This article by Grantland J. Rollins appears in the Success & Failure issue of The Mockingbird magazine.
Rush began the first of August, just a couple of weeks before class. I didn’t want to go back to campus early, but then again, I was glad to leave home. Mom and Dad had tried their best to convince me not to pledge a fraternity, and their vain efforts continued until I backed my car out the drive and waved out the window.
Three hours later, I checked in at the hotel and followed a sign to a large seminar room. There I found a few tables set up and fifty side-parts or so lined in front.
I was nervous, like most of the guys there, but not because I was worried about getting in. I was worried about being found out.
I signed the check-in sheet, got my name tag, and went to my room to settle in. I opened the door and found my roommate watching TV. We traded introductions and began talking.
“So you’re a sophomore?” he asked. “Why’d you wait a year?”
“Didn’t know if it was right for me,” I said, eyeing the floor. “The good thing is, I know what all the houses are like.”
It would be the first lie of many. The truth was, I hadn’t set foot in a single house. I didn’t even drink. Hell, I still asked girls permission to side-hug.
“What about you?” I asked. “Why are you joining?”
He sighed.
“My dad did it. He was a Pike. I’ll be one too.”
I nodded, wondering how long to wait for an opening to talk to him about God. An hour? All evening? What if no openings appeared the whole weekend? This question — how to righteously yet respectfully seduce — was one of the most tormented of my young Christian life.
And then it hit me. The reason I was pledging was to stop waiting for these mystical moments. I’d already sat silently and hopefully for years with nothing to show for it. The time to attack was now.
“Actually,” I said, “I chose to join because … are you familiar with Romans 6:23?” He looked like I’d asked to cuddle. He assured me, almost pleaded, that, as a fellow white sentient Southerner with Google and a mother, he was nauseatingly familiar with the man about whom Western Civilization swung. But I had to be sure because there were a lot of people out there who didn’t know the difference between “knowing about” and “knowing,” just as there were lots of people out there, like myself, who couldn’t distinguish God from the mirror or their head from their ass.
So I dutifully trudged through my presentation of the gospel, being sure to emphasize “relationship” while skirting social cues. I finished with a compelling testimony about a rogue, syrup-addicted six-year-old and asked him whether he wanted to accept Jesus as his Lord, Savior, and perhaps only friend, because that was becoming my reality.
He stood to leave, and I got the impression he wasn’t interested in even “knowing about” Jesus or especially me.
When the door slammed, I stared back at the TV and reflected on my performance. It was rough but heroic, I decided. But unwise, too, given my need for secrecy. I hadn’t been accepted into a fraternity yet and didn’t want word to get out that I was getting the Word out.
It was still hard to believe I was joining a fraternity, but I’d never imagined I’d be in a war either. And that’s what fraternities were for me — hot zones in a holy war. Joining wasn’t a question of desire; it was one of duty, like so much in life. I still liked sleep, sobriety, not vomiting, and disease-free genitals, but I wanted to be obedient more than anything.
And after hundreds of sermons and years of guilt, I’d finally accepted that obedience meant steering nearly every social interaction toward God. I had tried to remind myself that I would naturally be met with rejection, but experiencing it firsthand hurt more than I’d imagined.
Doubt whispered that I maybe wasn’t cut out for this sort of thing, that maybe it wasn’t worth it, but I mostly wondered how my war would pan out. Would stepping out in faith take me to the next level with God, wherever that was? (Probably on-stage.) Would the malaise of Christian discipline slough off and be replaced with joy? Would I become a modern Billy Graham, helicoptering into stadiums, a single-ear headset-mic in place, lecturing thousands about how to be God’s secret ninja warrior?
I didn’t know, but I did know God’s commands weren’t negotiable, so I hoped for the best and told myself something like love, joy, and headsets likely awaited if I just took the attack a day at a time.
I stood and left my room for the lobby in search of other targets. “I’m really doing this,” I said to myself. I was going to be Paul reincarnated. I was, at last, ready to persecute others for and with my Savior.
***
Rush was a three-day affair. We would visit every house the first day, with a process of elimination to follow. Pledges and houses crossed each other off each day until a match was made on Bid Day. It was kind of like the Bachelorette except all the candidates were Southern and out-of-shape.
At 10 a.m. on day number one, my bus pulled its hundred suits alongside a large, white house with Ionic columns. A dewy lawn shone beneath a pediment holding the golden letters “SAE.” We’d been told that every house attracted a certain personality. Some were rich, others poor; some white, others eggshell. The SAEs, we’d heard, were into drugs, which meant —because every house had drugs — that harder ones were there and easily obtained.
All glistened from a sticky marinade of sex, beer, and body fluids, of course. All, that is, but the brand-new Christian fraternity BUX, or “Brothers Under Christ.” I was surprised to hear that Christians had ineptly co-opted a fading cultural trend, but the Lord works in over-compensatory ways. They had few fans, but I disliked them because they were the kind of culture-accommodating hypocrites I was desperate not to be.
As we stepped off the bus, the walls of the building began to tremble. Unintelligible chanting hummed inside. We saw a flash of flesh and frantic eyes in the windows. Something was trying to get out. Something fierce.
We clenched our fists and wobbled forward down the walkway parting the lawn. The pounding on the walls grew fevered as we approached. A window shattered. Another pane shot open, revealing a half-naked kid dangling on the ledge and slobbering beer while shrieking.
Suddenly the front door flung wide, blowing a gust against us and revealing a tunnel of flesh that crowed, spat, and writhed like some terrible, multi-limbed, poly-headed god.
“S-A-E! S-A-E! S-A-E!”
The voices beckoned us to come closer. Half-grinning and dazed, we, like some hypnotized meal, shuffled in, shaking hands and high-fiving the screaming, frothy throng lining either side of the hallway.
They led us into an all-white room filled with white, wooden chairs where we sat, all swallows and sweat. The SAE members filed in behind, chanting still, and surrounded us. We then saw a gentleman in the front take a chair, lift it high above his head, and begin smashing and stomping the thing till it lay there in sweat-drool-and-beer-drizzled pieces. Did I mention it was 10 a.m.? We stared on lidless, wondering if we were going to need tetanus shots later.
The president, wearing only a blazer with boxers, pushed his way forward and rocketed atop a chair. He quieted the room with his hands and then howled, “FUCKIN’ MOTHERFUCKERS!”
His brethren exploded in response: “FUCKIN’ MOTHERFUCKERS!”
“Welcome to the greatest fuckin’ fraternity in the whole wide fuckin’ world!” He then introduced one of his brothers, who announced how many “V-cards” he had taken.
I put my face in my hands.
What in God’s name am I doing here?
A few more members then stood and added to the fraternity’s resume. They were like the X-Men of parties. Someone’s liver never pickled, another could snort coke through any orifice, and one guy’s erections always lasted more than four hours.
We politely applauded.
And then we were out the door and onto our next stop where the virginity-elimination theme continued. After eight houses and eight hours, we stumbled back to our hotel to consider what brand of hedonism we wanted.
Day two was much calmer, thankfully, giving us time to meet the members and discuss the nuances of date-rape.
And day three was basically an interview that focused on our depth of feeling regarding the tradition of alcoholism.
The third day was also the most difficult for me to remain undercover, because of extended, sober face-time with members who had influence over who was selected. These guys were rightly suspicious of me. Why would anyone who didn’t drink join a fraternity? Surprisingly, there were already non-zealot teetotalers who had joined and confused everyone, including myself. They were like the obese at a gym, just wanting to be near the action, I guess. I said I was like these weirdos, but I sensed the members were still disturbed by my aura of wholesomeness.
So I was forced to employ a little-known maneuver I picked up at God & Bond’s Stealth Emporium: the wristwatch of rationalization! Or as the members later called it: lying.
I told myself joining under false pretenses was okay because sinning for the kingdom was less bad than someone never converting at all. Did missionaries alert the Communist Party why they were coming? No. Come to think of it, our Lord and Savior wasn’t exactly Mr. Full Disclosure either. So I had plenty of good and bad, but mostly bad, examples to justify my evasion.
I don’t remember what I said, but I do know that in the end, I didn’t have to say much because few suspect that a white guy in a suit is deranged.
On the morning of Bid Day, we gathered on the campus lawn. We had ranked our top three fraternities the night before, and now we waited to see which den of iniquity, if any, had chosen us. Sigma Chi was my first choice, but I got Kappa Sigma instead. To me, it was like picking AIDS and getting cancer. I didn’t care so long as I got into a big one. Kappa Sig was the biggest, so I figured why not and went to greet my future disciples.
After hugs and high-fives, the newest Kappa Sig class ran down from the campus lawn to the fraternity house for lunch. We were then whisked by a fleet of pick-up trucks to a non-descript house a few miles away. They pointed to the backyard, and there we found a huge pile of cheap beer that had been sitting in the sun for the past week. The point? Drink till you puke.
I sighed. My counter-cultural stand had to begin at some point; I just didn’t think it’d be this soon. Strangely, they were very accommodating. It was like the Bloods and Crips had decided to make room for conscientious objectors and poets. We were all a little desperate, apparently.
I may not have tippled, but I could still puke. My reward for keeping the faith was warm buttermilk and Sprite, and looking at them, I have never been tempted to drink more in all my life.
As I hurled, part of me wanted to see it as persecution and imagine my place in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, but something about my voluntarily signing up for it had ruined the moment.
***
Now that I was in, the real work began. My plan was simple in the sense that shooting up a bank is simple. I would hang out for a month or two, real subtle-like, try to make friends and connect, perhaps, over a shared hatred of myself, pray, and then start scheduling the most awkward meetings in history. If they accepted, great; if not, they were lovingly dead to me.
In the meantime, I just had to survive a group of roaming adolescents saturated in booze and ooze. And it only took a week for me to learn that the floors, walls, beds, food, people, you name it, were invariably sticky, pube-dusted, and smelled of stale Budweiser. I started praying less for the miracle of salvation and more for a traveling endocrinologist with an industrial cleaning business.
As you might imagine, campus soon became my refuge, while parties morphed into a weird sales-warm-up hell. I’d roam the premises, a cup of water in hand, engaging in tepid conversation with those too polite to ignore me or too drunk to escape. I’d return to my room, alone and defeated, until I mustered enough resolve to go back out and try again.
After a month of this self-induced agony, I’d made no real friends but decided to lay siege anyway because I had a reputation to uphold. And you know, God’s love. In the coming year I offered hundreds who were too socialized by politeness the unbelievable chance to follow Christ crucified. Three accepted. And I soon learned they only nodded along to everything I asked just to end the meeting as soon as possible.
If you’re wondering, this is the best strategy when dealing with the psychotically helpful.
Speaking of psychotic, I would be surprised to learn I wasn’t the only pledge doing undercover work. When I met Josh, he seemed friendly and very rich. Except he was neither. Part of pledging meant that for one week we pledges ditched the rigors of our initiation, picked a place to take a trip, and went wild, or in my case, fell asleep. Our class picked New Orleans. Josh said he’d handle all the arrangements, but he inflated the expenses and pocketed the difference.
When it all came out, both the fraternity and university kicked him out, and we learned that he also had a record as a paperhanger in his hometown.
I mention him because, one, his tale is a tad shocking, and two, the house only hated me slightly less than Josh.
***
Despite rumors to the contrary, the hazing was mainly psychological, because of the threat of prior lawsuits. Some of it was even kind of fun. One night they woke us at 2 a.m., which was routine, and lined us up along the hallway shoulder to shoulder in our boxers to stare at “the crack,” or where the wall and ceiling met. This was usually when they’d shout insults at us for an hour, but one night they opened the cleaning closet, flooded the adjacent hallway, and added soap. It was my first indoor slip-n-slide.
The men who owned our house dropped by now and then to remind everyone that the pledges were “in no way to be physically hazed.” And we weren’t. But when the cat was away, the mice drank, causing a constant unease among whatever mice eat. A guy in my class had a biological-brother brother who had told him about all the head games and not to worry.
“But can we trust him?” we asked. “What if he’s in on it? What if …?” And round we went.
Incredibly, my class was guilt-tripped into physical hazing at the very end. The members whined that they had to do wall-sits and bows-and-toes when they pledged, and if we really cared, we’d do it, too.
One by one my class caved. But volunteering to be hazed, like volunteering for religious persecution, just isn’t as fun as the real thing.
***
While I may have hated everything and everyone in Kappa Sig, I must admit the process of becoming a “brother” was, more or less, meaningful.
One night they drove us blindfolded to the middle of the woods for a bonfire. No one said where we were going or why. There had been rumors of a circle-jerk, and some swore they were willing to do whatever it took, but I told the Lord I had my limits and hoped he understood.
Fortunately, when we arrived, we found two kegs and a few guys ready to hang out. After an hour, we were quieted and told to form a platonic ring around the fire. The members then said there would be three rounds.
Round one: tell a joke.
I told one about how you get a nun pregnant, but thought I should get credit for the joke of my existence at that moment.
Round two: tell your first or most memorable sexual encounter.
My heart plummeted. Why try to clumsily and half-heartedly build rapport only to demolish it, I wondered. I should’ve realized there was no rapport to begin with. Having never even made out, I knew this was going to be worse than communal masturbation, which would have been my first and most memorable sexual encounter.
Round three: discuss the most traumatic event in your life.
The first guy burst into tears before uttering five words. It was all sobs and mumbling for a minute. He mentioned something about a dog and his grandmother and a cabin. I thought maybe the granny who had raised him had recently passed, but instead, the most traumatic event in this guy’s life was when his dog died.
I sat there, wondering when The Worst Oprah Winfrey Show Episode Of All Time was going to end. Would it have been gauche to say I was in my most traumatic moment?
Some of the stories were deeply sad, though. One guy’s sister had been raped by a friend. The guy next to me talked about attempting suicide. One of the saddest stories was that one kid made up what he and his dad did every other weekend because his dad dropped him off at his grandparents instead of spending time with him. But about half of the guys’ most traumatic event came when Mom and Dad sat them down and told them they didn’t love each other anymore.
As I listened, I congratulated myself for joining and being there to hear their confessions, and silently praised my family for avoiding unchristian dysfunction. I forced sadness, too, about the decline of the American family and the wages of divorce, telling myself I needed to redouble my efforts.
At the end of our ceremony, they said becoming a brother was about being able to share these wounds with one another, and I was annoyed to concede they had a point.
It was a point reinforced later during another group confessional once our time as pledges had ended, though this time it was shorter and took place at the house with more members. The crescendo of this share-time came from a scrawny kid named Stan, who cryingly revealed he’d gotten a girl pregnant, and that they were going to go to Little Rock for an abortion. Horrified, I knew that even if I didn’t convert a soul I might still be there to advocate for life, family, and balanced budgets. I wrote Stan a long, anguished letter and gave it to him before he left, but I doubt he read it.
They got the abortion.
I was disappointed, once again, but proud of myself, once again, for doing my duty and getting the word out.
***
My own story of trauma was brief and felt too tame to deserve the name. I was often depressed and didn’t know why. It was just one of those things, I’d decided. Who was really happy anyway? The sober, sturdier joy of the Lord was more realistic, more attainable, and just fine. I mean, I’d pledged the fraternity with the belief that this “just fine” would blossom into joy, but that didn’t make fine traumatic.
And I was fine most of the time, I thought. Yes, I had cried on every birthday I remembered, couldn’t tell my parents or anyone that I loved them, barely made eye contact with people, and, because of my love and affection deficit, cried myself to sleep many nights with a pillow over my eyes so no one would see, but this was also fine. Everything was fine!
I’d gone to therapy the summer before, and the counselor had asked me three questions: What is intimacy? Do I want it? And am I willing to do what it takes to get it? But I couldn’t wait to flee each session, and only grew sadder, thinking that something was wrong with me for having to go there.
I read and read too, hoping I’d figure out this intimacy stuff like I had with everything else in life, but I couldn’t. Maybe intimacy looked different for me? Maybe intimacy wasn’t so great after all? If it was, why was it so uncomfortable? Maybe telling people “I’m fine with you” would catch on?
I had told a pastor about my sadness during the summer of therapy. He worked for the campus ministry Student Mobilization, which had devised and encouraged my ill-fated mission to the Greeks. He, too, had been depressed, he told me, but didn’t quite know the source either. He wanted to help me, and so, passed along his solution: obey God.
It wasn’t working.
***
The nauseating uselessness of my mission hit home by the end of the first year. I could no longer deny that I was an exhausted pariah with only pretense to offer. I gave up and moved out.
There were no farewell parties.
I also bid adieu to the source of my humiliation as I saw it: evangelicalism. Many of the theories justifying it lingered, but bitterness and anger began drowning them out. And the thing that made me angriest was the smirk and knowing head-shake of church people who found out about my pledging. “How could you be so stupid?” they seemed to say.
I had no answer other than that the whole evangelizing enterprise seemed crazy, desperate, and impossible. It meant convincing; it meant control. It meant simultaneously playing God and playing dumb. It meant setting out each day as if life was something to conquer. If it was, life had won. I was beat, and unplugged my dream of single-ear headset-mics.
I’d always assumed I understood the Chesterton quote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.” I had also assumed I knew whom his words applied to and that I wasn’t one of them. It would take several more years to see that Christian ideals like grace, forgiveness, and humility are not tried because they begin with failure. And I had only begun to fail.
COMMENTS
One response to “Undercover Campus Crusade”
Leave a Reply
Thanks for sharing. Reminds me a bit of years after high school finding out every girl thought they were masquerading outsiders. Your appraisal of the effects of divorce is so important. Like that your ending is a beginning of sorts.