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What was a main reason for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints leaving Scouts BSA?
“The Lord and Savior.”
The church said that Tuesday, when it announced it is ending a century-long partnership and putting together its own youth program based on LDS Mormonism.
The calendar shows that it did so just six days after the former Boy Scouts of America changed its name to Scouts BSA and just seven months after Scouts BSA announced that it would allow girls.
For their boys, it means that in a key way, the church is keeping them from being able to interact with boys outside of LDS Mormonism.
My main social interaction was weekly scouting events.
The religion’s cousin, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has done something similar when it has not allowed its boys (nor girls) to interact with an outside world. The two societies separate from each other because FLDS church leaders (the most notable is Warren Jeffs) made it that way.
When it comes to scouting, LDS Mormonism is doing the same thing—and to a lot of boys. About 470,000 LDS boys ages eight to 18 are scouts in the United States and Canada.
Others might say that it’s the BSA in the inter-mountain western region of the U.S. that is hurt, as the church’s boys make up the vast majority. That is true, but that’s just one region of among many (I’ll leave it to the experts to define just how many) in the two countries.
At the least, it seems to be an implied acknowledgment by the church that it is very much limited to that inter-mountain west region. (But since that’s a relatively small region — and that’s a generous argument, you could posit just Utah — that approaches the closed-off argument.)
This may be a good time for Mormons to ask themselves if it is worth it to affiliate with a religion that would move in this direction. Many of the FLDS Mormons have, and while there is much progress yet to be made, things are now changing even in the fundamentalist Mormon hub of Hillsdale, Utah/Colorado City, Ariz. Some still believe in Jeffs in the prophet, yes, but after all, Jeffs admitted in prison “I am not the prophet. I never was the prophet.”
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