At Some Point Fights Must End

A friend forwarded me an article from the American Spectator this morning deploring the Boy Scouts' change in policy to permit gay scouts to participate without lying about who they are. The author, Mark Tooley, argued that in changing its policy, the scouts consign themselves to the same fate as the Episcopal Church:

The BSA is deciding the follow the disastrously predictable path of once mainstream but now dying institutions like the Episcopal Church, which gets occasional media plaudits for its sexual liberalism but is otherwise ignored. And like the Episcopal Church, the BSA of the future, after losing a million members or so, will probably rely on the endowments of the dead rather than the active interest of the living, much less the very young.

Mark Tooley is with the Institute for Religion and Democracy, an outfit whose primary purpose is to discredit progressive theology within mainline Protestant churches. They mainly hang out on the disaffected internet fringes (Virtue Online, Juicy Ecumenism, etc.), and occasionally manage some mainstream exposure. They have little history of caring much about the Boy Scouts - the real target of their attack here are the UCC, the Episcopalians, etc. The most surprising thing about this article is its naked animus toward gay people; their normal MO is to cloak themselves in respectability before going on the attack. I don't worry too much about these people because they are basically PR hacks whose paychecks depend on their holding of these views.

That said, Tooley's statistics with regard to the Episcopal Church are correct. And even his interpretation of them, to a limited degree. Focusing for a moment on the Episcopal Church, in my view the great fights over sexuality over the last few years have been one of the reasons for our decline in numbers (though there are many others). That doesn't mean the fight isn't worth having, but we have to recognize that fighting comes at a cost - which is that few people want to join an organization that is fighting. The fact that these fights have stretched over decades, complete with lawsuits and schisms, means that taken as a whole, the church has been focusing so much on its internal stuff that it is little wonder that our funerals outnumber our baptisms by a wide margin.

Again, that is not to suggest that the fight was not worth having. But at some point the fights must end. The Episcopal Church has not gone as far on same sex marriage as I would like; neither have the Boy Scouts gone as far as I think they ultimately must with regard to adult leaders (I was a Life Scout; I came out before making Eagle and left before I could be kicked out). But now is a good time for laying down arms.

Within the Episcopal Church, the space that has been created allows for conversion of hearts. There are many who disagree with the stance the church has taken with regard to LGBT people. But they have chosen to stay. So we can remain in conversation with each other, worship together, and mutually prove to each other that it is right for us to remain in relationship. This is a posture that enables an outward focus to re-engage with the world outside the church, and to invite people into Christ's love, not our quarrels.

Just so with the Boy Scouts. Will hundreds of thousands leave? Time will tell. But just as many churches say they will cease to sponsor Boy Scout troops, there have been many churches that, for reasons of conscience, have declined to sponsor them. They should not wait for the Boy Scouts to come around on gay leaders before they shift their stance. The correctness of the decision the Scouts have just made will be found in a new generation of Eagle Scouts, some gay, some straight, who have grown up in an organization that values all young men, and who will reform the same organization to similarly value adults.

For both the Boy Scouts and the Episcopal Church: no one will ever care how just our policies for membership and participation, ordination and marriage, are if we are ultimately self-involved organizations who make no difference to anyone else. It is time for those who have campaigned for change in these organizations to pivot from agitation to support, while recognizing there is still work to do to get to full equality.