The Unitarian novelist, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., once wrote that America has created three great inventions:

The twelve steps are rooted in a meeting that occurred between two old friends back in 1934 when Bill Wilson received a phone call from an old friend named Ebby Thacher. Thacher told Wilson that he was in New York City and he would like to stop by and visit. Wilson was elated. He had always admired Thacher, a wealthy man who was always on the lookout for adventure. Because of Thacher's playful attitude toward life, people had not only thrown him out of bars and hotels, police had asked him not to return to certain cities.

When Wilson opened the door for Thacher, he knew something about him was different, but it took several minutes to understand what it was. Thacher was sober.

Ebby Thacher was in New York, and he was cold sober. Wilson poured Thacher a drink and pushed it across the table to his friend. Thacher refused it.

"Come on, what's this all about?" Wilson asked.

"I got religion," Thacher said with a smile.

Thacher explained that a man named Roland had rescued him from drinking. Roland was the son of a prominent Connecticut family. He had drunk his way through a fortune and in 1930 had wound up in Zurich, a patient of Carl Jung. For over a year he worked with the great psychoanalyst and had developed an intellectual understanding of the cause of his drinking. He left Zurich believing he could live a sober life. However, in a matter of weeks he was drunk again. When he returned to Zurich to see Jung, the doctor was frank. There was nothing more that medicine or psychiatry could do. When Roland pressed Jung, the doctor stated that he knew of only one hope: occasionally alcoholics had shown signs of recovery through religious conversion.

On leaving Jung the second time, Roland had joined a fundamentalist religious group called the Oxford Group led by a Lutheran minister. Just as Jung predicted, the religious community succeeded where psychoanalysis failed. The support of a small religious group of ex-drunks helped Roland to keep sober. With the evangelical zeal typical of a fundamentalist, Roland carried the message to Thacher, and now Thacher was passing it along to Wilson. The antidote for alcoholism, Thacher told Wilson, was not therapy but religion.

Over the next few days, Wilson began to experiment with the ideas of his friend Thacher. Wilson started attending the meetings of the Oxford Group in downtown New York City. Prayer and preaching filled the meetings. Afterward, a small group of the ex-drunks would go to Stewart's Cafeteria and talk. Wilson felt a special communion among the little group. Because they were all drunks, he knew immediately and instinctively that in the small group of four or five people, he could say anything to them. Around a little rear table, over mugs of coffee and too many cigarettes, they would talk for hours. They told one another the most horrendous accounts of their drinking, after which they would laugh unashamedly at and with each other. In this community, they could do something that none of them could do alone: stay sober.

In 1935, Bill Wilson left the Oxford group and took a trip to Akron, Ohio. A business deal that he was working on fell through, and he found himself alone in the Mayflower Hotel with $10 in his pocket. For a long time he paced in the lobby, walking back and forth in front of the door to the hotel's bar. As he paced, he saw a glass-enclosed sign in the lobby next to the pay telephones. It was a local church directory. He studied the names of the churches, the ministers, and the times of services. Then, choosing one minister at random, a Rev. Walter Tunks, Bill Wilson stepped into the booth and made a call. Rev. Tunks answered and Wilson began his story: he was an alcoholic from New York and to keep from drinking it was vital that he find another alcoholic to talk with. Tunks seemed to understand, and he gave Wilson the names of ten people. I find it interesting that this minister knew the names of ten people who were alcoholics.

The first nine phone calls got nowhere. A female voice answered the tenth call. After only a few sentences, the woman interrupted to tell Wilson that she understood perfectly and gave him instructions for getting to her home. The woman, Henrietta Seiberling, was not an alcoholic. However, she introduced Wilson to Dr. Robert Smith, a prominent Akron surgeon whose drinking had gotten so out of hand that none of his patients could trust him.

When Wilson met Smith, he explained immediately that he was not there to help Smith but to help himself. Bill Wilson needed to talk to someone who could understand his situation. He told his story, playing down the spiritual side. He described the obsession that had forced him to go on drinking. He talked about the progress of the illness of alcoholism and its obvious result: insanity or death.

They talked on for hours. Soon Smith opened up and was speaking as frankly, as unashamedly, as Wilson. When they parted after eleven o'clock at night, they knew something had radically changed in them both.

It was a turning point in Wilson's life. After admitting his deep need to share his problems with another drunk, he had not felt the slightest desire to preach or in any way judge the other man. With a sense of incredible freedom, he had felt the two of them growing closer, their talk becoming a mutual thing. Two drunks had found a new, loving communication.

Although it would be four more years before Alcoholics Anonymous would have an official name, Alcoholics Anonymous began that day in 1935 in Akron, Ohio.

Wilson and Smith, working together at first and then separately, visited hospitals. They tried to talk drunks into joining their small group. They broke ties from the Oxford Group and began to emphasize the value of persons openly talking about their own drinking, without judging or others judging them. The only requirement to join their group was a desire to stop drinking.

In two years, the group had about 100 members, mostly in Ohio and New York. To promote the growth of the group, Bill Wilson proposed that he write a book spelling out the principles of the organization. After much discussion the others gave him the go-ahead. Wilson would write during the day and bring what he had written to the evening meeting, where he would read it aloud, discuss it, and rewrite it.

The small group appeared about evenly divided among theists, atheists, and agnostics. The theists felt that since the movement had grown out of the Christian doctrine of the Oxford Group, they should say so in the book Wilson was writing; however, the agnostics and atheists argued for a strong ethical emphasis with no mention of God.

One night in December 1937, sixty years ago, Wilson brought the draft of chapter five to the group. In the chapter he had set out what he called The Twelve Steps. He had tried to break down the program into its components and identify its spiritual aspects. The first three described the central core of Alcoholics Anonymous philosophy.

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.

The steps stirred up a serious confrontation in the group. The theists were delighted; they liked the steps exactly as written. On the other hand, the higher-power language appalled the atheists and agnostics. Far too many references to God were in the document. They felt that it was all right for Wilson to talk a little about spirituality, but this was going too far. They argued that all the God talk would only scare drunks away.

The debate went on for weeks. Finally, the theists, the atheists, and the agnostics arrived at a two-part agreement.

First they agreed that they should always label their steps as a "Suggested Program of Recovery." None of the steps was to be a requirement for membership. Today, after sixty years, there is only one requirement for membership: the desire to stop drinking. Every person is their own judge about whether they meet this requirement.

Second, they agreed that whenever they used the word "God" in the steps, they would follow it by the phrase "as we understand Him." The atheists and the theists hoped that this would open the door wide enough so that all drunks could pass through, despite their belief or lack of belief in God. The theists hoped that this would force persons to come to terms with what they understood God to be. With this compromise, they approved the step. Today, an estimated 2,000 twelve-step meetings are held each week in the Washington area, and tens of thousands more across the world.

Over the 20 years of my ministry, when appropriate, I have encouraged individuals in the churches I serve to attend twelve-step programs. However, the same problem that Bill Wilson struggled with sixty years ago is still a problem today. The references to God are still a turn-off to some people, including some Unitarian Universalists.

One member of the first church I served told me:

Others agree with this position. Persons who want to stop drinking but who do not like the theology they find in AA have established three groups as alternatives.

• Quad-A is Alcoholic Anonymous for Atheists and Agnostics. Established in Chicago in 1974, Quad-A is aimed at people with a drinking problem who are disaffected by or uninterested in conventional notions of "God" or "Higher Power."
• Secular Sobriety was established in the Los Angeles area in the 1980s to offer a nonreligious approach to recovering alcoholics. It has spread across the United States.
• Rational Recovery was established in 1986. In Rational Recovery groups, leaders help people take stock of their problems with drinking. Leaders teach new group members a method for stopping drinking or drug use that does not refer to religion.

I was unable to find reliable data about how effective these approaches are or whether they are more or less effective in helping people to stop drinking. Of the three, only the literature of Rational Recovery makes me uncomfortable. I do not like their hostility to A.A. And I am skeptical of Rational Recovery's claim that a person can stop drinking without the long-term help of a support group.

Some who are active in AA will argue that a belief in God, a belief in a higher power, is essential for recovery from addiction.

Another member of AA said,

What is my own view? On the one hand, I believe that in trying to deal with a major stress in our lives--a stress such as stopping drinking--it helps most of us to be part of a community that shares a faith in a power higher than ourselves. My experience suggests that if people believe in a higher power, overcoming an addiction is often easier. We do not need to call this higher power God. We can call it "the creative force" or the "larger context" or the "relational web" or the "living, throbbing universe" or a "reverence for life." The name does not matter. Whatever we call it, some faith in a higher power helps most people to cope with major stress in our life, a stress like stopping drinking.

On the other hand, I don't think people must believe in God to overcome an addiction. Because I know committed atheists who have stopped drinking and stayed sober for many years. I don't agree that a belief in God is an essential element in overcoming an addiction.

I wish alternatives groups like Quad A and Secular Sobriety had existed all over the United States 20 years ago. Back then I was in my first church. I was trying to work with the people in my congregation with whose drinking I had a problem. They resisted going to AA because of its strong religious language. The atheist and agnostic alternative groups might have helped some people in my first congregation who were uncomfortable with the God-talk they heard in AA.

I think for example of the man who told me that "AA was a group of drunks who got religion." He died four years later, at the age of 42 of alcohol abuse. I think of the couple in that church who regularly smoked marijuana. They resisted my suggestion that they might want to look into a twelve-step program. Too much fundamentalist religion they told me. Ten years later their teenage son died in an auto accident while high on drugs.

Alcoholic Anonymous, Quad-A, Secular Sobriety, and Rational Recovery. Four approaches to dealing with the temptations of drug and alcohol abuse. If you need help in this important area, I strongly encourage you to try what feels right and, if it works, stick with it.

We enter the Christmas season, a time when the spirits of the season include an increase in the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Personally, I will drink very little in the way of alcoholic beverages, because drinking only a small amount of alcohol gives me a headache. However, if you do not have a problem with alcohol, I encourage you to enjoy yourself in moderation. Simultaneously, I also encourage you to remember that for some people, drinking alcohol would be like drinking poison. This time of year, especially, they need our support.

Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
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