I want to be clear about something right up front: I was an excellent Boy Scout, if by that we mean I had mastered the essential skills of tying knots, setting fires, and eating s'mores.
In my younger years with the Cub Scouts and Webelos I had earned every single badge and the Arrow of Light, too, the very first in our troop history. I had written essays about atheism to fulfill my Religion badge requirements. I also did the required volunteer charity work, though I should note that "required volunteering" is a suspect term like "jumbo shrimp" or "easily cancellable service subscription."
In retrospect, those were enlightened times. I endured concerned questioning from a den mother and two different scoutmasters — one who wore office clothes (the "I Just Came From My Accounting Job" look), and another who wore an olive green scout shirt (the "I Take Scouting Seriously" look). Each wanted to make absolutely certain I was sincere in my atheism. They had to verify I wasn't just a lazy churchgoer trying to game the system, because apparently a thing worse than not believing in a God is trying to get out of a badge requirement. The Boy Scouts had their priorities.
After passing my theological exams, I went on to thrive in the Boy Scouts. I had fun crabbing on the Eastern Shore. (Crabbing means catching angry crustaceans with string and chicken necks. It's like fishing, but more likely to result in the overall sense that nature is disgusting.) I learned that a pot with three crabs does not need a lid and a troop of boys does not need free time or they will resort to pranks.
I even became a minor celebrity at the Boy Scout Jamboree, winning the archery contest and racking up various other minor successes. But apparently the Jamboree was the last hurrah for our old Boy Scout leader, who had the good sense to treat religion like a reasonable person treats a wasps' nest: acknowledging its existence, maintaining a respectful distance, and resisting the urge to poke it with a stick.
Enter: The New Guy
We then entered a bold new era led by a scoutmaster who was less pragmatic and more evangelical. I hadn’t known many like him. He had the kind of religious fervor usually associated with people who stand at airport terminals handing out pamphlets and giving everyone soulful, sad-eyed stares.
Our new leader wanted to start each meeting with a religious observance he had written himself. And when I say "written himself," I mean he had crafted a speech so profoundly, magnificently awkward it made a lot of the boys laugh. Out loud. Immediately.
They laughed so hard the end of the speech remained forever a mystery. However, it contained a reference to "woodies," by which our scoutmaster meant cars, "rosy cheeks," by which our scoutmaster meant he didn't understand twelve year old boys, a reference to being "gay and carefree," a reminder to be "square and true," and the "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men," by which he again meant he didn't understand what boys find hilarious.
I didn't understand why some of the phrases like, "we will make everything tight" got guffaws from the older scouts but I knew the trite phrases were outdated. I chuckled along in frozen horror, the way you might laugh if you saw someone slip on a banana peel but then realized they were about to fall down an escalator.
Then he announced — and it's revealing when you think about the bold confidence this required — he wanted someone to give a big, dramatic reading of his religious masterpiece.
The boys were so openly, enthusiastically opposed to this idea that even the scoutmaster himself realized he had a rebellion on his hands. So he pivoted. Instead of asking who wanted to read it (since the answer was clearly "nobody, not even for money"), he decided to hold a contest. The losing troop would get the honor — and I'm using that word very loosely here — of reading his speech aloud.
Let me repeat that: We were now battling for the right NOT to have to read The Religious Essay.
Even now, this strikes me as a profoundly weird thing for a scout leader to allow to happen. How could he not feel embarrassed by everyone's reactions to his literary masterwork? But I suppose he was protected from shame by his religious certainty, which must have been like an invisible force field that deflects self-awareness.
At the time, I thought he might not be very bright. With the benefit of hindsight and my own adventures in raising children — during which I have learned that adults are morally just children who can reach high shelves — I am now absolutely certain that he did not understand people and probably not puppies who chew slippers, puzzles with more than 100 pieces, or himself.
But sometimes the Boy Scouts can't be choosy. They need warm bodies with driver's licenses. Someone who seems to have good intentions, no matter what his other drawbacks — poor judgment, questionable writing ability, the social awareness of a moose trying to mate with a rail fence — those good intentions might still be the best they can do.
The Great Athletic Competition to Avoid Public Humiliation
And so began a series of contests. Multiple contests. An Olympic-level cavalcade of contests, all designed to determine who would be forced to read this speech that nobody wanted to read.
Now, here's where I should mention something important: the other boys in my troop were not, generally speaking, what you would call "good athletes." I was better. Not Olympic-caliber or anything, just better than the average bunch of guys who had chosen to spend their free time learning about knots and earning badges.
I also fought harder, because I had seen the speech. I knew what was at stake. I won the sack race. I ran first in the relay race, powered by my purest fear of public speaking. I pitched curves in wiffleball that would have made a major league pitcher weep with envy. I hit a home run because my terror gave me strength plus the ball got lost in the leaves under a car.
I scored all the goals in crab soccer, which is a game where you walk around on your hands and feet facing up like a crab, and honestly, the fact that we were playing it at all should have been a warning sign that things had gone terribly wrong. And yet somehow the teams kept playing until my team, despite our heroic efforts, finally lost the third tiebreaker activity.
This meant we had to pick someone from our troop to read the speech.
It was so spectacularly, magnificently bad that I outright refused. Just flat-out said no, not something I had done since throwing a temper tantrum (and getting beaten for it) when I was four. This led the troop to pick me anyway, because I was the youngest available. I still refused.
So they finally picked some other poor schmuck, and I felt genuinely bad for him, the way you feel bad for someone who's been selected for jury duty on a murder trial in which the murder suspect has already declared he's going to kill everyone “who’s gone against him” in revenge.
The Quiet, Quiet Incident
When the time finally came for the reading, we all gathered around with the grim determination of people about to witness a terrible but unavoidable public torture session at the stocks. The designated reader began. Almost immediately, one of the scouts started to giggle at some phrase like "our brave parts" or another innocently over-hokey, noble-sounding expression that absolutely did not land the way the scoutmaster had intended.
I was standing next to this kid, and I immediately started snorting — not because I wanted to, but because suppressed laughter has to come out somewhere, and my body decided "through the nose” was how we were going to go. I was suppressing so hard, my ears were whistling.
The sounds I made were so ridiculous, the previously giggling scout couldn't suppress his laughter. And then others nearby started laughing because we were funny, which is how these things work. Laughter is contagious, like yawning, or panic, or unvaccinated children.
There's something about trying to hold in laughter that makes it worse.
Within seconds, we became a brass band of nose-honkers, stifled chortlers, and choking donkeys. Bursts of sound erupted from our group like popcorn bangs in a microwave. The senior boy in our troop resisted but that only led to him to make noises like a dying goose. Next to us, the other troop of boys caught fire with forbidden humor, too, and they tried to contain their laughs but as a result they sounded like someone kicking a pile of Scottish bagpipes.
Kids turned colors as we tried to calm ourselves. We gave our honest effort with "stout-hearted breasts of brave, young men" but we made the mistake of looking at each other, right in the eye. That was bad. When your friend looks ridiculous generally, he doesn’t look any less funny when he’s turning purple. We could not have been worse-behaved if we had applauded the speech using armpit farts.
The Aftermath
I was kicked out of the Boy Scouts immediately. This was partly due to my being an atheist but also because I wouldn't apologize and blamed the scoutmaster for the laughter right to his face. (I don't remember the blaming part but a couple scouts approached me very quietly about it later, so maybe.)
The most unforgivable sin had to be making fun of what the scoutmaster had written.
Looking back, I regret nothing. Well, almost. I do feel bad for the one kid who had to actually try to read the speech while thirty boys giggled and drooled and spilled things and snorted. I think we mostly didn't look at the speaker, at least. We weren't making fun of him and we all tried not to make fun of each other as we turned colors.
I learned some valuable lessons from my time in the Boy Scouts: how to tie a half hitch knot, how to start a fire without matches, and how religious certainty combined with poor writing can create a situation so awkward that it becomes impossible not to laugh.
Scouting teaches us good stuff. These are all skills that have served me well in life.
