The Mystery of Odd Fellowship Secrecy

Regular meetings of Odd Fellow and Rebekah Lodges are open only to members of the Order. Companies only invite their stockholders to stockholder meetings. Corporation Boards of Directors hold private meetings. Non-profit organizations that do not administer public funds can limit the attendance at their meetings. All that is different about an Odd Fellows Lodge meeting is that people go through an initiation ceremony to become members and we use an antique mechanism for checking membership before the meeting comes to order.

Does this make Odd Fellowship a secret society? Some church officials think it does, and believe the secrecy covers sinister doings in the lodge room. In reality, what comes after presentation of the flag and the opening prayer, and before retirement of the colors and the closing prayer, is a business meeting. The details of the meeting are not secret, but are the private business of the lodge. The normal business of the lodge includes reports on members who are ill or in need of help or prayers. During the rest of the meeting, the members discuss community projects that they might support with labor or money, and lodge fund-raising activities, such as a special dinner to raise money for the family of a city policeman killed in the line of duty, or a "Strike Out Arthritis" bowling tournament, and so forth.

Odd Fellowship started as a mutual benefit society in Industrial Revolution England. Many of the members were travelling laborers. If they ran into difficulties while on the road, they could call on the nearest lodge for assistance. There needed to be a consistent way to identify lodge brothers, in the interests of protecting the lodge treasury from impostors. Literacy was not high, which limited the usefulness of a written dues receipt. There was also the question about how to prove that the person asking for help was the person named on the receipt. If the person asking for help could prove his membership in the proper manner, he was eligible for assistance from the local lodge.

When the Order came to the United States, the mechanisms for proving membership came with it. As the country grew, brothers wandered and called on local lodges along their way for assistance. When the telegraph became available, a telegraph code was devised that could be used to send an inquiry to the home lodge shown on the dues receipt, without publishing a brother's private business over the public communications medium.

These days, lodges get very few calls for financial assistance from wandering members. There are many ways to prove a person's identification as a member. So the mechanisms no longer serve their original purpose. They are retained as part of our traditions and heritage, not as a means to exclude the public.