The Order of DeMolay was founded in 1919 in Kansas City, Missouri by Frank S. Land, a young man named Louis Lower, and eight of his friends. It started out as a group of young men that were left fatherless by World War I, but it evolved into the largest fraternity for young men in the world, with over 1000 chapters in the world. The only qualifications for membership are that one must be a young man between the ages of 12-21, of any race, of any religion (except atheism), and of any kind of background. The organization teaches its members seven cardinal virtues: filial love, reverence for sacred things, courtesy, comradeship, fidelity, cleanness, and patriotism.
Our founder, Frank S. Land, and our nine original members chose the name DeMolay, in honor of Jacques DeMolay, the martyred hero and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was wrongfully burnt at the stake (after seven years of torture and imprisonment) for not revealing to King Philip the Fair of France and the Inquisition the names and locations of DeMolay’s fellow Templar Knights or the location of the wealth of their order. This is why he is considered by the Order of DeMolay, historians, and many others as a “heroic example of fidelity.”
The individual chapters of the Order of DeMolay are sponsored by lodges of the Freemasons, as well as appendent organizations such as the Shriners, the Scottish Rite, and even the modern-day version of the Knights Templar. But it is not a junior organization of the Masons, their sponsorship only goes as far as to let us use their facilities (and our ceremonies are designed to accommodate those facilities). Some Masons choose to become DeMolay advisors, and some DeMolay, and some DeMolays go on to join Masonry. But as two separate organizations, membership in either one doesn’t guarantee membership in the other.