An Agnostic and Mainstream AA

By Brendan O’K

“All people must necessarily rally to the call of their own particular convictions and we of AA are no exception,” said Bill Wilson. One of my strong convictions is agnosticism, the belief that nobody knows or can know of the existence or nature of God. So I lack the religious faith that so many people told me was essential to thrive in AA. But after 15 years I’m still involved in our movement: I go to two or three meetings a week (five in the Zoom/Covid period) and am a volunteer for the AA telephone helpline in London.

Although I’ve lived in London for many years, I grew up mostly in Liverpool in the northwest of England, a city unusual for its high number of Catholics – many, like me, of Irish descent. I was an altar boy, a choirboy at the Catholic cathedral and around the age of 17 was being considered by my Jesuit educators as a potential priest. I had what I thought was a deep faith and I sincerely thought (agonised) about being a priest. But my faith turned out to be brittle and just an adolescent passion – maybe I read too many books (Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov was a big influence) – and by the time I was 18, 19 I had lost any interest in religion.

I mention this part of my background to show that my attitude to religion isn’t one of “contempt prior to investigation” as the Big Book says of some people – in fact, I know well the religious impulses and feelings, having once experienced them. Incidentally I think people who lapse from their faith often throw themselves into political activism of various kinds to replace what they sense they’ve lost, but that’s not for me.

At university in Manchester, I started drinking regularly. At first it was normal, social drinking, based on parties, girls, friends, the usual things for young men. In my 30s I became more melancholy after various heartbreaks with women and started drinking heavily, often alone. By the time I was 44 I was drinking mechanically, like a robot, and it was now an empty experience. That included my last day of heavy drinking, which was, on the surface, spectacular.

I was staying with friends in New York and on July 4th, 2005, Independence Day, I went to watch baseball in the Bronx for over four hours (of steady drinking), then headed to Battery Park in Manhattan to see James Brown perform, followed by two parties in Brooklyn where I consumed four bottles of red wine, topped off by sleeping with a married woman. The following day, hungover and remorseful, I bought some books including a novel called Dry, by Augusten Burroughs, about a man who is forced to go to AA, hates it, then gradually likes it as he experiences the benefits of sobriety. I read this on the plane back to London a few days later and it planted a seed.

A few weeks on, with all the elation of drinking gone, I turned to AA in desperation. On the one hand, I had misgivings about the religious nature of most people in the programme (this is the nature of AA even in a huge, otherwise largely secular city like London.) This was in stark contrast to my non-AA life, where almost everyone I knew had grown up secular or was a lapsed Jew, Muslim, Anglican or Catholic like me. But on the other hand, after a single meeting I completely lost the desire to drink, and I decided to keep coming back. I will always be grateful to AA for changing my life for the better.

I took on commitments and got a sponsor. I was enthusiastic. But I was always aware of most people’s casual assumption that there is a god, and found it hard to adopt a belief in a higher power helping me towards sobriety. Like many in this position, I settled upon AA itself as my higher power – I mean the members who had empathy with me and who were helping me. After five or six years of this, having done the 12 Steps and become a sponsor for people (who were mostly agnostics and atheists), I realised I was mostly enduring the religiosity of our movement and wasn’t always getting what I needed to thrive. I was too often sitting silently at the back of the room, trying to tolerate what was – to me and a minority of other AA members – sometimes nonsense. I felt present but not involved, like the lapsed Catholic I am who goes to mass once a year with his dad at Christmas but who doesn’t take communion.

I think being in AA should include having a strategy for sharing my own ‘strength, hope and experience’ in meetings, even when the topic being discussed is God. It isn’t productive to angrily challenge what is being said by others in the meeting, and yet there is more to our sobriety and more to Alcoholics Anonymous than merely learning how to blend in. Some of you may know the despair that can accompany having to choose between pretending to fit in and being ostracised by the people around you.

So, with a friend, I revived the mini-tradition in London of meetings for agnostics, atheists and ‘freethinkers’ by setting up meetings for such people in north and east London. They are still flourishing and new ones which are nothing to do with me have also now formed in different parts of the city. In 2018 the General Service Conference of AA in North America voted to adopt the British conference-approved pamphlet, “The God Word: Agnostics & Atheists in AA.” It was translated into French and Spanish from the original English. I’m proud to say this pamphlet, which is now eligible for AA meetings all over the world, was largely the work of the small group I helped to set  up in Islington, north London on Thursday nights. We lobbied AA for a few years about it and eventually won.

In our meeting formats and in our general tone we try to be accepting, encouraging and supportive of anyone looking for a solution to their alcoholism irrespective of what they believe or don’t believe. There is no shortage of newcomers coming to our meetings.

But I also attend ‘mainstream’ meetings, where most people seem to believe in a god. Some are dogmatic about this (a minority – there are also, of course, dogmatic atheists who won’t engage in a dialogue with those who don’t share their views), but most people are friendly to me and accept that I’m secular. Occasionally I’m told point-blank by a religious fundamentalist that if I don’t find God as my higher power I’ll eventually get drunk. I just graciously decline their offer to help me. I’m strong and secure in my agnosticism and will not be marginalised. They have their opinion, I have mine, there’s no need for me to respond angrily. I sometimes point out that the AA headquarters in England (in York) completely accepts the legitimacy of the secular meetings we have set up. I’m strong and secure in my agnosticism. Nobody is going to marginalise me. We’re all in this together, all recovering alcoholics who face similar daily challenges of living a sober way of life.

Frankly, for 15 years I’ve seen AA sometimes – often – being ineffective even for those who strongly believe in a traditional god. This is probably due to the large amount of mystification that usually comes with AA’s message. The difficult parts of our process of sobriety, such as the unruly will, the unmanageable life, the dilemma of our powerlessness and our residual character defects are just ‘turned over’ to a supposedly loving god (a god who it seems chooses to make some alcoholics sober and leave others to carry on drinking ruinously.)

I thoroughly accepted Step 1, I surrendered. This broke the vicious cycle that happened when my own ideas about correcting a bad situation only made things worse. But ultimately, even believers need a more precise understanding of the solution than “Let go and let God.”

AA, I suggest, can sometimes benefit from greater clarity regarding down-to-earth strategies. For many, belief in God is a catalyst in a process that makes sobriety possible, but the process itself is all about tapping into “human power.”

Viewing AA’s solution as “God doing for us what we could not do for ourselves” is to accept magical thinking. I can’t accept it (not in an arrogant way, I hope. ) More relevant to me is the empathy one gets at AA meetings, the actions taken under the 12 Steps, the social co-operation. This is all the work of “human power,’ ordinary people. It has nothing to do with a supernatural entity. All the resources necessary for sobriety are already in the possession of men and women.

If for you God is the answer to helping you get sober, that’s fine by me, and in fact none of my business anyway. But for me and for so many others the most important and salient assets AA has are in-depth identification, a sense of community, pragmatic wisdom about addiction, and sometimes just having something to do something that doesn’t involve using alcohol or drugs.

I’m not really interested in religion, I’m not even that interested in ‘spirituality’ – I don’t really know what that word means, I never have, even when I was a teenage Catholic. I just want to keep up this sober life which most of the time gives me peace of mind. I’m in AA for the same reason as you are, whether or not you have religion.

I hope a time will come when non-believers aren’t a sub-group that is grudgingly tolerated but instead are regarded as people who show AA is more concerned about being properly effective than about preserving AA orthodoxy.

The best way to make people realise that us non-believers aren’t working against AA or practising Satanic animal sacrifices at night is to share a positive message of recovery that everyone can relate to; to share one’s experience, strength and hope in a manner that invites an empathetic understanding of how atheists and agnostics experience AA; to form friendships where you can, focusing on similarities and responding to differences graciously; to always assume that there is someone in the meeting who needs to hear that they are not the only one who feels the way they do; to do service at meeting level and perhaps beyond; reach out to newcomers of the same gender, simply reassuring them they’re not alone; embody an attractive version of recovery, remembering the phrase ‘attraction, not promotion.’ Use humour, if you’re good at that. This puts people at ease, especially self-deprecating humour.

Finally, let’s suppose the word ‘spirituality’ is meaningful. I discovered that my addiction wasn’t a by-product of alcohol abuse, it was ‘a false filling-up of spiritual emptiness.’ It was ‘a set of protective repetitions designed to eliminate difficult feelings and choices.’ (I’m quoting a writer friend of mine who wrote a very good book about heroin and alcohol addition.) My friend continues: “If it is a disease of More, then at last I am Enough. I’ve stopped taking life so personally. I’m not so plagued by shame and self-hate.’ What he really wanted in his years of drugging and drinking, he now realises – and I realise too – was connection and love. I’ve had those two things in AA, with both non-believers and religionists. I hope you get some too.


Brendan O’K is 59 and has been sober since July 23rd, 2005. As an agnostic, he found the Steps difficult to accept at times but did them with a sponsor all the same. Having adopted a more open-minded stance to things he disagreed with, he now felt able to get involved in establishing meetings for other agnostics, atheists and freethinkers in London, having seen many newcomers give up because of the programme’s religiosity. Once these meetings were up and running and providing support for fellow sceptics, he found he had got his resentments against AA off his chest and took part in both mainstream and secular meetings. Brendan wants to put back something of what was freely given to him by AA.


 

24 Responses

  1. Pat N says:

    Thanks, Brendan, for an eloquent “easy does it” essay. I’ve gotten to enjoy one secular meeting in London (Angel area?), and I’m glad to hear there are more there now. I don’t think the UK is is as dire a need for secular meetings, since I don’t hear as much religiosity expressed there as I do in the States. Is there a national organization for secular meetings in the UK as there is here? Maybe you could write more about that sometime.

    Thanks again.

    • Brendan says:

      Thanks, Pat. Yeah, it’s the Angel meetings I was referring to. I’m not aware of any UK national organisation for agnostics, maybe someone should get round to that.

    • Laurie says:

      Great – yes connection & love. Many thanks both Brendans!

      Laurie

  2. Bob K. says:

    I much enjoyed this well-crafted essay.

    About a dozen years ago, Cokehead Steve put me onto some fabulous new translations of the biggies of Russian literature. It amazed me that “The Brothers Karamazov” is full of AA slogans and AA philosophy. Many of AA’s best ideas have secular philosophical wisdom lying beneath the religious language. Dostoevsky’s novel predates AA by several decades.

    Bill Wilson was not wrong that 12-Step thinking represents “the wisdom of the ages.” Some of that insight is purely secular.

    More and more do I appreciate the adage “Take what you want, and leave the rest.” I needed to find more than a strategy to stop drinking.

  3. Archer Voxx says:

    Great article….The robotic drinking was the same for me. There is science behind it. At one point your brain reclassifies what you are doing as “reptilian” behavior. In a sense, it is integrated into your system (brain/physically) like air, water, and food. It is not like you lose decision making over it – it is just that it does not require any decision making. You do it as a part of normal functioning. Asking to stop using is somewhat like asking you to stop breathing – it is not logical or rational to you.

  4. Ralph B. says:

    I agree 100% with this article. I had many great years in traditional AA meetings using Group Of Drunks as my higher power. Four years ago I picked up a big resentment about some attitudes expressed towards non religious members. A friend had lost her husband to alcoholism because he didn’t want to be preached to, so together we looked for a solution. With the help of AA Agnostica, other local secular meetings and the pamphlet “Many Paths to Spirituality” we started our own secular meeting.

    My resentment is almost completely gone and my friend has gone back to traditional meetings, but the secular AA community is thriving well. Hopefully new members will see us as an alternative or better yet as a part of AA and make there path to sobriety.

  5. Sanghasiha says:

    Well reasoned and set out description of your recovery. I was particularly moved by your emphasis on love and connection.

  6. Tom D. says:

    Thanks Brendan,

    I am a 77 year-old agnostic with over thirty years of sobriety and I am sitting here wondering why I don’t have a clue as to your inhabitation of my mind and psyche as you wrote these words describing your/my experience. And, yeah, I got some, too.

  7. Linda B. says:

    Love this article!

  8. My sponsor, Marty N, who comments here periodically, was a third-generation atheist who spent the early years of his 39 years of sobriety experiencing the isolation and frustration you describe due to the religiosity of some members and groups, until he learned “there’s no wrong way to stay sober.” In 2017 we attended a Secular AA meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and within months started what is now the Atheists and Agnostics in AA meeting in Northeastern Connecticut. Our emphasis is not “against” god(s) or religion(s) and our opening declares that “Our only wish is to assure suffering alcoholics that they can find sobriety in AA without having to accept anyone else’s beliefs or having to deny their own.” This seems the only sound way to “identify, not compare.” People, believers included, seem to enjoy the fellowship and open, honest sharing of our meeting!

  9. Chad M. says:

    Love it! There are many similarities for me. I too took my religion seriously growing up and was a “true believer” before losing faith and leaving my childhood religion and many family members and friends behind about the time I started in recovery. So my problem was definitely not “contempt prior to investigation” at least with respect to trying religious faith. I was however contemptuous of OTHER religions and other Christian sects (all of whom were doing it wrong) before losing my own faith, so I showed up in AA at just the right time to unlearn all of that and realize the diversity of beliefs “out there” as opposed to the simplistic bullshit I had been taught as a child about “them.”

    I love this: “I hope a time will come when non-believers aren’t a sub-group that is grudgingly tolerated but instead are regarded as people who show AA is more concerned about being properly effective than about preserving AA orthodoxy.” In my opinion, believers and unbelievers alike in AA should continuously, gently, but firmly, push back against fundamentalism. This is something that we should all unite on, because AA can continue to be welcoming to people of all beliefs, or unbelief, but only if the minority voices of the more extreme types who want to enforce conformity and insist on demonstrably untrue things are not let stand unchallenged.

    I’m so glad that this Website exists and that so many are participating in groups that help push the narrative back away from dangerous territory.

    hank you for your post!

  10. Richard K. says:

    Love Harry the Librarian.

  11. Megan Woodward Moyer says:

    Thank you, Brendan. Beautiful article. I’m fortunate to have a traditional AA community in Santa Barbara, California, that is generally very accepting of all people and have never felt like I was a member of a sub-group. I started a secular meeting as well and it thrived for about 4 years. It eventually declined and was disbanded because there were too many intolerant agnostics and atheists in attendance who only wanted to bash the traditional AA meetings and seemed to have little intention toward improving their sobriety. We ended up talking more about God in this meeting than in any of the traditional AA meetings and it became a turn-off to many. I suppose this has something to do with the fact that Santa Barbara is a relatively small town.

    I agree with you when you said, “But for me and for so many others the most important and salient assets AA has are in-depth identification, a sense of community, pragmatic wisdom about addiction, and sometimes just having something to do something that doesn’t involve using alcohol or drugs.”

    Thanks, Brendan!

  12. cam f. says:

    The times you mention finding acceptance in meetings is where true AA was found.

    Any God I might think to understand would be a very small one, and my feeble, failed attempts of trying to understand who or what that Power could be have permitted me the beginnings for humility.

  13. Dean G says:

    Thanks for writing this Brendan, I agree wholeheartedly.

    And a big thank you to you and AA for helping me get sober while attending the agnostics in Islington and the coffee after the meeting. I’d given AA quite a few tries with very limited success until I met you guys. Who knows what the magic ingredient is to get someone sober but I knew that being told to find a supernatural higher power just wasn’t going to work for me. Then I found the agnostics. From back then (almost 10 years ago now), I managed to get my first little chunk of sobriety under my belt. I managed 2 years and went back out for another go and then I came back. I’m over 3 years in again and currently living in the north east (why i man!) and for the most part, I love sobriety.

    I’ve also read Burrough’s book, good innit. In fact, it’s one of the few books I’ve ever read twice!

    Great to read this article and experience a little bit of connection across the waves. Thanks again.

    PS Unless it’s a special occasion I normally stick to the daytime for my animal sacrifice rather than night. I don’t want people getting the wrong idea you know.

  14. Chris L says:

    I’ve never read an article here that I’ve been able to relate as I did with this one. Thanks for posting. I am going to share this link with my local group in Atlanta.

  15. Simon says:

    It’s not an exaggeration to say the Islington meetings saved my life. So thank you Brendan. I now have someone I can blame for the mess.

  16. Patrick L. says:

    A very interesting and helpful piece of writing. I didn’t worry about the God word when I first crept through the doors of AA. I just wanted help with my life, and I got that. I was aware that “God” was not sincerely in my heart, despite my wishes. So, I want to thank you for showing that sober living is achievable without a strong belief in “God” or a religion. I’m so happy with a second chance at living, I want to live without drugs and alcohol, and without bending myself into knots over the God word.

    Well done Brendan.

  17. John S. says:

    Great article Brendan. You were a big help to me in my early days.

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