No Prayers to ‘Higher Power’ : Non-Believers Organizing Secular Version of Alcoholics Anonymous

Uncomfortable with the pervasive religious character of Alcoholics Anonymous, a North Hollywood man has begun a secular version for non-believers who say they want to maintain their sobriety without turning their wills and lives over to a “Higher Power.”

The widely adopted Twelve Steps of AA calls for alcoholics to entrust themselves “to the care of God”--however he is understood, as AA puts it--be ready to have him remove “these defects of character,” and to seek through prayer and meditation “to improve our conscious contact with God.”

But after years of frustration within AA and hearing of Jewish alcoholics “who gritted their teeth when they said the Lord’s Prayer,” Jim Christopher of North Hollywood said that in late 1986 he began the first of three secular counterparts to AA in Los Angeles.

Numerous Inquiries

An article that Christopher wrote for Free Inquiry magazine last year led to inquiries from all 50 states from people who also want to start chapters. Now called Secular Organizations for Sobriety, the group this year launched an SOS Newsletter published by the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, a group related to Free Inquiry magazine in Buffalo, N.Y.

“No one disputes the great work of AA, but it doesn’t meet the needs of some people,” said Christopher, 45, who said he will celebrate 10 years of his sober life on April 24.

“We are a friendly alternative. Some of our members attend AA meetings as well,” he said.

Consistent with AA’s “Big Book” and other literature of the 55-year-old society, a staff worker in one of the Los Angeles offices described the AA program as “spiritual,” rather than “religious,” in that no denominational connections or dogmas are espoused.

In the society’s tradition of anonymity, no individual acts as a spokesman or identifies himself. AA literature is used to explain the organization’s policies.

AA writings freely acknowledge the problems that a non-believer has upon encountering the society’s principles of recovery, but they contend that the method has proven results. “The effectiveness of the whole AA program,” says one book, “will rest upon how well and earnestly we have tried to come to ‘a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”’

Prayer Called Voluntary

One brochure declares that AA is neither a religious society nor an evangelical movement, and that participation in the customary Lord’s Prayer at most meetings is voluntary. Some members reject the God concept and, if anything, think of the AA as the higher power, it says.

“The fact is,” the brochure continues, “that the spiritual perception of most members deepens the longer they are in AA and try to follow the Twelve Steps. Many professed agnostics and atheists have developed faiths born of personal experience of divine guidance.”

Christopher said that he only gradually voiced his objections to the spiritual underpinnings of the AA formula.

“I, like so many others in AA, felt intimidated, hesitant and terrified to challenge the group lest I lose my precious sobriety,” Christopher wrote in a book published this month by Prometheus Books, “How to Stay Sober: Recovery Without Religion.”

Christopher contended in his book that there is “powerful peer pressure since the group’s automatic reaction is to maintain its collective concepts, no matter how irrational these concepts may be in the light of reason.”

John Winner, a Los Angeles resident who joined an SOS group, said that when he entered a hospital for alcoholic rehabilitation he could not help but think that he was involved in some kind of religious cult.

“We began each day with a morning prayer from a book called ‘A Day at a Time,’ and at the day’s end we joined hands in a circle around lighted candles and recited the Lord’s Prayer,” Winner said. “When I raised my objections to the counselors and therapists, I was told not to question: I had to ‘surrender’ and ‘turn myself over’ to the ‘Higher Power.’ They said my thinking was getting in the way.”

Looking for an ongoing program after he left the hospital program, Winner said he found that virtually all hospitals, clinics and other programs of recovery are based on the Twelve Step program of AA.

The Los Angeles city attorney’s office notified Christopher’s Secular Organizations for Sobriety last November that it would refer people to his group when an individual ordered by the court to undergo an alcoholic recovery program objects to the religious basis of AA-type programs.

Some Upset Over Program

Deputy City Atty. Alana Bowman, coordinator of the domestic violence unit, said several people in West Los Angeles “came to me and were real upset” over the religious basis for the AA program.

The SOS groups meet Monday nights at North Hollywood Park’s Senior Annex, Wednesday nights at Glendale Family Services Center and Thursday nights in the organization’s office at 8535 Sunset Blvd. (The telephone is 818 980-8851.)

“We think there are as many as 40 or 50 groups starting around the country, but we will know better when we get responses from our national newsletter,” Christopher said.

Independently of Christopher’s efforts, Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner published his proposed non-theistic, “humanist alternative” to AA’s Twelve Steps in the July-August issue of Humanist magazine.

“Several people have told me . . . they have been offended by its heavily religious character,” wrote Skinner. Instead of turning one’s will over to God, Skinner’s alternative dozen steps looks for help from “fellow men and women, particularly those who have struggled with the same problem.”

According to one report, however, the AA formula for success has not met with objections in its initial use in the Soviet Union where atheism is promoted and alcoholism is a major problem.

Creating a Sober World, an offshoot of the San Francisco-based U.S.-U.S.S.R Peace Initiative, began making trips to the Soviet Union in 1986 to introduce AA-type programs to medical and psychological authorities with the approval of the Soviet Ministry of Health.

Paula Carlson, an assistant in the Chemical Dependency Recovery Center at the Medical Center of North Hollywood, made a trip there last year. “Psychologists there had no problem with the ‘Higher Power’ concept. They looked at it in terms of Justice or Peace,” Carlson said.