25. AA's "Spiritual Angle" explained

Tom O'Connell

When Alcoholics Anonymous was formed in 1935, it didn't invent a set of new principles to live by. It simply adopted solid values that had already been in existence for thousands of years. But it adopted them in a way that made them acceptable to a group of drunks that included atheists and agnostics, as well as those who had been unhappy in their experiences with organized religions.

The key person in AA's "Spiritual Angle" was an Episcopal priest named Sam Shoemaker, a founder of the Oxford Group movement in the U.S. This Christian movement stressed the need for self-survey, confession, restitution, and giving oneself in service to others. And it strongly stressed meditation and prayer.

When AA's Twelve Steps of character development and spiritual growth were developed in the early years of AA, Sam Shoemaker provided guidance. In an article by Shoemaker in the October 1955 AA Grapevine he reviews the first few Steps. The First Step is an obvious one: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable." Who could quarrel with that?

The challenges came when the idea of "God" was discussed. And it was resolved by using the word "Power" in Step Two: "We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity." For the newcomer, this could even be stretched to mean the power of the AA group itself. But when the newly recovering drunks saw other people around them transformed, they gradually realized that they too were in the process of having a spiritual awakening and became less offended by the word "God."

In the Third Step the word "God" is finally used, but is carefully qualified by the words "as we understood Him." The full wording is: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him." This means that in AA nobody has to swallow anyone else's idea of God, and each person's beliefs are respected.

Shoemaker says, "For an outfit like AA to have become dogmatic would have been fatal." He goes on to explain that even though there was a realization among the founders of AA that alcoholics needed a transforming experience, "The problem was how to translate the spiritual experience into universal terms without letting it evaporate into mere ideals and generalities."

The Episcopal minister and AA's pioneers did a masterful job of resolving the issues and formulating a recovery process that would do the job for those willing to utilize mutual help and self-discipline to change their lives.

Rev. Shoemaker, in his article, calls the religious quest for truth an "experiment," and the AA "suggested" approach welcomes this way to arrive at truth. If you see others sobering up, and they're using a spiritual process to do it, then why not try it yourself and see if it works? Why not experiment? As Shoemaker says, "Enter wholly into the experiment...choose a hypothesis, act as if it were true, and see whether it is. If it's not, we can discard it. If it is, we are free to call the experiment a success." Since 1935, millions of AA members have tried the experiment and found it successful .

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