Tag Archives: religious

11/8/22

Is AA Religious?

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Roger C. announced in June of 2022 that his article, “The Last Post on AA Agnostica,” would be the final new article posted on the website. AA Agnostica would remain online, but there will be no more new articles. He said in the eleven years since it was launched, AA Agnostica has been a comfort for those who could not stand “all the God stuff at traditional AA meetings,” like ending with the Lord’s Prayer. “All the God stuff” makes AA religious.

Roger said he was treated with disrespect at traditional AA meetings because he didn’t believe in God and was told that without God, he would get drunk again. While that prediction did not come true, it seemed to motivate him to start the website, AA Agnostica. There are several resources in addition to its 746 other articles, including a listing of secular group websites, alternative 12 Steps and literature. There is also a link to a 2015 self-published book edited by Roger, Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA (available on Amazon). It contains thirty stories by people who do not believe that “an interventionist deity—a God—had anything at all to do with their recovery from alcoholism.”

In the first chapter of Do Tell! Stories by Atheists and Agnostics in AA, “Reshaping the AA Culture,” Roger C. pointed out that the fellowship and the book from which it gleans its name, Alcoholics Anonymous, was “mired” in the predominantly American Christian culture of the Thirties and Forties. He described how God was mentioned (in one way or another) in six of the 12 Steps. A section from “How It Works,” chapter five of the Big Book, is typically read at the beginning of an AA meeting. The reading says that “probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism” but the God could and would do so “if He were sought.” A so-called “traditional” AA meeting ends by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

The point he’s attempting to make is that despite various judicial decisions have found AA to be a religious organization, AA has failed to respond because it sees the rulings as “outside issues,” which he believes is incorrect. See “The Courts, AA and Religion” on the AA Agnostica website for the rulings.

He believes this is an “inside issue” that needs to be addressed by AA. However, Roger C. does not think the Big Book should be revised or rewritten. “It lays the foundation for what does work for alcoholics: the very human power of one alcoholic talking to another alcoholic.” This, he said, is what assists alcoholics in working towards “recovery from alcoholism and is the very essence of the fellowship of AA.”

It is true that U.S. Courts have ruled that AA is a “religion.” However, I think these rulings and Roger C.’s claim it is an “inside” issue to AA are based on an understanding of what constitutes a religion in modern culture that is different than what AA itself believes. Pointing to references to “God,” and saying the Lord’s Prayer as evidence that AA is religious stems from Edmund Tylor’s definition of religion as “the belief in spiritual beings.” AA seems to follow Emile Durkheim, who thought religion was a product of society and should not be defined just in terms of ideas of divinity or spiritual beings. AA also explicitly credits how its sense of religion and spirituality is drawn from William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience.

In “What Does Religious Mean?” I discussed how Tylor’s understanding seems to have influenced the legal decisions within American culture and the U.S. court system. Then I continued to unpack how William James influenced the spiritual, not religious understanding within AA in “Spiritual, not Religious Experience” and “The God of the Preachers.” I agree with AA that the Court decisions ruling that AA is religious is an outside, rather than an inside issue to the fellowship.

Some Christians, like Martin and Deidre Bobgan in 12 Steps to Destruction, make the same error, viewing AA as religious. They claim A.A. is a Christless religion, offering up a counterfeit salvation. “Because of the many versions of God represented in A.A., professing Christians are uniting themselves with a spiritual harlot when they join A.A.” In The Useful Lie, William Playfair claimed when Christians go to AA for help, they unwittingly side against Biblical Christianity.

In “Religious Alcoholics; Anonymous Spirituality,” I suggested a more helpful discussion would distinguish between true religion and mere religion; true spirituality and mere spirituality. Mere religion or mere spirituality are concepts consistent with Durkheim’s and James’ understanding of religion and spirituality (called personal religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, VRE).

The emptiness of ritual or worship (mere religion) without a heart for God (true spirituality) is noted in Hosea 6:6, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Again, the same contrast appears in Micah 6:7-8, “For You will not delight in sacrifice or I would bring it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” True religion always contains true spirituality.

At its best, Twelve Step spirituality rises only to the level of general revelation or common grace. There is a God and sobriety is better than drunkenness. True spirituality requires that we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our heart that God raised Him from the dead (Rom. 10:9). True spirituality requires true religion. In his book, “True Spirituality,” Francis Schaeffer rejected the possibility of true spirituality devoid of biblical content. There cannot be a leap-in-the-dark faith for a Christian; there is no “faith in faith” encounter with the divine.

Twelve Step spirituality is nothing more than common grace or mere spirituality. Following the thought of William James in VRE, it rejects institutional religion, which he defined worship, sacrifice, ritual, theology, ceremony and ecclesiastical organization. Personal religion/spirituality for his purposes, was “the feelings, acts and experiences of [the] individual . . . in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider to be divine.” In the broadest sense possible, this spirituality consisted of the belief that there was an unseen order to existence, and supreme good lay in harmoniously adjusting to that order.

A higher power could be anything that was other than and larger than the person’s conscious self. Towards that end, James said that spiritual experience could only testify unequivocally to two things: the possible union with something larger than oneself and the great peace that was found within that union. Spiritual encounters would not unconditionally confirm a traditional belief in the one and only infinite God. James suggested that the practical needs and occasions of religion were sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each person, a larger power existed that was friendly to him and his ideals. All that was required was that the power should be both other than and larger than a personal conscious self. “Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite; it need not be solitary. It might conceivably be only a larger and more godlike self.”

A.A. has consistently avoided an understanding of this higher power as G-O-D (as good, orderly direction) beyond the above discussion of William James in the Varieties of Religious Experience. Devoid of a true religious understanding of God and Jesus Christ, as we see in Romans 10:9, it is not a religion, as defined in the VRE. It won’t lead you to a relationship with Christ, but if you practice its 12 Steps, it may help you establish and maintain abstinence from alcohol.

09/6/22

What Does Religious Mean?

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© kuco | 123RF.com

As Terence Gorski has pointed out, A.A. is now legally a “religion” within the US. But I don’t think this really settles the dispute over whether A.A. is or is not religious. Legal rulings can be changed, as they have for many issues such as abortion and marriage. So I’d suggest that A.A. as a “religion” is based upon a particular sense of what “religious” means in modern culture and that could change.  There is at least one other view of religion that would not consider A.A. to be religious.

It seems that there two main starting points to define what being “religious” means in modern culture.  One follows Edmund Tylor and focuses on the belief in the supernatural, while the other emphasizes Emile Durkheim’s notion of the sacred and the profane. Within American culture, Tylor’s understanding seems to have influenced legal decisions on constitutional issues of the separation of church and state as well as legal rulings on the religiousness of A.A. At this point in time, Tylor’s sense of religion rules the day.

Tylor (1832-1917) simply defined religion as “the belief in spiritual beings” and held that this belief existed in all known cultures. He suggested that a belief in spirits and deities grew out of a belief in souls, which itself was a result of attempting to explain phenomena such as dreams, trances, visions and death. An evolving understanding of religious belief, Tylor’s theory said that all religions were based on animism, which had two parts: belief in a human soul that survived bodily death and belief in other spirits or deities. Animism led to fetishism, the veneration of animals, idols trees and so forth.

This belief was extended to the veneration of spirits and gods which were less attached to objects; leading to the concepts of gods, demons, spirits, devils, ghosts, fairies and angels. The next stage was the association of gods with good and evil, leading to belief in very powerful deities. Another pathway to these powerful gods was to seek after “first causes” for reality. The attribution of good and evil or first cause to the idea of gods and spirits then led to the concept of a Supreme Being. “Animism has its distinct and consistent outcome, and Polytheism its distinct and consistent completion, in the doctrine of a Supreme Deity.”

This seems to have built on the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach, who wrote The Essence of Christianity in 1841. Feuerbach argued against both the divinity of Christ and the existence of God, stating that all theology could be resolved into anthropology—with God as the projected essence of Humanity. What ranked second in religion, namely humanity, must be recognized as first:

If the nature of Man is man’s Highest Being, if to be human is his highest existence, then man’s love for Man must in practice become the first and highest law. Homo homini Deus est— man’s God is Man. This is the highest law of ethics. This is the turning point of history.

Tylor’s ‘evolving’ understanding of religion was similar to that of Carl Jung. Jung saw Western religions as unsophisticated. He said there were five main stages in the evolution of the idea of God.

First was the animistic view, where Nature was ruled by an assortment of gods and demons. Second was the Greco-Roman polytheistic notion of a father of Gods ruling in a strict hierarchy. The third stage idea was that God shared human fate, but was betrayed, died and then resurrected. The fourth stage held that God became Man in the flesh and was identified with the idea of the Supreme Good. Christianity conflated the third and fourth stages, according to Jung.

“The fifth and highest stage of belief in God is when the entire world is understood as a projected psychic structure and the only God is the ‘God within’ or the ‘God-image.’” (Frank McLynn Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography, 409-410) The God-image was a special reflection of the Self, the penultimate archetype of the collective unconscious in Jung’s psychology. This Self was not the ‘self’ of everyday language, which Jung typically referred to as the ‘ego.’ Frank McLynn suggested that Jung’s Self was roughly equivalent to the ‘Atman’ of Buddhism.

On the other hand, Emile Durkheim said in The Elementary Form of the Religious Life, (EFRL) that religion was a product of society and not always supernaturally inspired. So religion should not be defined just in terms of the ideas of divinity or spiritual beings: “Religion is more than the idea of gods or spirits, and consequently cannot be defined exclusively in relation to these latter.” (EFRL, p. 35) As a category, Durkheim said the supernatural only made sense when opposed to a modern scientific explanation for natural phenomena. He pointed out that for most of the world’s peoples, including premodern Europeans, religious phenomena were viewed as perfectly natural. For Durkheim, the division into “sacred” and “profane” was a necessary precondition for religious belief:

All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred. This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought. (EFRL, p. 37)

Durkheim believed that a belief in the supernatural was not necessary or even common among religions. However, the separation of different aspects of life into the two categories of sacred and profane was common. Objects and behaviors seen as sacred were considered to be part of the spiritual or religious realm. Sacred things for Durkheim were not limited to just gods or spirits. Anything and everything could be sacred: rocks, trees, a spring, a piece of wood, a house. Sacred objects were as varied as the diversity of religions. “Sacred things are simply collective ideals that have fixed themselves on material objects.” Profane things were everything else in the world that did not have a religious function or hold a religious meaning.

There was a radical separation between the sacred and profane, so that the two could not approach each and still retain their essence. The sacred was not the profane and the profane was not sacred; they were “more or less incompatible with each other.” (EFRL, p. 40) And yet, they interact with one another and depend upon each other for survival.

Durkheim believed that religious belief was built upon this fundamental distinction. When a number of sacred things were organized within a belief system that can be distinguished from other similar types of systems, “the totality of these beliefs and their corresponding rites constitutes a religion.” (EFRL, p. 41)

There were two essential criteria for religious belief, according to Durkheim. First, there was a division of the entire universe into the sacred and the profane; which embraced all that exists, but which radically excluded each other. Second, religions formed a Church: “In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.”

So then Durkheim defined religion as: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” (EFRL, p. 47)

The spiritual, religious distinction made by William James and embedded in Twelve Step spirituality, seems to be the most widely accepted sense of generic spirituality in American culture today. It embraces Durkheim’s thought on religion and rejects Tylor’s understanding. It does this by self-consciously refusing to formulate a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things and also accepts the naturalness of believing in some type of transcendence. The very heart of Twelve Step spirituality is the permissibility of the individual to formulate a personal understanding of their “god.” So what unites members of Twelve Step groups like A.A. is the diversity of religious and spiritual belief permitted—even to the acceptance of the lack of such a belief.

This is the first of three related articles (What Does Religious Mean?, Spiritual not Religious Experience, The God of the Preachers) that will more fully describe some of the influences I believe helped to shape the spiritual, but not religious distinction of 12 Step recovery.

Originally published on May 22, 2015.