Trail Life vs. Boy Scouts: A Future History

In the wake of the Boy Scouts' decision to allow gay boys, a new organization has been formed: Trail Life USA. Trail Life aims to be much like Boy Scouts but with no gays allowed. Also no non-Christian leaders, and no troops chartered by non-Christian organizations. 

Trail Life was modeled after American Heritage Girls, a Christian alternative to Girl Scouts started in 1995 in protest to Girl Scouts allowing girls to substitute a word of their choice for the word "God" in the pledge. Today in 2014 American Heritage Girls claims 32,000 members to Girl Scouts' 3.2 million.

So is Trail Life going to overtake and replace Boy Scouts? Not likely. First, look at their model, American Heritage Girls. After almost two decades, they have only about 1% of the membership of Girl Scouts. Perhaps that's why Trail Life declined to call themselves American Heritage Boys.

But it may not be a pertinent comparison. American Heritage Girls was started because Girl Scouts wasn't about God anymore. Trail Life was started because Boy Scouts weren't about excluding gays anymore.

Some say Trail Life isn't about excluding gays, it's just about not forcing boys to attend gay parades and memorize gay propaganda. But before the change, Boy Scouts were denied their badges if outed as gay. Gay boy scouts were only allowed to earn badges if no one knew they were gay. And there were no reports of gay propaganda actually being forced on scouts; only a lot of fearmongering about the possibility.

So the point of disagreement with the old organization was much broader for the girls ("They took out God!") than for boys ("They let the gays in!"). That alone would suggest proportionately less support for Trail Life than for American Heritage Girls. For Trail Life to do better compared to Boy Scouts than American Heritage Girls does compared to Girl Scouts would suggest that there is more hatred of gays in America than there is love of God.

What demographics are likely to prefer Trail Life over Boy Scouts? Certainly people who don't want their boys around gays, and people who want the stronger Christian emphasis. Anyone else? Probably not. It return, they offer a tiny organization with a tiny fraction of the financial support, and none of the history.

Here's how I think this is going to play out:

First five years:
2013-2017

Lots of excitement, lots of new troop charters, lots of glowing endorsements from high-profile celebrities, rapid growth like wildfire.

Broad agreement among fans that Boy Scouts is in its last throes, and that soon, very soon, virtually all heterosexual boy scouts will transfer to Trail Life, and that Boy Scouts will be left only with gay boys and (soon!) gay leaders, and that Boy Scout troop meetings will become gay pedophile orgies. Everyone agrees that the Trail Life Freedom Award will mean even more on a resume than Eagle Scout.

Though Trail Life doesn't have enough financial backing to offer the breadth of learning experiences offered by Boy Scouts, members agree that it's only a matter of time before parity is reached, and they are glad to make do with what it does offer for now. Also, they don't want to invest their time in an organization that is in its last throes.

Boy Scouts gains a few members who had stayed away due to the exclusion of gays, but most of those are still unhappy with the exclusion of gay leaders. Boy Scouts loses more members to Trail Life than they gain from people who join only because gays are now allowed.

The future looks uncertain for Boy Scouts. The news media piles on, with every other report practically a eulogy.


UPDATE
November 2016

So how is my prediction coming so far, about 4 years in? 

First, I was way, way off on how long it would take Boy Scouts to accept gay leaders. That happened in the Summer of 2015. Even though I was in favor of it, I was stunned at how soon it happened.

Second, I was surprised and disappointed to watch the collapse of my neighborhood's Cub Scout pack, during a time when young families have been moving into the neighborhood. Founded in 1965, the pack had around 30-35 boys when my oldest joined 4 years ago when he was in 2nd grade (he's a Boy Scout now). But about a year later scouting was in the news over the gay issue, and we had no recruits at all (or at least none that stuck around) until my youngest was old enough to join last year. That year the pack consisted entirely of 6 Tigers (1st graders). I was hopeful that that year's sudden membership surge was a sign that membership would build back up year by year, but this year there were only 4 boys in total, and only two parents interested in being involved. It was too much work for the two adults, neither of whom wanted to be Cubmaster, and not enough kids for it to be much fun for them. They're now attending meetings at a nearby Cub Scout pack instead. The local Scouting executive remains hopeful that eventually membership will return.

But what about Trail Life? They now claim 20,000 boys. Boy Scouts currently claims 2.4 million boys. That puts Trail Life at about 0.8% of Boy Scout's membership. The chartered Trail Life troop nearest to me still has no web site, though they've had the traillifetroop316.com domain for over 3 years. I sent them a message today; I'll report back here if they respond.

The next-nearest chartered troop is nearly an hour's drive away, and their website is their host church's website (nwcfoursquare.org), which says Trail Life meets there weekly. They also host Awana, and their website says their Awana program is so full they can only put newcomers on a waitlist. They don't say anything about Trail Life being full.


UPDATE
End of 2017

So how did the rest of my prediction go for this first 5-year period?

Trail Life now claims 26,000 boys, just over 1% of the membership of BSA. BSA membership hasn't grown since I last looked in 2016, while Trail Life gained 6,000 members, so they are by definition technically gaining in BSA, though at this rate it would take them centuries to catch up. On the other hand, they are falling further behind American Heritage Girls, who now claim 43,000 girls, up about 34% since Trail Life started.

Trail Life hasn't been as loud in the media as I had expected. They've been pretty quiet. I almost never hear of them.

Their troop finder tool on their website now shows a troop only 13 miles away (I searched on zip code 98006). But the website given for them, svachurch.org, a church, does not mention Trail Life at all. The next closest is the one same one I mentioned in 2016; nwcfoursquare.org. I don't see any change to their brief mention of Trail Life on their website, except that I think the contact person is different. I asked the previous contact person to be on their email list, and there were a couple of missives from them early on, but I haven't heard from them in a long time. That church is now also doing American Heritage Girls, and the bit about their Awana group being too full and having a waitlist is gone. The troop finder also now points me to a third troop, this one 24 miles away, but with no website. All in all, quite lame compared to BSA.

I'm surprised at how little web presence local Trail Life troops have in my area after 5 years. Web presence is so easy and cheap. The fact that they have hardly any in my area speaks volumes about how active they really are here, and how much enthusiasm there really is for them here. I'd say this is my biggest surprise about them after 5 years. I was expecting a big, splashy web presence for local troops. 

I had predicted a small loss in BSA membership for this 5-year period, but that doesn't appear to have happened, perhaps because the entire Trail Life membership is barely enough to amount to a rounding error in BSA membership numbers. Also I had predicted that their future would look uncertain, but that doesn't seem to be the case either. BSA appears to be holding on just fine.

Next five years:
2018-2023


At Boy Scouts, the most fervent anti-gay leaders have by now left, and pressure continues to mount to allow gay leaders. With the wall eroding and the pressure behind it mounting, eventually Boy Scouts make a decision to end all discrimination based on sexual preference, for both boys and leaders. When that happens, a huge backlog of families, mainly in heavily populated urban areas, that have avoided scouting for a generation or more because they are uncomfortable with discrimination against gays, start joining Boy Scouts. For every boy Trail Life gets from gay-hating families, Boy Scouts get two or more from non-gay-hating families. 

When the Boy Scouts lost the gay-haters to Trail Life, they also lost many of the people who were most interested in keeping the requirement that scouts be religious, as many of them were the same people. With them gone, the remaining proponents of that requirement, so often danced around and frankly lied about today, are outnumbered. However, they have to be careful not to lose the valuable support, mainly in the form of free use of facilities, of the many churches that charter the troops. Since they had already allowed literally all beliefs except atheism (and agnosticism), they simply reword the requirement to allow atheists and agnostics as long as the boys express commitment to patriotism and good citizenship. The decision seems more momentous to outsiders than to insiders, and there is much chatter about it in the news media. Families who had been avoiding Boy Scouts for generations due to that requirement start joining in droves.

A few churches do drop their charters as a result of the decision, but most of the churches where there would have been any appetite for doing that had already switched to Trail Life. Most churches decide that the opportunity to convert otherwise unchurched scouts was too important to throw away. Some churches start making more of an effort to entice the scouts at their church's troop to attend Sunday School. Where charters were dropped, most are picked up by community centers and schools.

With those changes, Boy Scouts go into a large growth phase, gaining back much of the mainstream demographic lost since the 1960s. They become a mainstream organization once again, emphasizing mainstream values, much to the disgust of Trail Life fans. As Boy Scouts becomes more mainstream, the demographic attracted to it changes accordingly and demands further change in that direction, in a continuous cycle that brings in still more boys from mainstream American families.

Trail Life fans no longer say that Boy Scouts is in it's last throes, since no one believes it anymore and it's started to sound silly.

Though growth at Trail Life was rapid in the first few years, it has eased off somewhat. It's still growing but at a slower rate, and leaders have stopped talking about rapid growth. Financial backing is still tiny compared to Boy Scouts -- and has even shrunk, because many early enthusiastic donors dropped out as the initial excitement subsided. 

As new families come into scouting -- those who's oldest boy has become old enough to start -- many of those families are now in the position of having to choose between Boy Scouts and Trail Life. Which do they choose? 

If they hate gays and strongly prefer a more overtly Christian organization, they lean toward Trail Life. But more of them are now asking how the overall experience compares to Boy Scouts. Trial Life still has a tiny fraction of the financial backing of Boy Scouts. They can't offer boys a similar experience without charging families much more for it. Where Boy Scouts is a very inexpensive way for families to give their boys a huge amount of useful learning experiences, Trail Life had to choose between inexpensive and extensive, and wisely chose the former.

Many decide that although they like the Trail Life philosophy, they prefer the Boy Scout overall experience. With the initial excitement over Trail Life over, many of these new families now start choosing Boy Scouts.

Awana saw membership decline as Trail Life took off. They had hoped the decline would be temporary but it continued. After an internal struggle they decide they need to become more like Trail Life to survive. They introduce new programs resembling Trail Life. Trail Life fans deride it as "Trail Life Lite", but it succeeds in stemming the tide. Christians now have a choice between the two, and a small percentage are switching from Trail Life to Awana due to the stronger emphases on teaching the Bible.


UPDATE
May 2018


Boy howdy, I didn't see THAT coming -- Boy Scouts are now accepting girls and are changing their name to just "Scouts", though still under the umbrella group "Boy Scouts of America".

From the time we joined in about 2007, our Cub Scout pack welcomed girls who wanted to participate. We had several who said they didn't like Girl Scouts because their local one was really only about doing crafts, and they preferred the Cub Scout activities. Unfortunately we couldn't award them badges etc., much as probably everyone in the pack would have liked to.

One fundamental difference between Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts is that each Girl Scout troop is given a lot more leeway in what activities they do. A friend's Girl Scout troop in a nearby city is as much about hiking and camping as Boy Scouts. Others are apparently more about crafts. Boy Scouts are required to be more uniform.

Going forward, I think it's a positive that girls will now have a choice. I certainly don't anticipate Girl Scouts allowing boys. Some are concerned that Scouts will no longer be a place where boys can be boys without the social pressure of having girls around to try to impress. But genders will be separated by den, so they'll only be together at pack/troop meetings. I think they'll be fine.

And this just in a day later -- Mormons are pulling their support of Scouts, along with their well over a third of a million scouts, about 19% of BSA membership. They won't be joining Trail Life, and Mormons probably wouldn't really feel very welcome in such an Evangelical group. Instead they'll be starting their own group. Since that forthcoming group will have the official backing of a very large and well-heeled organization, I think they'll do better than Trail Life. They'll certainly be starting with far more boys -- about 170 (one hundred and seventy) TIMES as many boys. So, correction -- I think that group is going to do MUCH better than Trail Life.

Though in the short term this will be financially painful for Scouts, in the long run I think it will be good for them. When Boy Scouts started, they were a very mainstream group. They continued to be mainstream through the 1940s. But as the culture started to shift in the 1950s, and especially as that shift accelerated starting in the late 1960s, Boy Scouts did not go along, and over the decades they have become increasingly isolated from mainstream American culture. I think the Mormons' influence has been a big part of that. 

Look for Scouts to soon drop the weird requirement that scouts affirm that they (a) believe that people can only be good citizens if they worship a god, and that they (b) do in fact worship a god. Once Scouts drop that requirement, allowing that boys can be good American citizens without necessarily being religious, their path back into the mainstream of American culture will be wide and clear.


UPDATE
January 2019

Fox news had an interview December 12th with the Trail Life CEO, and it just reached my inbox today with the headline "New Faith Based Boys Only Scouting Group Surges". It's interesting that Fox is calling them "New" 5 and a half years after their founding. But I was more interested in the "Surges" part. Have they suddenly started growing a lot?

No. Last I checked, just over a year ago, they were at 26,000 boys. Wikipedia still shows that same number, but in this interview the CEO said 27,000. Does that count as a "surge"? The relevant Merriam-Webster definition of surge is "to rise suddenly to an excessive or abnormal value". Going from 26,000 to 27,000 in just over a year -- an increase of just under 4% -- doesn't rise to that level.

After one year they were at 20,000 boys. Four and a half years later (five and a half years after their founding) they're at 27,000, an increase of 35%, or an average increase of about 7.8% per year. So it seems their rate of increase is slowing, not surging.

Meanwhile, BSA currently counts 2.4 million boys, the same number I read in 2016. But the Mormons announced in May 2018 that they would leave to form their own organization at the end of 2019, and when they do they'll take about a third of a million boys with them.

Has any of Trail Life's growth come as Awana conversions? I don't see data for that, but since Awana is for both boys and girls, it would probably mean converting to both Trail Life and Heritage Girls. I have no data on any such conversions but would be surprised if it wasn't happening. Most of the sponsors would be churches, and surely they'd see some costly duplication in having both. And BTW, Awana's founder just passed away in January 2018.



Years 11 - 15:
2024-2028

The initial excitement over Trail Life is long gone, and Boy Scouts is bigger than ever. No one pretends anymore that Trail Life will ever seriously challenge Boy Scouts, or that the financial backing will ever be there to offer a serious alternative.

Blog posts from Trail Life Freedom Award achievers are appearing complaining that the Freedom Award still has little or no currency in the job marketplace compared to being an Eagle Scout.

Instead, leaders emphasize the Christian aspect of Trail Life. Trail Life becomes more and more about learning and practicing Christian values. It becomes more like Awana, though still with more hiking and camping. As Trail Life moves away from general scouting to being more and more about Christian life, the demographic attracted to it changes accordingly and demands further change in that direction, in a continuous cycle.

Meanwhile Awana has not been resting on their laurels; they have been incrementally improving their offerings to better compete with Trail Life. Eventually Trail Life and Awana become so similar that there are more differences between individual troops than there are between the larger organizations.

As America celebrates its Sestercentennial (250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence), a wave of nostalgia about American history washes over America, and with it a renewed interest in Boy Scouts appears. By now Boy Scouts is as thoroughly mainstream as it was in the 1920s. Membership and financial backing both soar. Many boys start switching from Trail Life to Boy Scouts.

Years 16 - 20:
2029-2033

Trail Life merges with Awana. Though Awana is the older organization, Trail Life is now bigger, and the new organization is called "Trail Life Awana".

Years 21 - 25:
2034-2038

Many blog posts start appearing from young fathers who went through Trail Life as boys, and are now choosing Boy Scouts for their own sons, explaining their choice. Most say they would have been better off earning Eagle Scout than the Freedom Award.

Year 26 and beyond:
2039+

It's now been a generation since Trail Life was started. Trail Life Awana soldiers on as a tiny niche organization. Eventually it changes it's name to just "Trail Life" after the Awana old-timers have moved on.

You can search their entire website and not find a single word about homosexuality. As gay rights have become more and more accepted in mainstream society, it has become more and more socially unacceptable to be outspoken against gay rights. Even Trail Life Awana members are by now about as uncomfortable with it as they are with racism. As one pastor put it who's church charters a Trail Life Awana troop:

"Homosexuality is a sin, but it isn't for us to throw the first stone. Our place is to love the sinner. The Bible warns against gluttony and homosexuality, but we allow both overweight and homosexual members, and encourage them to earn their badges just like other members."