Cross and Crest: Why Black Greeks Don’t Have to Choose Between Jesus and Their Letters

By Rev. Terrance L. Thomas, Contributing Writer

If you have been following on social media, in particular Facebook, TikTok, and Threads, there’s a fresh wave of people renouncing and denouncing their Black Greek affiliation in the name of Jesus. These videos are replete with dramatic testimonies, tearful confessions, accusations of demonic possession, as well as long explanations about “idolatry” and “ungodly vows.” At first listen, it sounds like a spiritual awakening. But if you pay attention to the language, the cadence, the theology, the framework, it’s familiar. We’ve heard it before, just aimed at different targets. As we approach the midterm primary season, it seems old tactics have claimed the hearts and minds of new negroes.

It’s almost predictable at this point: every generation, a group of Black voices emerges telling us to abandon the institutions our ancestors built to protect us, lift us, and give us space to breathe in a world that never planned for our flourishing. Although the targets change, the pattern stays the same.

First, it was civil rights organizations. These voices claimed that the NAACP and Urban League were suddenly “outdated.” Then came the claims that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) supposedly created a “false reality” for Black students. Next, the Black Church was declared unbiblical, dead, or too political, and at the same time, when that wave hit, we were told to abandon hymns and gospel music for contemporary Christian music (CCM). Now we’re being told to renounce our Greek letters.

Different decade, same script. In each case, when you follow the threads, you keep finding the same fingerprints: white evangelical theology, white evangelical funding, white evangelical institutions shaping Black abandonment of Black institutions.

Notice when these renunciation waves surge: Kamala Harris runs for Vice President and becomes the first Black woman Vice President, proudly claiming her Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sisterhood and Howard University legacy on national stages. Jasmine Crockett becomes a rising political star, her Delta Sigma Theta (DST) connection visible and celebrated, and, prior to his death, John Lewis, a member of Phi Beta Sigma, left a lasting challenge for us to get into “Good Trouble.” Almost suddenly, social media fills with testimonies about how Greek life is demonic. The pattern repeats: Black political consciousness rises, Black institutions gain visibility and power, and voices emerge telling us to divest from those very institutions. It happened after the civil rights movement’s legislative victories. It happened after HBCUs produced Black Power activists. It happened after the Black church led voting rights campaigns. We see it’s happening now.

The Pattern Achebe Already Warned Us About

Chinua Achebe understood this dynamic. In Things Fall Apart, the missionaries didn’t destroy the Ibo by force alone. They began by welcoming those their society had wounded, the twins who were cast out, the rejected, the outliers. By embracing the wounded, they created the wedge that split the village. The colonizers didn’t have to destroy Umuofia from the outside. They convinced the Ibo to dismantle themselves. The wounds were real. The pain was real. But it was weaponized.

We need to say this plainly: Our institutions, Black Greek Life Organizations (BGLOs), HBCUs, civil rights organizations, and the Black Church have caused harm. There is no debate or denying this. Some pledging processes went too far, some churches covered up abuse, and some universities mismanaged resources. Those failures matter. All these pieces matter.

But white supremacy and its theological arm, white evangelical theology, have mastered the art of turning wounded people into tools for dismantling their own community. They validate the pain (something our institutions should have done), then resource the platform through white evangelical conferences, publishing houses like Destiny Image and Charisma House, and media outlets like Turner Broadcast Network (TBN). They provide a theological frame that transforms “this harmed me” into “this entire Black institution is unbiblical,” and wait as Black people do the rest.

But let’s be careful here, because not everyone on this train is responding to harm. Achebe also taught us that there are always some among us who will side with the colonizers if it means getting a leg up or receiving some material benefit. That’s more often the reality than people working through pain. Mike Todd wasn’t hurt by Kappa Alpha Psi, but it certainly improved his standing and visibility in white evangelical circles to denounce it. The renunciation became his passport to platforms, book deals, and credibility in spaces that reward Black people for distancing themselves from Black institutions.

Why BGLO Renouncing Sounds Familiar

Look closely at the arguments against BGLOs. The language, “secret societies,” “unholy vows,” “idolatry,” “demonic symbolism,” comes straight from white evangelical deliverance ministries and apologetics manuals. Books like Unmasking Freemasonry and Spiritual Warfare paint any organization with rituals, symbols, or oaths as demonic, conveniently ignoring that their own churches have baptismal vows, communion rituals, and membership covenants. The same frameworks used to condemn African cultural rites are now being applied to BGLOs.

The critique doesn’t come from our tradition. It’s imported. And the replacement? Always the same: Leave Black institutions, join white ones. Leave HBCUs for Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Leave the Black Church for multiethnic megachurches where the worship team is Black, but the leadership is white. Replace gospel music with CCM. Replace Greek life with white-led or white-founded campus ministries like Cru, InterVarsity, or Navigators.

What Scripture Actually Says About Idolatry

We need to talk about the Bible because that’s where most renunciation testimonies hang their hat. The most common Scripture cited in these testimonies is Matthew 5:33-37, where Jesus says, “Do not take an oath at all… Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be ‘no.'” But context matters. Jesus is addressing the Pharisees’ practice of swearing elaborate oaths to get out of commitments, using God’s name to manipulate and deceive. He’s calling for simple honesty, not forbidding every form of commitment or covenant. If Jesus meant no oaths ever, then marriage vows, baptismal vows, and church membership covenants would all be sin. The disciples themselves took vows of allegiance to Christ and to one another in community. Jesus isn’t condemning commitment; he’s condemning the use of God’s name to avoid keeping your word.

There’s also a deliberate obfuscation when critics conflate Greek-letter organizations with Greek gods. The connection is intentional and plays on people’s lack of knowledge about both. Using Greek letters for naming (Alpha, Kappa, Delta) doesn’t mean worshiping Zeus or Athena any more than naming your church “Trinity Church” means you worship a mathematical concept. Being in an organization with Greek letters does not equate to practicing ancient Greco-Roman paganism. It’s a naming convention rooted in academic tradition, not religious devotion. But the confusion is useful to those pushing renunciation, as it makes the unfamiliar sound demonic.

The First Commandment is clear: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). Not “you shall have no organizations,” not “you shall have no cultural identity,” not “you shall have no community commitments.” The command is about ultimate allegiance, what you worship as supreme, what you trust for salvation.

Isaiah and Jeremiah were not concerned about community guilds or family associations. The prophetic rage was reserved for something specific: trusting in empire rather than justice, bowing to power rather than covenant, making idols and calling them God.

Let me state the obvious: anything can become an idol if you allow it. Just like your job, church, political party, family, or even ministry, your fraternity or sorority cannot be an idol unless you make it one. But let’s be real, if the solution to possible idolatry were abandonment, we would have to leave every human institution. Including the local church.

The “secret society” panic is imported theology. It ignores that the early church itself had shared vows, rituals, meals, and commitments. They didn’t call that idolatry; they called it community. Somehow, Black Greek letters are demonic, but the Rotary Club is fine. Somehow, our rituals are idolatrous, but white business fraternities are neutral. Somehow our hymns are “of the flesh,” but Hillsong is “anointed.” Notice what never gets called idolatry: white evangelical patriotism, nationalism, capitalism. If we’re serious about idolatry, we need to name the real altars people bow to in this country, and they aren’t in Black Greek life.

Why BGLOs Exist and Why They Matter

Black Greek organizations weren’t created to replace faith. They were created because the world shut its doors in our faces. PWIs didn’t want us, professional networks wouldn’t accept us, and leadership tracks were closed to us. BGLOs were born out of the need of young Black people for spaces to grow, lead, organize, and survive.

These organizations built mentoring programs, scholarship funds, service initiatives, and community partnerships. They nurtured Black professionals across generations and created networks of care. They uplifted the race and the world at large. Those are not anti-Christian values. Those are kingdom values.

Can BGLOs fail? Yes. Can they hurt people? Yes. Should they be reformed? On some things, yes. But you cannot reform what you have abandoned, and you cannot heal harm by burning the house down.

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church knows this all too well. Richard Allen didn’t abandon Christianity when he was dragged off his knees at St. George’s. He built a new institution that held together African identity and Christian faith when others tried to split them apart. That is our tradition: We don’t flee our institutions. We transform them.

Who Benefits When We Leave?

This is the question we rarely ask. Who benefits when Black people leave Black institutions? Not us.

When we leave civil rights organizations, white-led advocacy groups fill the vacuum. When we leave HBCUs, PWIs collect the tuition. When we leave Black churches, evangelical megachurches absorb our gifts but not our voice. When we abandon our music, white worship industries grow richer. When we renounce Greek life, Black professional networks weaken. The pattern is clear: every time we’re convinced to leave a Black institution, we end up in white spaces, under white authority, generating resources for white organizations. We trade Black institutions that failed us imperfectly for white institutions that never intended to serve us at all. A people without institutions is a people without power.

A Warning and a Hope

If you need to step back from your organization for your own healing or calling, that’s your right. But when individual choices become movements, especially movements built on theology imported from spaces that have never centered Black liberation, funded and amplified by white evangelical machinery, we must ask who the movement ultimately serves.

In this denouncing phase, in all its forms, what is explicitly and implicitly being said is that those who fought for our liberation and freedom were and are demonic. It is saying that these institutions, their missions, and we who follow them are wrong. If we do not stand up and counter this narrative, then our enemy, both spiritual and natural, in the words of Achebe, will have “put a knife on the things that held us together,” and we will continue to fall apart.

The AME Church has always refused the false choice between Black identity and Christian faith. We hold them both. We honor both. We protect both. Richard Allen saw through the game of forced choosing in 1787. We can see through it now.

So keep your letters if they serve your call. Reform our institutions where they need reform and heal where you need healing. But don’t let anyone, especially not someone whose platform is funded by people who benefit from Black institutional weakness, convince you that God’s holiness requires you to dismantle what your ancestors built for your survival. The real danger isn’t Black Greek life, it’s letting someone else decide which parts of our culture are worthy. The real idolatry isn’t your Greek letters, it’s the theology that keeps trying to make you destroy your own institutions while leaving the empire’s altars untouched. Our story is not a story of abandonment; it is a story of resilience.

And we’re still standing.