How To Love A Fraternity And Its Brothers (And Associated Sisters) By Leaving It

by Darryl L. Fortson, MD

Dear Rev. Young;

I am in receipt of your exemplary letter regarding Black Greek fraternity and sorority denouncing/renouncing. I shall refrain from the use of the name of the fraternity I have left, save for the obvious reference to one of the frat's founders, because the issues that both you and I address in our communications are generally applicable and bigger than any individual Black frat or sorority.

The receipt of your letter from one of my line brothers this morning blessed me profoundly as I began a new day that followed one in which I had to retreat to my car in midday and regain my composure from my grief upon leaving an organization filled with a group of men who I have loved dearly as brothers for 42 years. Your blessed letter, which was composed with obvious care and love for God, His Word, the Fraternity, and Black people writ large, gave me a way forward that gives me renewed hope to be directed and to help direct others in a way that will enlarge the territory of Christ both within Black Greek organizations and beyond. I would humbly ask you to place your letter (or a link to it) in the comment section of this blog so that others reading my post can also read your letter in its entirety.

But first, a correction. The title of your letter is "On Denouncing (the fraternity)." As a point of clarification, I did not "denounce" the fraternity. To denounce is to "publicly declare to be wrong or evil." What I did was renounce (that is, formally declare one's abandonment of a claim, right, or possession) the fraternity. I would never denounce an organization that has blessed me and others through gifts of friendship and service as much as the fraternity that we both pledged has. What I am denouncing however, is my oath - an oath which, while referencing the Divine, syncretizes these references with deities and forces aligned with masonry and other nebulous gods to which I have and owe no allegiance. It is on the basis of this denunciation that I made my "renunciation." There are, and will be, brothers who will see my discussion of this as lacking in discretion. Discretion is needful and has its place. But the facts are that these issues permeate all of Black Greek life to its hazard and, I believe, to the spiritual hazard of its members. The only difference between the fraternities and sororities in this regard is the flavor, and not the nature, of the hazard to which they are exposed.

It is greatly appreciated that you, my Morehouse brother, are a theologically trained minister, compelled to make sound arguments based on both spirit and reason, thereby potentiating the power of both. In your letter, you rightly grieve that Black people are all too often "held to harsher spiritual scrutiny than our counterparts" - a "higher standard" so to speak. When I read that, I was immediately transported to the crisp, cool air of the Georgia nights of my 1983 pledge season when, at the close of march practice, our Dean of Hop would gather us to sing our pledge club song where we promised, in love for our dear fraternity, "to hold our standards high."

You are doggone right we are held "to a higher standard!" After all - what did we pledge and where did we pledge it? Surely, the other fraternities and sororities demand a higher standard as well and so ask the same questions of their initiates with equal passion. The question, young brother, is not just whether we are held to a higher standard; the question is who is holding the standard? For you and me, "the standard" is Christ. One of the reasons why your letter was such a blessing to me is because it helped me to embrace as much affirmative purpose in leaving this fraternity as I had in joining it, and to still retain my love for it and its members, bereft of malice or regret. This is because I believe, in my departure, as painful as it has been, that I am "meeting the standard" - both of the noble aims of the Fraternity, and more importantly, the even more noble and blessed aims of Jesus Christ. I pray that my departure bears witness to my capacity to sacrifice for God, to submit to His will for my life, to express love beyond comfort, to walk and act in faith, and to be a true brother by engaging brothers with truth. Finally, it has forced me to summon courage, something that had heretofore been evading me.

It took courage to pledge our frat at our chapter, didn't it Pastor Young? Revelation 21:8 says "But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” Imagine - the first people in the line to Hell won't be murderers like Hitler or child molesters like John Wayne Gacy, or liars (such as a certain politician that shall go unnamed). It will be cowards like me, if I hadn't renounced this vow as I was moved in faith to do.

I sat on this thing for eighteen months, Rev. Young, first in denial of the spiritual threat these vows may entail, and afraid of what others might say or think - silently, stubbornly and rebelliously resisting the power of the truth

(1 Samuel 15:23 - "for rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry"). I didn't want to disturb the relationship between my two best friends and I - men I have known since childhood and high school, or the four-plus decades long relationships with my chapter brothers. I didn't want to feel or be awkward. But man, it got so crucial that God explicitly told my wife and son - two people thoroughly immersed in Christ - to stop praying for me. I was on my own. I was either going to go get with the program in faith with God or be judged - any and all of my prior good deeds notwithstanding. As my Uncle Andy used to say, "I may be dumb, but I ain't stupid." Praise the Lord - I'm just "dumb." Ain't no pressure like spiritual pressure.

My exit from the fraternity is not like I am running from a burning building, leaving souls "on fire." I see myself moving swiftly up a hill to get to a vantage point where I can see the smolderings emanating from the "basement" of not only my former "frat house," but from the fraternity and sorority houses of all those along "Black Greek Row." My renouncing sounds an alarm that something is amiss. Something is amiss when you can't just straight up say "Jesus Christ" in the contract (oath). ("For whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." - Matthew 10:33.) Something is amiss when you have to be blindfolded and commit to an oath under duress that you never had a chance to review and when the contracts and subsequent rites, rituals, and communications are about nebulous gods, dead Greek gods, defunct Egyptian gods, and other deceiving signs, symbols, and associations that permeate Greek fraternity and sorority oaths. Something. Is. Amiss. I didn't want to believe it, but God doesn't lie, he is never wrong, and he doesn't blink. I believe it is useful two ask two key questions here to get to the heart of the matter: one, what is the relationship of the brothers and sisters one to another?" and two, "what is the relationship of these organizations to Christ?"

The first question, at least for me, is easy to answer. I have a relationship of deep and abiding love and admiration for my line brothers, the brothers that pledged me, the brothers that I pledged (including my best friend from childhood), as well as the new ones I have met in my new city of residence that I know is authentic and Godly. Many of these relationships have now transcended mere fraternity, and so in leaving the frat, I feel that I have lost nothing in this regard. And yet, something has changed. But just because something good changes doesn't mean the change has to be bad. Our fraternity started with three young men - mere boys from my older perspective now 40-plus years removed from undergrad - who wanted to transform the "potential energy" of their friendship into something meaningful, enduring, and in service to the greater good for the similarly situated Black male "strangers in a strange land" that our people in America ever are. They reached out to a brilliant professor at their school by the name of Ernest Everett Just.

Dr. Just and I are kindred spirits in many ways. I am exactly eighty years to the day his junior. He left for boarding school at age twelve, and when he returned on a school break, he found out his mother had been buried (not dead, buried!) a few hours prior. I left my mother - a sorority woman herself - in a room in our apartment in Chicago for about 30 minutes during my sophomore/junior summer break and returned to find her brain dead. (My best friend and future fraternity brother drove me to the hospital.) Both Professor Just and I excelled in school. We both experienced a failed marriage. We both bore no small frustration with our chosen professions. He went on to briefly become interred as a German prisoner of war in Europe when he was taken captive in France while doing research during the Nazi Occupation of that country. (He never would have had to leave America in the first place if he had been treated fairly here.) His internment delayed his treatment for the pancreatic cancer from which he died at the age of 58 years old. Meanwhile, I'm still here, and I have work to do, but I can't do it with God as my enemy or impeded by the "smoke" of spiritual incumbrance because all the frat and sorority houses are "smoldering."

Yesterday, the man who first read me the oath to recite that made me a member of our fraternity called to tell me that he still loves me as a brother and that he will be there for me. His thoughtful comments helped me bring into focus a potential way through the "smoke" of these ungodly forces in Black Greekdom. The facts are that if every fraternity or sorority member did what I have done, the collective work of a total of 948 years of Black fraternal or sororal friendship, benevolence, and service would come to an abrupt end. The devil himself would delight in this and is not my desire to participate in the tearing down of long-standing, service-based Black institutions. But I have faith that God and His Word can deftly fix a complex situation if those involved are willing to submit to Him.

Revolutionary change requires revolutionary thinking. It involves engaging challenges with humility before God, creativity and with passion - all at the same time. Reverend, I would ask you to share your letter with ALL your Greek letter fraternity and sorority friends/associates. Your analysis is worthy of that. What I personally am prayerfully recommending to ALL the Black Greek fraternities and sororities, for whatever it is worth, is that each of them select from, throughout their ranks, three individuals of deep and authentic Christian report and that they convene together, following or during a period of corporate fasting and prayer, to ALL denounce their oaths collectively as organizations and cancel their oath contracts among their members and themselves to their respective entities, and then "renegotiate" these attestations under the prayerful direction of Christ and submission to His will. During such a coming together, all of the organizations should share their initiation oaths with each other, so they can collectively identify where and how those oaths are errant so that the representatives can use what they have learned to go back to their respective organizations and craft a more Godly initiation process. To expose that which is supposed be secret to others holding secrets of their own requires both courage and faith, and cuts radically against the secret traditions of the past. But what is the point of trying to hide an initiation ceremony for any organization whose rites can be instantly summoned from the internet, placed there mostly by bitter or malevolent former members or pledgees who wanted to hurt the people and the organizations they pledged? These fraternities and sororities should not try to fight any dark influences on their organizations alone any more than Harvard or Morehouse should try to cure cancer alone. To cleanse "the blood lines" of these organizations will require a sincere and divine collective effort as a community of humble and obedient Christian people, calling upon the collective spiritual strength and power of members who love the Lord from all nine of the Black Greek letter organizations. This may be a genuine way forward to put the wind of the Holy Spirit consistently to the backs of the organizations and its members. There is too much human potential among Black fraternity and sorority members to do even more good than they already have done to merely be satisfied with what dark forces are willing to allow to happen positive in order to continue to get the best and brightest of us to keep joining Black frats and sororities and end up being subtly occultly impeded or injured spiritually due to fealty - whether explicit or implied - to other gods.

In your letter, you mention the Hippocratic Oath that I took as a physician as a potential portal of false god worship. I am renouncing AND denouncing that. (Why in the hell should healing physicians have ever been made to continue to swear to dead and fake gods and snakes wrapped around a stick?) You mention other organizations and brands such as Nike, Hermes, Versace, and Pandora as being based on false deities that I will prayerfully consider how to comport myself with. As you infer in your letter, we can't separate ourselves from everything "unclean," but we can seek direction as to what we should separate ourselves from and what we should work to clean up.

I realize that everyone isn't called to do everything. I didn't make this decision instantly, nor should I have. But I know for sure that God isn't playing with me. He's not playing with any of us. All I want Him to know is that I'm not playing with Him, either. "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling," says Philippians 2:12. Thank you from the bottom my heart for helping me work out mine.

Sincerely,

Darryl L. Fortson, M.D.