“‘Good deed’ indeed! Well, it don’t
look like it to me, and I’ve no patience with these Guides – seems to me
Guiding’s about the last thing they do.”
Eve Garnett, The
Family from One End Street (1937)
 |
| The bubble thing will get relevant, I promise. |
Right, myth-busting time: Girlguiding
has never actually been a Christian organisation.
What now? But you said last week –
What I said last week was that
Girlguiding has historically held to the importance of putting God first in one’s
life.1 I never said that it prescribed that the God in question had
to be the God revealed in the Bible and the person of Jesus. And the reason I
never said that is because it never did. Some thoughtful human called Leslie
has compiled a history of the relationship between religion and Guiding over
the decades (which I shall be plundering heavily for the duration of this post,
with sincere gratitude to the aforementioned Leslie);2 she includes
quotations from a number of relevant sources, and records that the first Guide
handbook, written by Agnes Baden-Powell (sister of Robert) and published in
1912, included the following assertion:
There are many kinds of religion, such
as Roman Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mohammedans, and so on, but the main
point about them is that they all worship God, although in different ways. They
are like an army which serves one king, though it is divided into different
branches such as cavalry, artillery, and infantry. So, when you meet a person
of a different religion to your own, you should not be hostile to him, but
recognize that he is like a soldier in your own army, though in a different
uniform, and still serving the same king as you.
Argh! Pluralism! Help! Run! Or at least,
that’s something like what my brain did when I first read these few lines.
Honestly, I could not disagree more. Anyone who does not worship God as Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit does not worship the same God as me. Anyone who does not
worship Jesus Christ as the sinner’s sole means of being counted righteous does
not worship the same God as me. Anyone who worships a God who doesn’t mind
being conflated with other gods does not worship the same God as me.3
And so I seem to have backed myself into
a bit of a corner, really. On the one hand, I argued last week that Girlguiding
ought to stand firm on its historic foundations; on the other, it now emerges
that Girlguiding’s view of God has historically been quite incompatible with
mine. Am I not arguing myself out of belonging to the movement at all?
The thing is, when one’s doing one’s best
to live under God’s rule amidst a world given over to outright rebellion
against that rule, things are bound to get messy. There are all sorts of
situations in which we are going to find ourselves required to work together
with, or under the authority of, people who don’t share all of our values and
goals. Essentially, there are only two possible reactions: we can either
retreat, in every sphere of life, into a bubble populated only by people of
very similar theological persuasion; or we can get stuck into doing stuff
alongside people of various different theological persuasions, pray hard for
wisdom and godliness, and do our best to draw the lines as to what we will and
won’t do or affirm in God-glorifying places. And if we’re serious about making
Jesus known to a world that’s doomed without him, the first possibility simply
isn’t a runner.
And so I wasn’t advocating, in last week’s
post, that Girlguiding ought to be a bubble populated only by people of very
similar theological persuasion to me. There are enough church youth clubs out
there; that’s not what Guiding is for. Nor has it ever existed to
convert or to proselytise. Members have always been encouraged to be active
within their own religious communities, and any participation in
religious activities associated with a tradition other than a girl’s own has
always been voluntary and required her parents’ permission (even in the days
when the only other activity for which parental permission was required was
camping). Apparently, a 1985 leaflet called ‘The Religious Policy of the Girl
Guides Association in the United Kingdom’ said this on the subject:
Membership of the Girl Guides
Association is voluntary, and is open to girls and women without discrimination
as to race, religion or any other circumstances, providing they are prepared to
make the Promise.
Here, then, is the nub. If a girl can
say the Promise and say it honestly, she can be a Guide. This, I remind you,
was the Promise I made:
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.
I made the promise, incidentally, on the
same day as my childhood best friend, who’s a Muslim. When she said that first
line, I have no doubt she meant something different by it to what I meant – but
we could both of us say it and mean it. Whether or not Agnes Baden-Powell had
been a pluralist had no bearing on the situation; her views weren’t what we were
being asked to subscribe to. And so it’s clear that it isn’t remotely necessary
that Girlguiding be a bubble populated only by people of a very similar
theological persuasion to a particular girl, in order for her to be fully
involved in it. Certainly I don’t want it to be a bubble populated only by
people of a very similar theological persuasion to me. Equally, nonetheless, I
don’t want it to be a cult of the self, either – and that’s why I object
to the new ‘be true to myself’ Promise.
It’s a messy thing belonging to any
earthly organisation when one knows that the only authority to which one
ultimately owes allegiance is the kingdom of God. It’s messy even just to be a
citizen of a nation-state or an employee of a company or, I would argue, a
member of a church denomination; to be a Girl Guide doesn’t strike me as
particularly any messier. Insofar as the things that the organisations we
belong to ask us to do are compatible with the higher allegiance we owe, there’s
no reason for us not to do those things. The beauty of the Promise I made as a
Guide was that it not only allowed me to acknowledge that higher allegiance,
but positively obliged me to prioritise it. That was more than enough, no need
for the organisation to be a theological bubble.
So I hope it’s clear that when I call
for Girlguiding to stand firm on its foundations instead of trailing sorrily
behind the moving status quo, I’m not advocating that it ought to work for me
and people like me and everyone else can shove off. A balance can be struck:
one can stand for something without making that something so incredibly
specific that one is compelled to stand for it more or less alone. Yes, that’s
going to be messy, but so is belonging to any sort of collective existing in
the present age. And hey, I’m a Girl Guide; we’re good at figuring messy things
out…4
Footnotes
1 You may well want to read last week’s post before this
one, particularly if you’re a bit hazy about what Girlguiding actually is –
link in the box on the right, of course.
2 It’s generally a very good and informative site, but here’s
the particular page in question: http://lesliesguidinghistory.webs.com/religion-and-guiding.
3 Try Isaiah 46, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+46&version=ESVUK.
4 Incidentally, the Guiding higher-ups are currently in the
process of developing a new programme, http://stories.girlguiding.org.uk/ourjourney/,
which is a pretty big deal and so I thought I ought to mention it at some point
in these two posts…
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