The proposed OA ceremony changes aren’t isolated decisions. They’re symptoms of the same ideological shift that has driven church sponsors away, alienated conservative families, and prompted the U.S. Military to reconsider its support of Scouting.
Understanding the reasoning behind these changes reveals why they threaten the very nature of the Order of the Arrow.
Cultural Appropriation: The Elimination of Native American Heritage
The Claim: Using words like “Elangomat” constitutes cultural miss-appropriation.
The Reality:
- All Native American words have been scrubbed from the proposed ceremonies
- This logic would require renaming the 25 of the 50 U.S. states that have Native American names
- It suggests that I cannot use words like “marinara” and “spaghetti” because they are Italian and I have no Italian blood.
- Isn’t it racist to say that only those of a particular ethnicity can use certain words?
The Pattern: Modern DEI frameworks define people by identity categories (race, gender, orientation) rather than shared values and universal brotherhood. In this worldview, borrowing from another culture – even respectfully – is exploitation. The irony is profound: an organization founded on cross-cultural respect is now abandoning that heritage to avoid offense.
When we welcome foreign Scouts to our camps, we are “tickled pink” by the strangeness of their uniforms and accents. That wonder at the vastness and universality of Scouting doesn’t require abandoning who we are. Neither does genuine respect for Native American culture require erasing Native words from our ceremonies.
Entertainment Over Experience: “Kids Like Videos”
The Claim: Modern youth expect multimedia presentations. We need narrators, background music, and stage lighting to engage them.
The Problems:
- A narrator turns lived experience into a play you watch
- Background music breaks the sense of outdoors and creates a pageant atmosphere
- Requiring electricity at the ceremonial ring contradicts outdoor Scouting
- Dimmed lights instead of extinguished candles = stage production, not natural clearing
The Truth: Scouts can watch videos anywhere, anytime, on demand. What they cannot get anywhere else is a genuine outdoor experience in the wilderness. As documented on theriseandfallofscouting.org, Scouts aren’t leaving because the program isn’t “modern” enough. They’re leaving because it’s become less real, less primitive, and less authentic.
The BSA is rebuilding its programs around entertainment and instruction instead of lived experience. The proposed OA ceremony is the culmination of this shift.
Business Principles Over Scout Methods
The Claim: Modern educational and business principles produce better outcomes than traditional outdoor methods.
What We’re Seeing:
- Corporate-style “team building exercises” – forced dancing and laughter with nothing funny said
- Elimination of tested challenges that have worked for decades
- Silence limited to nighttime (when Scouts would be sleeping anyway) – essentially eliminating this test
- Content showing little evidence of the deeper meanings found in existing ceremonies
Why This Fails: The principle of Cheerfulness in the OA is not about laughter and having fun. It’s about maintaining “a cheerful spirit even in the midst of irksome tasks and weighty responsibilities.”
Dr. Goodman went through a lengthy process to select the four tests using experimentation. The test of Silence makes service work more difficult. That’s its objective. It forces us to pay more attention to each other while working. It teaches Brotherhood.
Real experiences are Scoutlike ways that change lives. Manufactured fake vignettes – the kind of “team building exercise” privately disparaged by employees everywhere – have no practical use in business and even less in Scouting.
The Systematic Pattern
These ceremony changes emerge from the same ideological framework driving other BSA policy decisions – and attacking Western institutions everywhere.
The Pattern: Replace Independence with Dependence
Traditional Scouting teaches self-reliance. You learn to build fires, navigate wilderness, solve problems, and lead others. You become independent.
Modern progressive ideology requires dependence. When people are self-reliant, they don’t need institutional control. So the institutions that teach independence must be transformed or destroyed.
How This Plays Out in BSA:
Identity Over Character
- DEI frameworks define Scouts by race, gender, and orientation rather than shared values
- Pronoun usage training and gender-affirming care endorsement
- Transgender policy allowing physical boys in girl troops based on self-identification
- Why: Divides people into competing identity groups instead of unified citizens with shared principles
Accommodation Over Conviction
- Breaking the promise of separate girl and boy troops
- Encourage combined troops that erode single-sex boundaries
- Policies that directly conflict with sponsoring religious organizations’ beliefs
- Why: Attacks church and family – institutions that teach transcendent right and wrong beyond institutional control
Entertainment Over Experience
- Moving programs indoors and onto screens
- Replacing primitive outdoor skills with modern convenience
- DEI Merit Badge (Citizenship in Society) – another indoor Eagle requirement
- Why: Self-reliant people who can navigate wilderness, build shelter, and work together don’t need government intervention
The OA Changes Follow This Exact Pattern
- Eliminate primitive outdoor ceremony (require electricity)
- Replace tested challenges with corporate team-building
- Erase cultural heritage (“Elangomat” is appropriation)
- Turn experience into entertainment (narrator, music, lights)
- Reduce actual hardship (silence only at night)
The Result: Membership Collapse
- LDS completely withdrew in 2019 (largest single sponsor)
- UMC dropped from 10,000+ units to 6,600 in two years
- LCMS, PCA, and other conservative denominations also reducing support
- U.S. Military preparing to withdraw support
- Conservative families walking away
Churches, military, and traditional families recognize the pattern. They’ve seen it destroy other institutions. They’re leaving before it destroys Scouting completely.
Why the OA Matters
The Ordeal is the last authentic experience in BSA that builds independent, self-reliant, principled young people:
- Physical challenge you overcome yourself
- Brotherhood through shared hardship (not assigned identity categories)
- Service requiring personal sacrifice
- Primitive outdoor experiences that work without electricity
- Connection to transcendent principles
This is exactly what progressive ideology must eliminate. Self-reliant young people who’ve proven they can endure hardship, work together, and lead others don’t become dependent on institutional control.
The stakes are higher than ceremony preferences. This is about whether Scouting will continue to build the kind of citizens who sustain free societies – or become another entertainment program producing dependent consumers.
The Communist Pattern
Marx’s “class struggle”:
- Divide society into oppressor/oppressed classes
- Create consciousness of identity as class member
- Pit groups against each other
- Destroy existing institutions
- Promise utopia after revolution
Today’s DEI/Wokism:
- Divide society into oppressor/oppressed identity groups (race, gender, sexuality)
- Create consciousness of identity categories
- Pit groups against each other
- Destroy existing institutions (churches, Scouting, military, family)
- Promise equity after transformation
Same playbook. Different labels.
In the BSA specifically:
- Attack the “melting pot” of universal Scout brotherhood
- Replace it with identity categories (DEI frameworks, pronoun training, gender ideology)
- Fracture the coalition: drive away churches, military, conservative families
- Destroy traditional structures (combined troops breaking promises, forced inclusion policies)
- The result: membership collapse, institutional failure
- For more information: https://theriseandfallofscouting.org/woke-policies/
The Question Before Us
Are we willing to turn the Order of the Arrow into another casualty of ideological conformity?
The same thinking that drove away church sponsors, alienated military support, and caused membership collapse is now being applied to our ceremonies. The results will be the same: families and Scouts voting with their feet.
Or do we stand with Dr. Goodman’s vision: real outdoor experiences, tested challenges that change character, and ceremonies that honor our heritage?
The choice is ours. But the clock is running out.
For documentation of the proposed ceremony changes, visit Home
For evidence of BSA’s broader policy failures, visit https://theriseandfallofscouting.org