A.A.: America's Stealth Religion

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The Higher Power, in 12-step thinking, offers a salvation strength that allows a new life for those who truly seek it. In this, 12-step programs are very similar to mainstream faiths--just minus the houses of worship and the scripture. (There is also no professional clergy, but true-believing Program oldtimers are often referred to, more or less affectionately, as "bleeding deacons.")

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Like other religions, 12-steppism seeks to redeem troubled lives; requires penitence and confession; seeks to improve a person's ethics in dealing with others; encourages regular attendance at meetings that involve inspirational speeches, witnessing, and prayer; and has genuine and hypocritical adherents.

The stealth religion of 12-steppism may have become increasingly significant in the United States for two reasons. First, as religious formality has relaxed, people may have become more willing to have faith-related experiences wherever they may find them. The nondenominational wave really is for real. Millions of Americans are seeking God, or some kind of higher power, in circumstances that have nothing to do with formal denominational structures--often abandoning their birth religions in the process.

For many uncomfortable or unfamiliar with the official faiths of their upbringings, 12-step faith may provide the sense of caring, moral order, spirituality, and community that religion customarily provides, without the specific requirements of doctrine. It's no coincidence that the so-called "Next Church" movement, which offers a generic nondenominational Christianity with many modern touches but almost no theology, often invokes 12-step principles and almost always offers an array of recovery and counseling programs in conjunction with services. This phenomenon may be as significant as the populist "holiness movement" that swept the United States at the beginning of the 19th century, scorning all official denominations.

Secondly, the disorders that people in 12-step recovery are recovering from--alcoholism, addictions to drugs or sex or gambling or food--tend to be stigmatized as sins by organized religions. Twelve-step programs, following the medical model of alcoholism, view them as diseases. "You're not a bad person getting better; you're a sick person getting well," as an A.A. slogan puts it. Twelve-step programs hold out the balm of understanding and the promise of lack of judgment from others who have "been there."

Probably you can name Episcopalians, Jews, and Muslims whom you personally know. Try to make a mental count. Then realize the chances are that you know more 12-steppers than that, since the nation has more 12-step adherents than Episcopalians, Jews, and Muslims combined. You just don't know who they are, because they belong to America's stealth religion.