A "Friend of Bill W." Or Not?

Recently a thread was started in Fun Stuff,"Friends of Bill W." The person who started the discussion was celebrating "how great it is to be sane and sober" for 14 years and went on to invite others to discuss their sobriety. The second message posted stridently accused AA of being a cult and being affiliated with the United States Government. The next message included an article Alcoholics Anonymous...Of Course It's A Cult!

This essay goes into great detail about how and why AA can be seen as a cult. Given the evidence presented here and from speaking to many individuals who have had painful and disastrous experiences with 12 step programs, I can understand their feelings. Even as an active member of AA, I have some misgivings based on how the 12 steps are presented. The program one experiences is based solely on the individuals who deliver its message. If a fundamentalist Christian delivers the message in a fundamentalist Christian format, one would be hard pressed to believe AA is not a fundamentalist Christian organization. If one has a closed mind, that argument holds up given the fact the original program was based on the Oxford Group. (I will leave the history lesson to another article.)

It is my opinion that the founders took great pains to leave the higher power concept open to individual interpretation. Anywhere that God is mentioned the phrase "as we understood him" follows. In Narcotics Anonymous literature the idea of being an atheist and still needing the program to recover is addressed. Cliff Walker discusses this in Atheism in the Twelve-Step Movement. It has been my experience that the variety of "powers greater than" is extensive and limited only to the believers imagination. As alcoholics and addicts we have proven without a doubt that we have given our lives over to a power greater than ourselves. That power being the addiction. We need to get beyond that and find something else to believe in.

That is where the "suggestions" (a euphemism for "do this or die") given in meetings at a group level and individually from member to member come in to play. Many of these have come from the personal experience of what works for each member. Go to 90 meetings in 90 days, is one suggestion often given to newly sober individuals. A "newcomer" is urged to go to a lot of meetings and not drink in between. While this may drip of cultist behavior, it has been my experience that this gives an individual the opportunity to get sober on a day by day basis and hear the variety of experience that is offered at meetings.

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