting movement already established in England had addressed this issue: although the initial testing ground for the Scouting movement had been the resolutely Presbyterian Boys' Brigade, of which there were Anglican, Catholic, Jewish, and Pacifist iterations, the Scouting method was designed as a religiously neutral method of training boys, and the Boy Scouts, once founded, maintained that neutrality. The self-organizing principle ensured that many groups were religiously homogeneous, often because they were also units of the Boys' Brigade or equivalents. This was also a reflection of the more segregated religion of the day, except in the military, from which Baden-Powell came. Baden-Powell and Brigadier Smith, the founder of Boys' Brigade worked together for many years, but the split, one of many among the promoters of the booming youth program movement, was on the relatively passive role of religion with the Boy Scout organization. Baden-Powell was adamant that duty to God was a matter of individual conscience and therefore could not and should not be administered by external forces within the Boy Scout organization. Smith, whose initial inspiration to form the Boys' Brigade had come from the union of Sunday school and military drill, could not countenance such sloppiness. This was hardly the only ideological rift among youth leaders, but the military and political aspects are topics to be discussed another time.

It is worth noting that neither of the predecessor organizations in the United States, the Sons of Daniel Boone and the Woodcraft Indians, placed explicitly denominational requirements on their members. This ecumenicism (for non-denominational, sadly, has now come to mean "very specific denomination") carried over to the BSA, although it seems that many people could not wrap their minds around the concept except in terms of military training.

Nowadays there is an organization called the Troops of St George. It is Catholic, somewhat military ( partly through expediency of Army/Navy store supplies in Texas), and incorporates father-son elements similar to the YMCA's long-defunct Indian Guide program. The truly distinguishing paraphernalia, however, is the Rosary. Although the organization is not linked to the military, nor are troops within the organization required to practice drill, the assumption of a military rank system and the explicit religious element are a return to the days of the Boys' Brigade, or in this case, the Catholic Lads' Brigade.

https://troopsofsaintgeorge.org/troops/

https://boys-brigade.org.uk/

http://www.bgbrigade.com/

http://www.thefullwiki.org/Sons_of_Daniel_Boone

http://history.oa-bsa.org/node/3039

http://vintagekidstuff.com/yguides/yguides.html