Inventing More of Its Own Bullshit
Inventing More of Its Own Bullshit
Sexy Drunk Christians: Chapter 3 Seeing the Light Part 39
Critics miss the primary reason Alcoholics Anonymous persists in American culture and requires denouncement: the inextricable nature of AA and Christianity.
Make no mistake; AA is a sect or cult of Christianity.
In the past, critics, including myself, referred to AA as a cult religion which was a mistake for the same reason blaming evangelicals as the source of political problems is wrong.1 AA could not have grown to such monstrous authority in government policy and addiction recovery without Christian support, and ignoring this responsibility allows the organization tremendous control over government policy, funding, and industry to support religious endeavors. Oddly, the most difficult aspect of AA to understand is not its religiosity. Any literate with half an eye sees the organization’s religiosity plainly stated in its literature,
The central fact of our lives today is the absolute certainty that our Creator has entered into our hearts and lives in a way which is indeed miraculous.2
Perhaps there is a better way–we think so. For we are now on a different basis; the basis of trusting and relying upon God. We trust infinite God rather than our finite selves. We are in the world to play the role He assigns. Just to the extent that we do as we think He would have us, and humbly rely on Him, does He enable us to match calamity with serenity.3
Just like its original form of Christianity, AA instills the believer with arrogance from believing they possess some secret information or knowledge.
We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength.4
Christianity permeates the program denoted by revisions of Christian rites like Step Three, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him,” which serves as the baptismal rebirth of born-again Christians. Step Five, “Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs,” forms confession. AA argues these steps are spiritual, not religious, but this claim is disingenuous, considering everyone must practice them to follow the program correctly.
Seeing AA as a Christian sect, cult, or church – all of which AA comprises elucidates further in a monotheistic God belief, adherence to loosely referenced scripture, and most of all because it produces the exact same controlling culture. As one AA victim described,
This time around, I made a promise to myself that I would obey all the family rules. After all, I had learned from an early age that it is God's will to honor thy parents, and I now learned in AA that, as a recovering alcoholic, I was to do God's will, which was not-so-subtly hinted to be that which is taught by Christian religions.5
Seeing AA as a Christian sect mires in AA’s interpretation of Christianity that genericizes God and redacts all mention of Jesus and the Abrahamic God, replaced with “higher power.” Confounding this view further, faith in the teachings of Jesus Christ defines Christians, and witnessing AAs recoil at the mention of Christ or the Bible makes one question how AAs can be Christians if they do not follow Christ?
They do follow (a) Christ and just don’t know it.
If you rename a kitchen “Food Hall” and the chef “Food Master,” this does not change the meaning of the kitchen as a place to make food or the chef’s job to prepare it. All religions, sects, or cults alter semantics based on denominational differences. Catholics have priests while Baptists have pastors, and though each position serves essentially the same purpose of leading congregations, they differ per the church’s beliefs, such as priests remaining celibate and reverends allowed to marry.
Some assume AA stole the blueprints for Christianity and rebranded under a different name, claiming they are spiritual, not religious, but AA camouflaged Christianity in generic spiritual talk. The evidence of this hoodwinking abounds in members’ supposed freedom to follow any religion. This freedom comes with the caveat of first following the AA religion, which just so happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to Christianity.
Let’s say you are a Buddhist and join AA. To have a successful program, one in which you become free of alcohol, you must follow the steps which involve turning your life over to the care of your higher power and confessing all your sins to that God and another person.
You might be a Buddhist, but you are sure acting like a Christian.
Fundamentally, you act and behave like a Christian down to the very fabric of morality that is not openly expressed in AA but implied exuberantly throughout the literature:
What with our ultra-modern standards, our scientific approach to everything, we are perhaps not well equipped to apply the powers of good that lie outside our synthetic knowledge.6
I had always believed in a Power greater than myself. I had often pondered these things. I was not an atheist. Few people really are, for that means blind faith in the strange proposition that this universe originated in a cipher and aimlessly rushes nowhere.7
How are these statements different in meaning than Christians discussing theodicy, claiming all good comes from God, inability to understand God because he resides outside our knowledge, and claiming atheists believe the universe spiraled out of nothing? They are not different because AA is Christianity camouflaged in spiritual rhetoric to not offend newcomers but carries the same morality, ideology, and implications.
Different interpretations abound in Christianity, just like interpretations of Christ and the bible. Mormons provide an easily viewed sect so far removed from Christianity that other Christians have a difficult time accepting them as Christians. To accept Mormonism, you must accept numerous key differences with mainstream interpretations. For example, Mormons believe,
“Jesus Christ is just the “firstborn” of God’s billions of spirit children and the first to become a God.”8
As opposed to the mainstream Biblical view,
Jesus Christ is the only human being who existed in heaven before his human life (John 3:31). He did not become a God, but has always been God (John 1:1). He is called the “firstborn of all creation” (Colossians 1:15) to mean that he is the Father’s primary heir, not that he was the first spirit being created.9
The correctness of these viewpoints does not matter, but rather their ability to reveal how Christianity morphs into sects based on diverse views of Christ, often in conflict with mainstream views. Many Christian nonmainstream sects deny the divinity of Christ, including,
- Latter-day Saints
- Jehovah's Witnesses
- Christadelphians
- Christian Science
- Unification Church
- Unity School of Christianity.10
More than just conflicting views, Christ is often sidelined by earthly prophets. Evangelical churches profess foresight by speaking tongues, or they practice spiritual healing, and both revere their evangelists. Beyond these groups, Christian cults like The People’s Temple, The Branch Davidians, and The Family become far removed from Christ to the point of justifying almost anything via scripture, even claiming yourself to be Christ. The People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones, who claimed he was Christ among other famous religious figures, convinced nearly a thousand members to abandon the US and move to Guyana to live in a utopian socialist society and eventually kill themselves after murdering a US senator investigating reports of abuse. Branch Davidians justified child brides, polygamy, and hoarding illegal firearms following David Koresh’s doomsday prophecy. The Family, led by David Brandt Berg, operated for decades using scripture to justify child sexual abuse. If these cults can pervert the word of Christ to the point of meaning anything, the obvious question becomes, does Christ’s word have any meaning beyond the person interpreting it? The fact that so many Christian sects exist, all with interpretations claimed as truth, renders not just Christ’s word arbitrary but Christianity.
You don’t have to follow Christ to be a Christian.
AA now reveals as just another Christian cult or sect in its seeming rejection of Christ that is actually a swapping of messiahs just like Koresh, Jones, and Berg, who became prophets and new messiahs of God. The Godhead of Christianity, father, son, and holy ghost, become the Trinity of AA: God, the group, and the speaker who is the Messiah of the Moment able to perform the miracle of passing on the experience, strength, and hope to save other alcoholics in need. Purified of his sins through confession, prayer, and God’s forgiveness, the AA member, stands before groups reciting drunkalogues with the same passion Koresh, Jones, and Berg declared themselves the saviors. Every AA meeting is a church, and speakers make the rounds at meetings, like evangelical ministers and pastors speaking before different congregations.
Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the AA Lord.
The booze church of Christianity doesn’t need Jesus because all the requisites to believe in Christianity are renamed and restated by every speaker, who is the reverend, pastor, minister, evangelist, and Christ, all rolled into one. To achieve this status in AA, all one must do is not drink, go to meetings, talk in the spiritual rhetoric that genericizes Christianity, and sponsor other alcoholics. Upstanding AAs can save many lives and acquire many disciples, provided they follow the rules of the booze church.
The reward for sobriety is much larger than just being a guru in AA. As an AA messiah armed with a coffee pot and a Big Book, you can start your own meeting, build an AA club, or even a treatment center that utilizes the twelve steps, just like your Christian brethren, pastors, and evangelists, start mega-churches. AAs can have it all just like Christians, even the same hypocrisy and irrationality derived from believing an implausible religion.
The same Christian pollution instilling with the justification and purity to take people’s rights away, police their thoughts, promote misogyny, and inflict suffering on the LGBTQ, fills the rooms of AA with the serenity to rationalize molestation, sexual assault, lies, gaslighting, coercion and dysfunction that ruins lives like…
Triola, V. & Trueman, T. (2022). Christian Pollution: Polemics & Absurdities See: “How CNN Promoted the False Narrative of “Imposter Christianity” https://a.co/g9R6g3I
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book (p. 34). Kindle Edition.
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book (p. 63). Kindle Edition.
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book (p. 63). Kindle Edition.
Fransway, Rebecca (2000). 12-step horror stories: true tales of misery, betrayal, and abuse in AA, NA, and 12-step treatment. https://archive.org/details/12stephorrorstor0000unse/page/30/mode/2up?q=This+time+around
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book (p. 24). Kindle Edition.
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book (p. 14). Kindle Edition.
Bowman, R.M. (2011). Mormonism and Jesus Christ. Copyright © 2012 Institute for Religious Research https://mit.irr.org/mormonism-and-jesus-christ
Ibid.
Bing AI. (2023). Source: Conversation with Bing.
(1) Which are some of the Non Trinitarian sects in Christianity. https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/14614/which-are-some-of-the-non-trinitarian-sects-in-christianity
(2) Non Trinitarian Faith Groups That Reject the Trinity - Learn Religions. https://www.learnreligions.com/faith-groups-that-reject-trinity-doctrine-700367
(3) Is there, or was there, a Christian denomination that believes, or .... https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/52962/is-there-or-was-there-a-christian-denomination-that-believes-or-believed-tha
(4) “Christian” Cults and Sects | Dwell Community Church. https://dwellcc.org/learning/essays/christian-cults-and-sects
(5) “The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus” - The Martin Luther King, Jr .... https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/humanity-and-divinity-jesus