Not-God (33 page)

Whether presented as “serenity” or as attained adult life, the sobriety-promised by Alcoholics Anonymous to its adherents was clearly
salvation
. As with “conversion,” the general popular fear — especially in the aftermath of the failure of national Prohibition — of reformed drunks as crusading, anti-booze zealots, and A.A.’s own wariness of religion, led the fellowship to abstain from the use of a term so culturally loaded with pejorative connotation as was “salvation” in mid-twentieth-century America. Yet “sobriety,” especially when it came to be distinguished from “merely dry” and expanded into “way of life,” was clearly the A.A. equivalent of classic religious salvation. And it was, classically, salvation or justification
by faith
.
²¹

But the program’s First Step faith affirmed belief not in the
fact of
salvation but in the
need for
it. Indeed,
the fact
of salvation was never witnessed to directly in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous; after the Second Step extended faith to the
possibility
of salvation, each succeeding Step testified to human rather than to divine activity. Subtly, however, at the beginning of the last of that list of “Steps,” an assumption appeared: the twofold activity of the Twelfth Step — “to carry this message” and “to practice these principles” —
assumed
“Having had a spiritual awakening.…” Salvation was
needed
, and from outside the self; salvation was
possible
, but by a Power greater than the self. At this point Alcoholics Anonymous borrowed a special sensitivity to human psychology, via William James, from earlier but different American expressions of religious insight. Indeed it had been from this very psychological sensitivity that Bill Wilson had learned the importance of the ancient religious insights. Salvation was required, in the classic religious understanding of a new life; and this salvation came from outside the self. But salvation was explicitly apprehended, laid hold of, made operative, by
human
activity.

The human activity mandated/suggested by the Third through the Eleventh Steps of the A.A. program best reveals the integrity within Alcoholics Anonymous of the Evangelical Pietist and the Humanistic Liberal religious insights. This activity is
human
, and it is
freely
engaged in by the A.A. member: thus Alcoholics Anonymous manifests the Humanistic and Liberal emphasis that marks it as a typically American religious phenomenon. But this human activity, freely engaged in, which leads to the salvation of sobriety, consists essentially in a continuing elaboration and amplification of the initial act of
surrender
. Thus, Alcoholics Anonymous remains true to its core Evangelical Pietist insight. According to this insight, which can be expressed in either religious or secular form, the human activity most fundamentally essential to the attainment of “salvation” is
accepting reality
.
⁺

What does “accepting reality” mean within the spiritual program of Alcoholics Anonymous? The explicit theism of Alcoholics Anonymous witnessed clearly that its founders believed that the fundamental reality was “God.” Over the first forty years of its history, most who approached Alcoholics Anonymous as “atheists or agnostic” in time came to believe in the reality of a personal divinity, usually in a Christian understanding. But not all. Especially fascinating to Dr. Tiebout as well as to Wilson was the success of Alcoholics Anonymous among Buddhists in southeast Asia. And among those “unconventional in belief,” more and more remained both sober and unconventional through the A.A. program and within the A.A. fellowship in later years.
²²

In some of A.A.’s more explicitly religiously inclined derivations, the confrontation with self by way of honesty about self with others that is outlined in Steps Four through Ten led to an understanding of the fundamental therapeutic dynamic of “The Answer to Addiction” as “devotion to truth.” At root, Alcoholics Anonymous presented a simultaneously very modern and very ancient religious perception. The embrace of not-God-ness led easily to the acknowledgments: “Accept reality, for reality affirms you;” “Be devoted to truth, and the truth will set you free.” Whether or not to capitalize “reality” or “truth” was left by A.A., with cautious strategic wisdom, to the individual believer.
²³

The program of Alcoholics Anonymous, especially in its first three Steps, thus deeply shared in and clearly reflected the Evangelically Pietist insight. The salvation of sobriety — the restoration of the sanity of appropriate contact with reality and truth — resulted from the active interest and free gift of a Higher Power. But A.A. also manifested more than a trace of a sense that at first glance might appear to highlight the Humanistic in its belief that human cooperation with the divine saving activity could be useful and was even necessary. In addition to “raising the bottom,” the fellowship attempted to “work up” a kind of individual revival in its insistence, to those having difficulty with its program, that they should “bring the body.” “Thirty meetings in thirty days” was its standard prescription for newcomers. This maxim asked for investment and commitment, but it also expressed a faith that if one brought the body, the mind would follow.

Another frequent injunction more explicitly pointed up both the humanistic tinge of A.A.’s faith in human nature and the specific source of this faith in the thought of William James. Practices such as attendance at meetings, the inventory Steps of its program, and asking for help even if one did not believe, were urged under the mandate: “Act yourself into a new way of thinking rather than trying to think yourself into a new way of acting.” The suggested sequence echoed the classically American understanding of the psychology of the emotions and of the impact of habit upon the will that had been articulated by James in 1884. Under this maxim as well as those earlier noted lay a perception that was at the same time both deeply American and profoundly Pietist. Expose yourself to “the truth,” and “the experience” will come! Participate in the external occurrence, and the spiritual experience will be added unto it!
²⁴

How its substantive faith in a salvation attained through a conversion rooted in surrender was daily realized and conveyed in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous further clarifies A.A.’s place in the history of religious ideas in America. Three facets of this living out merit attention: the mode of Word and Witness by which A.A.’s message was conveyed; and both the anti-professional bias and the style of anti-intellectualism implicit in this mode.

Alcoholics Anonymous transmitted its not-God core intuition exclusively by Word and Witness. The fellowship’s faith in the efficacy of the telling by stories about personal experience was rooted in its memory of Bill Wilson’s first call on Dr. Bob Smith. This faith in Word and Witness was also itself witnessed to by the “story section” of its hallowed book,
Alcoholics Anonymous
. Carrying the message by Word and Witness marked in the first place an acceptance and corollary of limited control. The core A.A. philosophy allowed no place for any attempt at the triumphal imposition of the salvation of sobriety. In the accumulated experience of Alcoholics Anonymous, fewer than one in five to whom “this message” was proclaimed responded by showing any willingness to attend even one A. A. meeting with a serious intention of getting and staying sober. A style of transmitting salvation better designed to drive home even the sober alcoholic’s limited control would be difficult to devise.
²⁵

Three further facets of the reliance upon Word and Witness still more sharply clarify the place of Alcoholics Anonymous in the history of American religious thought: its implication for the classic problem of mediation; the insight such reliance offers into the deeper significance of attendance at A.A. meetings; and the light it casts on Twelfth Step work.

A representative figure in
both
American Evangelicalism and the Liberal Era in Protestant Thought, Henry Ward Beecher, provides a clue to the first point. On 22 September 1861, this most popular preacher of that era delivered his considered thoughts on the essence of the Christian message, “Preaching Christ.” Within this sermon, Beecher moved quickly to his main point. Central to Christian preaching was the
“crucified Savior
, … the power [over the sinner’s] heart of a broken Christ”:

The preacher, to move his hearers, vividly recounted the effects of human sin upon the person of Christ. He pointed to Calvary and said, “This is what sin did to Him.” On Twelfth Step calls and at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, each speaker, to move his hearers, vividly recounted the effects of his alcoholic drinking upon himself— his degrading “bottom” of “weakness, and want, and imperfection, and guilt, and dreadful danger.” He pointed to himself and said, “This is what ‘booze’ did to me.” The witness to “resurrection” was as parallel and as profound.
²⁷

Any expression of religion that wrestles with the problem of the divine as both transcendently other and immanently saving has need of a “mediator,” a
proximate
“savior” to communicate salvation from divinity to humankind. The tendency of some to regard the A.A. program (so often referred to by speakers as “this God-given program”) as “the savior” lay behind much of the fellowship’s continued wariness of the Christian churches, albeit unconsciously.
²⁸

Obvious parallels to attendance at A.A. meetings and Twelfth Step work are church-going and missionary endeavor. The member of Alcoholics Anonymous “goes to meeting” for his or her own sake, for help, because of weakness rather than as any proclamation of goodness or strength. For all the fact of actual sobriety, the witness is primarily to fault and frailty rather than to any claimed righteousness. Some churches have tried to claim the same dynamic, to present church attendance as a confession of sinfulness and thus a testimony of depravity. Rarely have they succeeded in achieving this, nor likely can they, given the assumptions of American society about the “goodness” of church-going. The culture does not hear the confession, “I am a sinner,” as threatening or disgusting. It does so apprehend the admission, “I am an alcoholic.”
²⁹

The Alcoholics Anonymous parallel to missionary activity, “carrying this message to other alcoholics” in “Twelfth Step work,” is more complex — and more revealing. The individual A.A. member always remains acutely aware that “faith alone does not save him.” He has to act, to do something. He must
carry
his message to others.” Mere belief in right principle and sound tradition cannot make a Group a going concern.” The individual member and the A.A. group itself had to engage in missionary works of Word and Witness; but the efficacy of the works lay in their effect on the
worker
, rather than in any external result.
³⁰

By the dawn of the twentieth century, most American religion had been so infiltrated by the secular sense of progress that the heated debate and denominational in-fighting over missionary endeavor was carried on largely in terms of results. An earlier intuition had been lost. Formerly, there had been a sense that the main efficacy of Witness was to be found in its effect in the life of the one giving it, but by the 1890s a nation oriented to results and progress no longer tolerated nor even grasped this key facet of an earlier Evangelical witness. An important aspect of the pragmatism that evaluated according to results had been lost, and the pragmatic philosophy of those oriented to
doing
was itself stunted by such sole focus on results outside the do-er. Here, then, Alcoholics Anonymous blended its Pietist insight and its American intuition to proclaim by example a message singularly appropriate to its time: looking also to subjective results could richly enhance the overall appraisal of objective actions. Results within the one who acted were also
results
.
³¹

The A.A. program’s substantive insight was that “salvation” is attained through conversion and by surrender. The A.A. fellowship’s mode of conveying this insight was its style of Word and Witness. Both reflected the core idea of Alcoholics Anonymous that the acceptance of limitation begot wholeness. Two further characteristics, A.A.’s anti-professionalism and anti-intellectualism, can perhaps be appreciated only in this precise context, for they were corollaries of that core concept. Yet the anti-professionalism and anti-intellectualism of Alcoholics Anonymous are also important because they clarify the fellowship’s participation in the larger, respectable, intellectual history of ideas with which human beings have attempted to grapple with the meaning of human existence.
⁺

Although more ancient than such labeling may seem to imply, anti-professionalism and anti-intellectualism are characteristically both American and Pietist. These characteristics issue from a profound respect for individual human worth, but for this worth as
limited
. From such an understanding flows not only immense reverence for “the common man” and vast trust in “ordinary people” but also consequent wariness of any “expert” claim to be more than ordinary, to be less limited than the common man.
³²

The Eighth Tradition of Alcoholics Anonymous reads: “Alcoholics Anonymous should remain forever non-professional.…” The roots of “this hard but healthy doctrine,” beyond the Oxford Group practice and understanding that there was to be no charge for “soul-surgery,” lay in the 1937 experience of Bill Wilson with the attitudes of his New York alcoholics concerning the Towns Hospital job offer. “Sure,” one of them had said, “It’s ethical. But what we’ve got won’t run on ethics only: it has to be better.” The rejection of any personal profit from the carrying of so saving a message as Alcoholics Anonymous offers profoundly echoes the ancient Pietist rejection of “bought grace” as “cheap grace.”
³³