www.christianpost.com By Leonardo Blair, Christian Post Reporter
America is in danger of raising a generation of boys who are “unproductive narcissists,” and Trail Life USA CEO Mark Hancock says his organization is prepared to step in and neutralize the threat.
For the last eight years since pulling his sons away from the embattled Boy Scouts of America, Hancock has been promoting his “unapologetically Christian” alternative to the iconic youth organization, which he argues has lost some 2 million members since 2013 because it abandoned its “laser focus on boys.”
And his message has been gaining traction among Christian parents and churches worried about the threat of a mainstream culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to raising their sons as traditional men.
“It’s as if boyhood is some kind of social disease that needs to be eradicated,” Hancock, a trained mental health expert and father of two boys, told The Christian Post in a recent interview. “We don’t celebrate boys like we used to. We don’t recognize their strengths and their impulsivity and their risk and their attraction to competition as positive things anymore, and they used to be accepted. Those were strengths that were being tested in a boy that would serve him in manhood.
“When you look at the history of the country, it’s winning and focused men who took chances, who took risks, who made the difficult decisions, who sometimes made unpopular decisions that really led us to be one of the greatest countries in the world,” he said. “And if we’re not still instilling those same things in boys, letting them know that risk and competition are not bad words, letting them know that they can get outside and exercise their strength, their masculinity, in a godly way is not a bad thing, then I think it’s not going serve us well going forward as a society that’s going to require that we have men do things like go to war. Like stand up and defend our rights, stand up to defend the weak, to be strong, to have convictions, to be bold about certain things. And if we aren’t instilling that in our boys, we’re certainly not going to have it in our men.”
Trail Life USA was launched in 2014 in the wake of the Boy Scouts lifting their ban on gay youth. The Boy Scouts have since made more changes that conflict with traditional Christian values, such as allowing openly gay scout leaders in 2015. It also expanded membership to include girls in 2019, which led to a lawsuit from the Girl Scouts of the United States of America.
In just nine months after it launched, Trail Life USA attracted more than 14,000 members. It recently reported some 30,000 members and has continued growing even during the pandemic. And in the last month alone interest has remained high.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth. Just the past month or so we’ve seen over 300 people reach out to us and just say, ‘How do I start a troop?’ ‘How do I get a Trail Life troop in my community? I need this focus. My son needs this.’
“I really believe that families are scrambling in search of an organization that will help them make godly men from the stuff of boys, and we believe that Trail Life is that organization,” Hancock said. “That’s why our numbers are exploding. We’re seeing people that are responding to messages like ‘boys and girls are different.’”
