Most people know Robert Baden-Powell as the man who started Scouting.

Fewer people know he was deeply, personally religious – and that faith wasn’t incidental to what he built. It was the foundation of it.

A deeply religious man, Baden-Powell recognized the presence of God not only in the Bible but also in nature. When asked once where religion came into Scouting, he replied with something that has stayed with me ever since:

“It does not come in at all. It is already there.” (1926 address) Think about that for a moment.

He didn’t build a character program and then add faith to it. He built a program in which faith was assumed, woven into the fabric from the first campfire. To him, developing a young person without connecting them to Heavenly Father wasn’t just incomplete. It was impossible.

He didn’t just study religion. He applied it. Serving your neighbor because it was part of our Duty to God. Recognizing that there is a higher power.

Latter-day Saints have been taught since the early restoration that religion isn’t a Sunday activity. It’s a way of living. Covenants made in sacred spaces are meant to shape how you treat people on Monday. Faith that doesn’t change your behavior isn’t really faith at all.

Baden-Powell taught the same thing through a different vocabulary. He called it Scouting. We call it discipleship. But the person being built – the one who is trustworthy because integrity is a way of being, who serves because it’s simply what you do, who reveres God not as a category of life but as the context of all life – is recognizably the same.

As Latter-day Saints, we understand that kind of faith. The kind that isn’t ornamental. The kind that tells you what life is for.

That’s the faith Scouting was built on. It’s the faith we’re still building with.