being a Christian in a sorority

A recent con­vert told me she’s strug­gling with life in her soror­i­ty, so I asked anoth­er soror­i­ty gal I know to give her some advice.

Soror­i­ty gal emailed the recent con­vert and, with her per­mis­sion, I’ve anonymized it and present her email for your con­sid­er­a­tion. I’ve trimmed off the begin­ning because it’s impos­si­ble to anonymize with­out mak­ing it use­less (she iden­ti­fies a spe­cif­ic Chris­t­ian in the recip­i­en­t’s soror­i­ty for her to con­nect with), but the rest of her let­ter is more broad­ly applic­a­ble:

I think [your soror­i­ty and my soror­i­ty] may be dif­fer­ent in terms of their empha­sis on par­ty­ing and drink­ing, but I will def­i­nite­ly try to give you my two cents, and if you want to meet up at any point, let me know and I’d love to get togeth­er to talk and/or pray with you about it.

I have always felt very at home in [my soror­i­ty] as a Chris­t­ian. There are 10–15 Chris­t­ian girls in [my soror­i­ty], and many more who aren’t into get­ting drunk/hooking up. My big is a Chris­t­ian, as is my twin, and my twin’s lit­tle. I try to sur­round myself with these girls, rather than the partiers. I do still go out to the events where there is drink­ing, but I only drink mod­er­ate­ly (if at all) and still always have a great time. Do you have a group of girls like this in [your soror­i­ty]? Are there oth­er Chris­tians in [your soror­i­ty] you can team up with?

Anoth­er thing that helped me ensure that there are enough events that don’t cen­ter around drinking/partying was get­ting involved on the sis­ter­hood com­mit­tee. If you guys have a com­mit­tee like that, I would encour­age you to get involved and make sure those kinds of events are hap­pen­ing.

If you are feel­ing like [your soror­i­ty] is a place where you can’t be your­self or where you are encour­aged to make poor deci­sions, deac­ti­vat­ing might be the right choice for you. My biggest advice to you would be to pray about it and go with your gut. I do think there is room to be a Chris­t­ian in Greek life, but I also think it varies a lot depend­ing on the frat/sorority. Many of my clos­est friends aren’t Chris­t­ian, and I think this can def­i­nite­ly make it more dif­fi­cult to do the right thing at times. But, I think that as long as you have that Chris­t­ian com­mu­ni­ty some­where, you can make it work.

I feel like I haven’t done a very good job giv­ing you advice here, so please let me know if you want to talk about it over cof­fee or some­thing!

I think that, on the whole, it is pret­ty good advice. What would you have said?