Pledge Court

Note: all names have been changed.

When I joined my fraternity, I swore to protect the secrets of the fraternity. I also promised that I would not discuss this event with even my pledge brothers. But silence is antithetical to recovery.

Part 1: Background

Our Statements of Faith were due the Sunday prior. In these documents, we summarized what we believed about various Christian topics. At that stage of my life, I was slowly moving away from the ideology I had been raised in. I began figuring out what dogma I wanted to keep and what I wanted to throw out and replace. So I allowed myself to freely express these issues in my Statement of Faith. I admitted that the Bible may not be a perfectly accurate text. I admitted that maybe it was possible to be a Christian and to have a boyfriend. I admitted that evolution might be true. I admitted that women should be able to hold leadership roles in the church. My hope was that the fraternity would recognize my thoughtfulness and my vulnerability and would support me as I teased out possibilities.

We knew that the event was called "Pledge Court". We knew that it was the only event we could not use an academic* for. We knew that it might take a while, and that there would be down time during the event. The event itself, however, was shrouded in mystery. So I was quite confused when, in the week or so prior to the event, several actives asked me, "Are you excited for Pledge Court?" I wasn't sure how I could have an opinion on the event. "Don't worry," they reassured me, "As long as you're honest, you'll be fine." What was that supposed to mean?

One requirement of pledging was the completion of interviews** with each active member. There were eighteen active members; by the time Pledge Court rolled around, at approximately the halfway point of the semester, I had completed fifteen of these eighteen interviews. Getting to know the actives was my favorite part of pledging. I could do without the Monday suits, the entertainments, the pledge book, and the forced pledge duties, but I was willing to overlook those minor grievances if it meant I could join the community. The pledge process wouldn't last forever.





*An "academic" was an excused absence. We were given three at the beginning of our semester.

**An "interview" was more or less an extensive getting-to-know-you chat.

Part 2: The Event

It was Thursday, March 8, 2012, at approximately 9:15 PM. Our pledge class was in the fraternity house basement--the "Pledge Cave"--awaiting guidance from our pledgemaster, Corey. He came down a few minutes later and escorted us to Room 11 in the back house. We learned that we would be taken into the front house one at a time and to wait until we were called. Mark, our pledge president, went first. The remaining four of us sat there working on our school assignments; I simultaneously chatted on Skype with my friend Michelle, who was studying abroad in New Zealand at the time.

After about half an hour, Corey returned and took Daniel with him. He did not say anything about the nature of the event or what had happened to Mark. Some time later, Corey came for Will; and after that, he came for me. It was about 11:30 PM. I had not planned to wait that long; I was hoping to be home by midnight so I could get enough sleep. I was working at a school time performance in the morning.

As I left with Corey, I carried my backpack and my laundry hamper. That was a perk of pledging--I avoided paying $4 to do my laundry in the dormitory laundry room. We entered the front house through the back door which led into the kitchen. All the lights in the house were off; Corey lit my path with a flashlight. As we neared the front room, he told me to leave my stuff just outside the door, next to the piano. After I set my backpack and hamper down, he led me into the front room, which was even darker since any light from outside had been blocked by the blinds. He lit my path to the center of the room. He instructed me to kneel on a pillow on the floor with the fraternity letters on it, which had clearly been adhered to the pillow with nothing more than fabric glue. Had I known how stained that pillow actually was, who knows if I would have kneeled on it.

He pointed his flashlight to a short table in front of me. On the table was an open Bible with an active-member pin sitting on the open page. "Keep your eyes on the pin at all times," he instructed me. I began gazing at it; he turned off his flashlight and walked back to the couches at the edge of the dark room.

It was hot in the room. Already I could feel the sweat beads starting to coagulate on my lower back.

"Pledge Max 'frizzle'*** Vale. This is your Pledge Court," Eric declared. Suddenly, a bright yellow light snapped on, pointed directly at my face from the underside. It took me by such a surprise, I struggled to keep my eyes fixated on the pin. In an instant I understood why it was called "Pledge Court". It was as if I was going to court, and my Statement of Faith was on trial. Eric read some additional instructions, ending with, "Do you understand these instructions?" to which I replied, "Yes."

"Frizzle. Name the most informative field trip you have been on, and three things that you learned while on this trip," Sam's voice said. It was completely lost on me that this question was not supposed to be serious. So I frantically scrambled to recall every single field trip I had ever been on, to select the one that was the most informative, and then to regurgitate three items that I learned. I knew I was pressed for time, so I responded by discussing Mrs. Moore's three-day High Sierras field trip from seventh grade. I think during my listing of the first thing I learned, I realized that the actives wouldn't be able to certify or disprove what I said regarding this field trip, so I made up the second and third things that I learned such that they would still sound believable.

It was only the first question, and I was already shaking out of fear.

Then shit got real.

Chris asked me if I believed the Bible could have bias. I responded, "Yes," citing the fact that in the Gospel of John, John does not let his readers forget the fact that Judas would later betray Jesus. Sean asked me to give an example of a controversial Bible passage that could be used to justify sin, alluding to a statement I had made in my Statement of Faith. I don't remember my response, but I completed my answer by asking, "Does that answer your question?" The room was silent. "...but there was no answer," I continued. I heard a muffled snicker.

I was asked why I added brackets to a passage on spiritual leadership when I quoted it in my Statement of Faith. This was to mitigate the inherent male bias in the text and to present the passage as gender-neutral, stemming from my belief that women could hold church leadership positions.

And so this continued. I don't remember how many questions I was asked, but each of them followed the same format: question, and then answer. No feedback. No discussion. No chance to offer clarification. I could not see my interrogators, but they could see me. I felt a large drop of sweat roll down my back as I realized that every eye in the room was on me. The only light on in the entire house was pointed directly at my face, and eighteen men encircled me, watching, listening to every word I said. Never before had the differentiation of "pledge" and "active" felt so staggeringly acute as it did then.

I had worked so hard to do right by the actives. Now here I was, unsure if they were condoning or condemning my answers. My guess now is that there was a little bit of both. Would they not activate me based on what I said?

After the questions, Cameron asked me to state "agree" or "disagree" in response to the subsequent statements that he read. They were statements along the lines of, "In most cases, abortion is immoral," or "Jesus is the only way to heaven," and the like. Many of these were issues that I continued to grapple with, so I answered "agnostic" for probably more than half of the statements, with no opportunity to explain what I meant.

Alex spoke. "This is your final question. No pledge since E. Harlan Fischer has ever been activated without first answering this question. Whom among the active body do you feel is the best mover with women?"

Immediately, no more than two feet behind me, a gong went off. Fight or flight. My heart skipped a beat. I was short of breath. Half a second later, the light snapped off. It took me a few seconds to recover from the shock, and then I remembered that I had been asked a question. I replayed it in my head, but the wording was just as confusing the second time around.

"...what?" I asked.

Alex repeated the question, slower. More seconds of silence.

"...what?" I asked.

He repeated it again, slower, with painstakingly clear enunciation. This was humiliating.

"I know what you said, I just don't know what it means."

"Interpret freely," was Cameron's only guidance.

I was dumbfounded. I wanted to give the right answer, especially because no pledge had been activated without answering that question. There was a lot at stake. But I couldn't give the right answer if I didn't know how to do it. So I refused to speak until someone gave me additional guidance.

"Anybody gonna give me a lifeline?" Silence. I was fed up.

"You can't just string words together and expect it to make sense," I asserted. I didn't care if they perceived me as having a bad attitude. I had assumed my reputation was already ruined based on the responses I had given up until that point anyway.

Finally, after several more seconds of silence, probably once the actives realized that I wasn't going to be the one to break the silence, Cameron translated the question as asking who the best ladies-man was. I frantically tried to think of a satisfactory answer. I could only think of Mike, my big brother, the only active member who was engaged. So I said, "Mike." As soon as I spoke, I feared that the active body would assume that I was clinging to him because he was my big brother. And again, there was no opportunity for me to explain my answer. Eric read some final instructions, and Corey asked me to come with him. I was tired, hot, sweaty, cranky, fearful, angry, flustered, and humiliated all at the same time. Had I failed Pledge Court? I had no idea.

I grabbed my backpack and laundry hamper and followed Corey upstairs to Room 8 on the third floor, where Mark, Daniel, and Will were waiting.





*** 'frizzle' was the abridged version of my pledge name. My full pledge name was 'frizzle, leader of informative field trips.'

Part 3: The Aftermath 

"So what did you think?" Mark asked me. "I hated it," I declared without a moment of hesitation. "Really?" both Mark and Daniel asked. Neither of them thought it was that bad.

We waited for another hour or so, until our last pledge brother, Neil, joined us. A few minutes after he did, Corey came back up. He gave no feedback whatsoever; he did not debrief with us. He simply said that we needed to meet with our big brothers before leaving that night.

It was 12:30 in the morning. And I still had to be at work at 9:00.

Nevertheless, I found Mike in his room. He asked me what I thought of the event; I told him I hated it. I told him how uncomfortable it made me feel to be the center of attention. I told him that I felt that the fraternity was passing judgment on my beliefs to determine if I was "worthy" enough to join. I told him that I felt extremely alienated from the active body. Mike told me that it was fairly obvious that I had a distaste for the event. Rather than trying to understand my perspective or even provide me with some rationale, he proceeded to tell me that I should have had a better attitude. He criticized my usage of the word "agnostic", claiming that it meant "without knowledge", implying that I had not thought about the issues. He also criticized my choice to insert brackets in the passage from the Bible on church leadership.

Mike began to tell me about "dings". "Dings" are infractions that could jeopardize one's activation. An active could assign a ding to a pledge for any reason at any time if he believed that the pledge was unfit to be an active member. If a pledge accrued two dings during his pledge semester, then he would not be activated.

And then Mike told me I had two dings after that night.

But then he followed that statement by saying that the Pledge Court dings were "not as serious"; they were simply used as a metric to gauge where a pledge stood with the active body at the halfway point. That night, the term "ding" was used unreasonably loosely. Actives were allowed to use dings if they merely had an issue that they wanted to discuss with a pledge.

Then don't call them "dings", I thought.

Mike told me that the dings were assigned anonymously. Whoever dinged me was supposed to reach out to me within 24 hours and set up a time to chat. Until then, I was in the dark about who had an issue with me and what they had an issue with.

Meanwhile, my anxiety went to work. I began to think that I was a failure as a pledge, and that I was unfit for the community. I began to catastrophize about what I said during Pledge Court. I suspected my dings came from what I said in Pledge Court because I had worked hard to be a good pledge. I reasoned that the actives had no basis to ding me other than Pledge Court or my Statement of Faith. This in turn reinforced my belief that the fraternity was passing judgment on my faith.

It was 1:30 AM. Mike steered the conversation toward some specific items in my Statement of Faith. We began to debate whether the Mosaic Law was relevant to Christians, namely concerning homosexuality. I incoherently struggled to defend my view that we were not under the Law; he fought back. Finally, I terminated the conversation, saying that I needed to go home and sleep.

As I carried my hamper toward my dorm room on the walk home, I texted Daniel, who lived on the same floor as me. "Being an active had better be worth all this shit. If not, then fuck AGO."

In our hall, I ran into him in the bathroom. He revealed that he had acquired one ding, and he was exceedingly upset.

I made the decision that for the next week, I would not be spending any time at the house other than the time that I was required to be there. The house was no longer a safe place for me. I feared the acquisition of more dings, because I was clearly doing something wrong.

The following day, I received a Facebook message from Brian. He revealed that he gave me one of my dings, and he said that he would like to meet up to discuss it. I did not return his message until he texted me the following Tuesday. He assigned me a ding because he wanted to ensure that I knew what community I was getting myself into, especially with regards to the majority view on homosexuality. I told him that there could have been better ways to have that conversation rather than dinging me.

Several more days went by. A second active never reached out to claim responsibility for dinging me. A week after Pledge Court, I told Sean that I was still in the dark about my second ding. He was shocked; he said, "That's really really bad." Sean texted the active who dinged me, and he claimed that he had told me. But I had no idea who it was or what the ding was for.

I still didn't know until the following Tuesday, when I again reached out to Sean, who suggested I contact Corey. Corey revealed that it was Mike who gave me my second ding.

How about that. My own big brother, the one intended to guide me and encourage me through the pledge process, was one of the people who made me feel like a failure as a pledge. And I still didn't know why he dinged me.

The next day, I asked Mike why he dinged me. He told me that he dinged me because he didn't like my attitude during Pledge Court, and that we had talked about it when we met up afterward. However, he never said the words "I gave you a ding." He was my big brother; of course I never assumed that he would be my opponent.

On the day of Pledge Court, I completed my fourteenth and fifteenth of eighteen required interviews. It would be another month--to the day--before I completed my sixteenth. Pledge Court drove me away from seeking deeper community.

Part 4: Distant Aftermath

The night that I was activated, our pledge class entered the Active Room for the first time. The gong sat behind one of the couches. An active hit the gong, and my heart began to race again. My body remembered that sound and once again put me in a fight-or-flight response. He asked our pledge class, "Do you guys remember this?"

How could I forget?

Brandon, an alumnus, asked the active, "Did you get some good reactions this semester?"

I was incredulous. The gong was a game that they played on the pledges. I guess they received some sadistic enjoyment out of startling pledges and seeing their reactions.