What the Boy Scouts Teach Boys Now

Can scouting still raise boys, responding to gerontocracy, and more in this week's digest.

I was honored to be asked by the Wall Street Journal to write a short reflection on Indiana (gift link) as part of its series on America 250. It was great to be included alongside figures like Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

I was also delighted to be asked to contribute to a First Things symposium on places that people associate with America. I wrote about the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

And when it comes to America 250 celebrations, I’d like to specifically highlight this superb “speech” by Ross Douthat in the New York Times (gift link).

If you liked my piece this week on the end of cool cities, you might also enjoy my more detailed reflections on Portland, Oregon that I posted as an article on X.

If you are in Southern California, you might be interested in this forthcoming event at Chapman University on science and religion. It’s coming up on July 24th.

Can Scouting Still Raise Boys?

The Dispatch ran an interesting essay by LuElla D’Amico on the Boy Scouts, and the downward trajectory of her son’s troop.

A few weeks ago, the Scouts BSA troop my 11-year-old son belongs to faced a decision. With many of its older scouts graduating, there were not enough adult volunteers to keep the all-boys troop running as it had—or even to send all of its younger scouts, including my son, to summer camp this year. For an 11-year-old who had spent months looking forward to camp, the disappointment was palpable.

Our local issue is indicative of a larger trend. Between 2019 and 2020, scout membership fell by 43 percent—from nearly 2 million youth to around 1.1 million. Faced with this reality, our troop's leaders and families, like many others, found themselves confronting a difficult question: What would it take to preserve this community for the next generation of scouts?

One proposal quickly rose to the top: convert our traditional boys-only troop into a “Family Troop,” or one that included both boys and girls.

The organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts is one of the many core social formation and educational institutions in the country that has gone into major decline. Some of this is demographic - there aren’t as many young boys as there used to be. But there are other general and specific factors at work. Institutions are in decline generally. The Boy Scouts had a major sexual abuse scandal. And participation in institutions like the Boy Scouts likely no longer carries the cachet - say for getting into college or getting a job - that it used to. A young striver may be better off from a college application perspective creating their own (quasi-bogus) non-profit rather than becoming an Eagle Scout. I noticed that my local newspaper has more profiles of people doing the former than the latter these days.

The Scouts have responded by doing basically what mainline Protestantism and any number of other institutions did. It evacuated its traditional religious core, adopted standard issue liberal positions du jour, and started allowing girls to join (in the way the mainlines allowed female clergy). This isn’t likely to work out any better for them than it did for the mainline churches.

D’Amico talks about some of what she hoped to gain for her son from scouting, especially exposure to a range of high quality adult male role models.

Part of the reason we chose my son’s troop was that I wanted him to grow up around different types of men whose lives were worth imitating. As I write this, I find myself thinking about those men: our easygoing scoutmaster who leads with the type of confidence I wish I could emulate; the engineer who can fix nearly anything and throw an ax to boot; the retired pilot who seems to know every trail and tree on our hikes; the student-athlete Eagle Scout who comes home from college to mentor younger boys. From them, my son and his troopmates learn about masculinity.

Of course, my son is also learning what it means to be a man from his father. But fathers have never raised children alone. Plus, it bears mentioning that, while my family is in a two-parent home, today nearly one-third of American boys are growing up without a father in their house– and that boys as a whole are struggling across nearly every educational measure….

Now, it matters that my son is also surrounded by extraordinary women leaders. He is taught by women at school, sees women lead in our parish, is encouraged by aunts, grandmothers, and cousins, and—though he’ll have to render his own verdict on this last one someday—is mothered by a rather strong personality. What is far rarer in contemporary American life is a community of unrelated men who voluntarily give their evenings, weekends, and vacations to boys simply because they believe that young men are worth investing in. Teachers are paid. Fathers have obligations. Scout leaders choose to be there.

These are things that would, to some extent, be compromised if her son’s troop decided to admit girls, something that’s already happening across the country. I will let you read the entire piece to find out what happened.

I don’t want to suggest that change wasn’t needed in the Scouts. It was. Or that they needed to double down on being “based” or something. That wouldn’t work either. But its actions, none of which were anything other than conventional wisdom, are signs of an organization where the fire has gone out, structural integrity has failed, and which has turned into yet another piece of institutional flotsam drifting downstream.

The Boy Scouts today can’t turn boys into men because it isn’t run by men or in accordance with masculine principles. Part of being a man is about making your mark on the world, not just having the world make its mark on you. It’s about having agency and the ability to, when necessary, defy convention and external pressure and withstand the heat for doing so. Nothing about the Scouts suggests that the organization itself operates on that principle.

Yuval Levin emphasizes how our institutions form us. How are the Scouts forming boys? When the DEI wave swept America, the Scouts made a DEI badge a requirement for Eagle Scout. Four years later when there was pressure from the new the Trump administration, they reversed that decision. What do these decisions teach the boys who’ve been part of scouting? By the very way it operates itself, the Boy Scouts forms boys into men who believe the way to get ahead in life is to go along to get along, even as the institution you are responsible for is in steep decline.

D’Amico also has some interesting thoughts on the stay or leave question when it comes to declining institutions:

Too many essays about scouting end with the same refrain: It isn’t what it used to be, so I’m leaving. Sometimes, that’s the right decision. Institutions can lose their way, and there are moments when fidelity to conscience requires us to walk away. But increasingly I wonder whether our first instinct has become departure rather than stewardship. Progressives are often criticized for believing institutions can simply be rebuilt from scratch. Yet conservatives sometimes make the opposite mistake: assuming that once an institution has changed, it is beyond salvaging. Both forget that institutions become what people make of them. Stated simply, institutions endure only when people remain long enough to preserve what is good and patiently reform what is not.

I don’t believe there’s any single right answer on the stay or exit question. I’ve heard from many people who still say their local Boy Scout troop is doing amazing things. If you feel confident that it works for your family, then by all means stay. Don’t let my pessimism cause you to leave. And showing institutional loyalty is itself another kind of lesson being imparted to our children.

I’m also mindful of Redeemed Zoomer’s thesis about the mainline churches, that their future belongs to those who show up. He argues that if younger theological traditionalists are the ones sitting in the pews, they’ll eventually inherit the keys. That may or may not be true, but it does show that decline, once it reaches a certain stage, opens up new possibilities.

But RZ has a concrete vision of change and renewal. Staying in a failing institution without such a vision to me seems questionable. Staying in order to “sustain institutions,” as D’Amico argues is sometimes what’s needed, is not in itself a solution to institutional decline. These institutions are troubled not simply because of numeric or financial decline, but because of what they’ve become and what they are doing - and because they are no longer fulfilling the necessary functions we once relied on them to carry out. A vision or program of institutional reset is a critical component of institutional loyalty. In a absence of that vision, and the fortitude to pursue it, exit begins to look like a better choice.

Click over to read the entire essay at the Dispatch.

On Demographic Transition

The Boy Scouts are just one institution feeling the pressure from demographic decline. In a follow-up to my piece yesterday on the demographic implications of low birth rates, here are a couple of interesting videos exploring other aspects of the fallout.

The first is a conversation with the interesting and creative thinker Samo Burja of Bismarck Analysis on gerontocracy and what to do about it. One of the key points is that we need a revolution for the young but not a revolution of the young. Because by the time youth revolutionaries succeed, they are no longer young. See: the Boomers

Burja is always worthwhile to listen to. You definitely won’t get standard issue thinking from him.

The other is this three-minute “Comeback City” promotional video for San Francisco. It feature’s a number of bigname people like Stephen Curry, former mayor Willie Brown, and Joe Montana. It strikes me as very desperate, like something a Rust Belt city would have produced.

But what’s really noticeable is the demographics portrayed, which are also traditional Rust Belt. The video features overwhelmingly white and black people, even among its non-legacy celebrities, as if it were representing America of the 1980s or something. In reality, San Francisco is down to only 6% black population. But it’s over 36% Asian, equal to its white population, something you’d never know from watching this video. (And also 17% Hispanic).

This shows that even in very liberal cities, leaders really don’t get it in their gut how different America’s demographics are than what they were a few decades ago.

Best of the Web

There’s an interesting research project and report on friendship, community, and purpose among men without college degrees. It’s called “Nobody to Call.” You can read commentary on this at the American Institute for Boys and Men.

NYT: Where Testosterone and the Bible Are the ‘New Punk Rock’ (gift link) - Thousands of men and boys gathered in central Washington for masculinity, Christianity and right-wing politics

Rob Henderson/City Journal: Want More Babies? We Need More Friends - If Americans are to revive our sagging national birthrate, we must rebuild the ordinary social structures that made children thinkable and natural

NYT: Is Kidmaxxing the Ultimate Status Symbol for Ultimate Wealth? (gift link).

Birthrates in much of the developed world are at record lows, but there’s one demographic group that’s exploring new frontiers of fertility: ultrawealthy men. Deploying nearly limitless resources, a small number of them are reproducing at such an extraordinary scale and pace that they’re exploding previous notions of what a family is. At a moment when so many people say they feel priced out of having even one child, these adventures in prolific fatherhood are emerging as a stark example of inequality made flesh.

The Gospel Coalition: Why Every Society Needs Faith - A nice review of In Good Faith by Ryan Avent, a great economics writer I’ve followed for nearly two decades.

Avent’s In Good Faith achieves something genuinely difficult: a synthetic account of human belief, cultural evolution, and social meaning that takes religion seriously without being religious. He writes candidly about his own losses and uncertainty, giving the book an unusual intellectual honesty.

NY Mag: The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA - For J.D. Vance and his co-religionists in Washington, faith is a powerful means of ascent - “In some ways, conservative Catholic networks in Washington function like the Communist Party in China. You don’t have to be a member. But if you’re ambitious and want to get ahead in your career, it surely helps.”

The Wall Street Journal profiled Redeemed Zoomer and his quest (gift link) to retake mainline Protestantism for traditional Christianity, and the New York Times has a great profile (gift link) of friend-of-the-newsletter Emma Waters of the Heritage Foundation.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from Rachel Lu and from Twin Cities Business magazine.

New this week:

• The End of the Cool City - What a trip to Seattle and Portland taught me about commodified cities, collapsing downtowns, and why conservatives keep losing the culture they refuse to build

• The Revenge of “Keep Portland Weird” - My X essay on the city

• Most of America Is Pittsburgh Now - Deaths now outnumber births across most of the country — and the effects are just beginning to arrive.

• Happy Birthday, Whoever You Are - On its 250th birthday, America no longer agrees on who it is — and a nation that forgets its story cannot stay one people - A guest essay from Dr. John Seel.

• My Member only Zoom session this month was on the future of churches.

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Cover image by Noah Wulf/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0