Blog

Spiritual, Not Religious Experience

© Bruce Rolff | 123RF.com
© Bruce Rolff | 123RF.com

The Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE) by William James had an important influence on Bill W. and Alcoholics Anonymous.  There is a free edition of VRE available here. Within VRE are several notions common to the A.A. sense of spiritual, not religious, experience. The first is the distinction between spiritual and religious. William James distinguished between institutional and personal within the broader field of religion. Worship, sacrifice, ritual, theology, ceremony, and ecclesiastical organization were the essentials of what he referred to as institutional religion. Limited to such a view, he said religion could be viewed as an external art of winning the favor of the gods.

James said that within the personal dimension of religion, the inner dispositions of human conscience, helplessness and incompleteness were of central importance. Here the external structures for winning divine favor took a secondary place to a heart-to-heart encounter between the individual and his maker. He proposed to confine himself, as much as possible within VRE, to discuss pure and simple personal religion.

If someone felt that the term religion should be reserved for the fully organized system of feeling, thought, and institution typically called the church, then James was willing to accept almost any name for what he called personal religion. He suggested two: conscience or morality. Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Step recovery have called it spirituality.

Personal religion/spirituality for his purposes was defined as “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 the 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 second notion from VRE important to A.A. was that 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 could 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.” There was something—a sense of reality or perhaps a feeling of objective presence—that was a deeper and more general perception of actuality than science supposed was possible with any of the particular human senses. This supreme reality was what Christianity called God.

According to James, humanity had an instinctive belief regarding this supreme reality of the universe that could be stated simply as: “God is real since he produces real effects.” Yet most religious/spiritual people spontaneously embraced a wider sphere than this immediate subjective religious episode. Based upon the perception of godly order in existence and the supreme good found in adjusting to that order, they took a further step of faith concerning God. James said religious people formulated a hypothesis that the existence of God was a guarantee that an ideal order would be permanently preserved, even beyond the probable destruction of this world. Only with this further step of faith, in which remote objective consequences were predicted, did religion become free of its immediate subjective experience.

The third place where James influenced AA’s understanding of spiritual experience was in his view of conversion. In VRE, James stated that in general terms, conversion signified the gradual or sudden process by which a person became unified and consciously right, superior, and happy as a result of a firmer hold upon religious/spiritual realities. To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain assurance, all referred to the same process.

Taken at face value, James equated religious or spiritual experience with conversion. Before this “conversion” process, the person was initially divided, consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy. This was true whether or not the person believed that a direct divine operation was needed to bring about such a moral transformation. After an extensive discussion of the psychology of conversion, James noted that as long as the religious life was spiritual, and not a consequence of outer works, ritual, or sacraments, the self-surrender element of conversion was always the vital turning point of the religious life. The Jamesean conversion and surrender process became formalized in the first three Steps of AA.

In 1949, Bill Wilson said that conversion, as broadly described by James, was the basic process of AA. Everything else was but the foundation to this process. He declared that by 1949, AA spoke little of its recovery process as a conversion because so many people were afraid of being God-bitten. Nonetheless, it was the basic process of AA. One alcoholic working with another could only consolidate that process of conversion, built upon a foundational faith in God as we understand Him. (William Wilson, “The Society of Alcoholics Anonymous,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 106 [Nov. 1949], 370-375)

This is the second 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.

About Anselm Ministries

Drawing its name from an eleventh century monk and theologian who had a profound impact on Christianity, Anselm Ministries is a church-based teaching organization whose purpose is to support the pastoral care of the local church. It seeks to help individuals grow in their faith and their understanding of how to live godly, Christ-centered lives.

Share This Post

X
Facebook
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Email
Print

Discussion

Charles Sigler

D.Phil., Licensed Counselor, Addiction & Recovery Specialist

Share This Post

Recent Posts

In June of 2023, Columbia University announced that a Phase 2a clinical trial, jointly led by Columbia and the French biopharmaceutical company Aelis Farma, found that AEF0117 “significantly reduced the effects of cannabis in daily cannabis smokers.” The lead author of the study thought the drug has “great potential” for

According to Bill Johnson, we are blind to the Kingdom of heaven until we fully repent: "You’ll never see the world that is right in front of you.”
What is the risk-benefit of prescribing high doses of stimulant medications to patients with a history of psychosis and other mental health issues?
The interventions into overdose deaths need to see their prevention attempts with MAT through the lens of a drug-centered model of drug action.

Favorite Posts

“The kingdom is the whole of God’s redeeming activity in Christ in this world; the church is the assembly of those who belong to Jesus Christ.”
There does seem to be a “fuzzy boundary” between Substance Abuse and Substance Dependence. Allen Frances suggests we simply ignore the DSM-5 change.
The bottom line is The Passion Translation (TPT) is not really a bible translation. Bible Gateway had good reasons to justify its removal.
The Niebuhrian version of the Serenity Prayer seems to have clearly come from Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1943 sermon.
If researchers and academic psychiatrists never believed the chemical imbalance theory of depression, why weren’t they as assertive challenging this urban legend?
Marijuana researchers like Stacie Gruber are concerned that “policy has outpaced science” when it comes to lawmakers making public health decisions about recreational and medical marijuana.

Related Posts

Search this Site