The Pirate Captain: Pirates? What pirates? Nobody here but us Girl Guides.
The Albino Pirate: I’ve got a badge for looting!
The Pirates! In an
Adventure, with Scientists (2012)
This is a post – which is, as it turns out,
actually going to be two posts – that I’ve been meaning to write for ages. This
weekend, however, proved something of a catalyst for my mind and typing fingers
actually to compose it in that I encountered some New and Relevant Information
which I will probably struggle to re-consult in future. In other words, I am getting
this jazz down while it’s fresh in my mind.
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| This is the Trefoil, the symbol of Girlguiding in the UK. The three leaves stand for the three parts of the Promise; the star stands for the Law. Thanks to G Filz at clipartlogo.com. |
Girlguiding, in case there are any of you
out there who are unaware of the movement or perhaps know it under a different name,
is an international organisation for girls and young women, founded by Robert
Baden-Powell in 1910 as a girls’ equivalent to his then-new Boy Scout movement.1
I’ve been involved in Guiding pretty much continuously since I was five years
old, initially as a participant (working my way up through Rainbows, Brownies,
and then Guides proper) and subsequently as a leader, so it seems fair to say
it’s been a pretty big part of my life. Indeed, Thursday evenings have in my
mind become practically synonymous with Guide meetings – not that the programme
for the girls in the Brownie and Guide units I help to lead is limited to our
Thursday evening activities, as is immediately evident from the fact that this
weekend we took a number of the girls camping, an annual fixture in this as
well as many Guide units. The theme of our camp this year (and the name of the
badge gained by attending) was Traditions of Guiding. That meant laying
woodcraft trails through the forest,2 lashing together camp-related
gadgets using nothing more than logs and string, and learning odd bits and
pieces about how Guiding used to work in days gone by, on which account our
Unit Leader brought along a couple of vintage Guide Handbooks for the girls to
consult, one of them from 1992 and the other from 1968.3
I was immediately fascinated. I love all
the history-of-the-movement stuff, the traditions and the structures and the
symbolism (the sorts of things that, on principle, I don’t allow my ISTJ brain4
to indulge in very much in a church context, and of which it is consequently starved
and grateful for opportunities to indulge in in other contexts) – and so, when
I got a spare moment, I settled down to have a peruse of these two snapshots of
my beloved Girlguiding as it was in former decades. I found much that
interested me, but, in order that this post end up something at least close to
a manageable length, I’ll adhere solely to the relevant sections, namely what
was said about God.
See, when I became a Girl Guide proper at
the age of ten, I was required, like all Girl Guides throughout the ages, to
make publicly the Guide Promise, the unifying statement of all Girl Guides
throughout the UK, which, at the time when I made it, went like this:
I promise that I will do my best
to
love my God,
to
serve the Queen and my country,
to
help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.5
I was fine with that as a Promise. But
apparently – unsurprisingly – not everyone was, and in 2013, after a nationwide
consultation, the Promise was changed to this:
I promise that I will do my best
to
be true to myself and develop my beliefs,
to
serve the Queen and my community,
to
help other people, and to keep the Guide Law.
Spot the difference.
And I get that not everybody is
happy making a solemn pledge to love her God. That’s obvious. It
is, in fact, not even news. That 1968 Guide Handbook I mentioned earlier
had a bit to say on the subject, in fact. (The Promise at that stage,
incidentally, would have had its first component as to do my duty to God
– that change was made in 1994). Essentially, the author, M. Elizabeth
Brimelow, recognised that some people choose to live their lives without acknowledging
God, but suggested that such people are severely missing out, and that part of
being a Guide is being, as she put it, “alive to God”. This stuff wasn’t very
specific or doctrinal – the concept of God expressed was, as I recall,
basically limited to a good Creator who cares about how humans behave
themselves – but it was firmly, unapologetically there. Brimelow went on
to stress the importance of belonging to some sort of worshipping congregation,
and encouraged the reader that if her family did not belong to such a
congregation already, she should ask her Guide leader to recommend one to her –
and this in a handbook which elsewhere exhorts girls to respect and adhere to
the policies and traditions of their families (one of the clauses of the Guide
Law back then was A Guide is obedient). In essence, Brimelow considered
a Guide’s duty to her God to be of primary importance – a Guide without
a God is, by her reckoning, no Guide at all – such that she advocated that that
duty should be executed even should it stand at odds with other influences and
authorities, as she was perfectly aware it sometimes would. She knew that not
everybody would agree with her stance and apparently, she was OK with that.
Apparently, the Girlguiding of her day was OK with that. It was OK with
standing for something not everyone would agree with. In fact, we can shorten
that: it was OK with standing for something.
Because, try as one might, one cannot
stand for something that everyone agrees with. The new Promise was supposed
to make Guiding more widely accessible, but even as it has opened doors to
atheists, agnostics, and secularists of various sub-persuasions, it has shut or
left closed other doors. Anyone who principally objects to the monarchy is still
excluded, for instance. So, on different grounds, would I be, if it were
required of me to make the new Promise in order to continue my role in Guiding.
Happily, it has as yet not been, and so I count my commitment to the movement
as continuing to be encapsulated by the version of the Promise I originally
made. The substance of my objection to the new Promise, just to be clear, isn’t
that I’m sulking in a corner at the removal of the word God, resolutely
unwilling to give any alternative phrasing a fair hearing; it’s that I can’t
very well promise to do my best to be true to myself when my Lord tells me to deny
myself, take up the cross on which I am daily to put myself to death, and
follow him and him alone.6 My objection is that the first component
of the Promise is supposed to be about spiritual development,7 and
it has been reduced to a commitment to the self and the self’s preferred values
– an endorsement of our innate but immoral human tendency to obsess over
furthering our own interests. Girlguiding has never stood for self above
others; indeed, it has always encouraged a minimisation of the self and selfish
desires in favour of helping others, being a responsible member of society, and
doing the right thing. The Brownie Guide Law is still A Brownie Guide thinks
of others before herself and does a good turn every day, and I don’t
forecast that changing any time soon, but I deem it saddening that the new
Promise sits so ill alongside it. Putting God first in the Promise made sense
of the rest of Girlguiding’s values; putting the self first seems to me to
contradict them.
On one level, I think we could all see the
change coming. The trajectory was to some extent discernible from the 1990s
Guide handbook I skimmed through at camp this weekend: therein the commitment
to God was still upheld, but in slightly more embarassed tones, allowing that
people have different ideas about God; the decision not to belong to a
worshipping congregation was also legitimised. But surely such concessions were
hardly dramatically ‘progressive’ at the time? And surely even the new Promise
is, in the eyes of secular society, only the inevitable eventual surrender of a
stronghold that had already been offensively holding out for far too long? Girlguiding
is big on tradition. Change, whatever the current spin placed on the
organisation’s history by its central leadership,8 does not tend to
happen very quickly. At the rate we’re going, the Girl Guides would seem to be
simply following the path of society in general, many miles behind the cutting
edge.
What if we were to stop trailing
reluctantly after the crowd, and take things more M. Elizabeth Brimelow style
instead? It’s not news that some people are going to be excluded from an
organisation whose foundational pledge includes a commitment to God – but the
fact is that some people are going to be excluded from an organisation whose
foundational pledge includes anything, or rather exists at all. If we
want to stand for something, we have to stand for something not everybody is
going to like. Is making incredibly delayed alterations to that something,
vaguely along the lines of what appears to be the majority view, really the
most attractive possibility we can come up with?
I’m not trying to whine here: If
Girlguiding had always had at its heart something I fundamentally disagreed
with, then it wouldn’t have been fair for me to have expected to find room
within its ranks. But I did find room, and I grew to feel quite at home in it,
and all in all the whole movement has become very dear to me – and so now, I
would much rather see it take a stand on the foundations that made it great,
than abandon them under a false premise of inclusivity.
Footnotes
1 Official website: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/.
2 Robert Baden-Powell has the symbol for ‘I have gone home’ on
his gravestone, which is one of my favourite things. Seriously thinking about
copycatting…
3 You can get copies of the 1968 one on AbeBooks: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-guide-handbook/author/m-elizabeth-brimelow/.
It seems to have become quite iconic, actually.
4 I explain my ISTJ-ness in a post called ‘Myers-Briggs and
Morality’, coincidentally written this same weekend – first in July, Guide camp
– last year. (I’m sure you’ve got the hang of finding stuff in the box on the
right by now.)
5 The Guide Law then consisted, as it still does, of the
following six clauses:
1) A Guide is honest, reliable, and can be
trusted.
2) A Guide is helpful and uses her time and
abilities wisely.
3) A Guide faces challenges and learns from
her experiences.
4) A Guide is a good friend and a sister to
all Guides.
5) A Guide is polite and considerate.
6) A Guide respects all living things and
takes care of the world around her.
6 That chunk is a if not the pivotal point of the gospel
according to Mark: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+8&version=ESVUK.
7 Interestingly, Girlguiding still affirms its commitment to
enabling the spiritual development of young members (along with five other
areas of development). I learned that in an e-training module I did earlier
this year, so I assume it’s still current.
8 See what I mean: https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/what-makes-guiding-special/our-history/.
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