Trail Life USA expands its scouting ranks as it approaches 10th anniversary

Trail Life USA, the faith-based scouting organization for boys, is hitting its stride as it approaches its 10th anniversary.

Trail Life has seen its membership grow steadily since officially launching in January 2014 as a traditional alternative to the Scouts BSA, the organization formerly known as Boy Scouts of America before it started accepting girls in 2019.

Beginning with 500 troops and 10,000 members across the country in 2014, the Christian youth wilderness program today boasts more than 50,000 active members, 20,000 adult volunteers and 1,200 affiliated churches in all 50 states.

“We’ve had almost 200,000 members over the 10 years we’ve been through Trail Life,” Trail Life CEO Mark Hancock told The Washington Times.

Scouts BSA, which emerged from bankruptcy in April, witnessed a nearly 40% loss in its youth membership between 2019 and 2020, falling from 1.97 million to 1.12 million.

The Girl Scouts of the USA also faced a sharp drop, as membership fell from 1.4 million in 2019-20 to 1 million in 2021, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Hancock credits Trail Life’s success to its unabashed commitment to traditional Christian values. Its Statements of Faith and Values say, in part: “We believe there is One Triune God — God the Father; Jesus Christ, His one and only Son; and the Holy Spirit — Creator of the universe and eternally existent. We believe the Holy Scriptures (Old and New Testaments) to be the inspired and authoritative Word of God. We believe each person is created in His image for the purpose of communing with and worshiping God.”

“I think families are recognizing that Christ-centered, boy-focused approach at Trail Life USA is making a difference in the next generation, not just for the boys who are participating but the dads and men in the program who don’t have sons in the program who are interested in pouring into the next generation,” Mr. Hancock said. “All of them are seeing the benefits of a Christ-centered, boy-focused program.”

He said the role of fathers and men as mentors is strongly emphasized to guide boys, some of them without fathers, toward godliness and biblical manhood rooted in the “model of Jesus Christ himself.”

Spiritual discipline, hands-on discipleship, family values, rough-and-tumble masculinity, and outdoor prowess are all factors in earning awards and badges throughout the three levels of the program.

Those spiritual requirements make it more difficult to earn Trail Life’s highest award, the Freedom Award, than even the BSA’s Eagle Scout, long the gold standard in scouting programs. The Freedom Award is rarely completed before age 17 or 18, whereas “it’s not unusual for a boy to earn an Eagle Scout at 12 or 13 years old,” Mr. Hancock said. 

“It’s a more robust award,” he said.

Trail Life was founded after the Boy Scouts voted in 2013 to allow openly gay members. At its launch, the upstart organization received backlash from those who decried its Statements of Faith and Values as exclusionary.

The program requires parents to sign its Statements of Faith and Values; however, it does not require the same for the boys.

“Boys are not required to sign the statement of faith,” Mr. Hancock said. “Boys can be of any faith, or no faith at all, and be in Trail Life USA.”

“We see that over and over again,” he added. “The unchurched boy joins the troop, and then the unchurched family joins the church.”

Parents typically see Trail Life as “an ark that protects their boys from the complicated message of our culture” and “a battleship that’s going to raise up a generation that can turn back the tide through these tested traditional values,” he said.

Mr. Hancock expressed high hopes for the coming years despite what he described as the growing “darkness” of the culture.

“The darker things get, the more attracted people are to the light that we hold to in Trail Life,” he said.