Summary: Yes, AA can work for you even if you don’t believe in God. Although AA was founded and developed with a Judeo-Christian ethos and spiritual foundation, AA welcomes and supports anyone who wants to quit drinking, regardless of their background or spiritual/religious beliefs.
Key Points:
- People in AA seek sobriety by following the 12 Steps of AA, which are informed by 12 traditions of AA.
- Each step revolves around a concept related to seeking sobriety that does not require belief in God or adherence to any one religious or spiritual point of view.
- An important AA tradition states that “the only requirement for A.A. membership is a desire to stop drinking.”
- People in AA are not required to believe in God or convert to Christianity or any other religion.
- There’s an official, AA-approved, Secular AA, that’s part of the worldwide AA network of meetings and peer-led community support groups.
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Has One Goal: Help You Quit Drinking
That’s the bottom line.
The unifying theme behind every AA meeting is if you want to quit drinking, you’re welcome here.
Language is important. It’s important to point out language that doesn’t appear in that unifying theme:
If you want to quit drinking…and you believe in God, you’re welcome here.
If you want to quit drinking…and you’re Christian, you’re welcome here.
The theme leaves out religion and focuses on what matters. The unifying theme is this:
If you want to quit drinking, you’re welcome here.
You don’t have to convert to anything, sign a waiver, make an account, come up with a password and confirm it with an email, a phone call, and two-factor authentication with a fingerprint and a PIN. The way you become a member of A.A. is by identifying and acting on an internal, personal desire or need to stop drinking.
That’s in the official literature, that’s the core ethos, and, again, that’s the bottom line.
It’s also relevant that it’s been the AA ethos since the beginning. This openness is not a 21st century, kinder, gentler rewrite of AA history. It’s an original feature of the AA process. Here’s what one of the founders of AA, Bill W., said in lectures and meetings in the early years of AA, i.e. the 1930s and 1940s:
“It must never be forgotten that the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is to sober up alcoholics. There is no religious or spiritual requirement for membership. No demands are made on anyone. An experience is offered which members may accept or reject. That is up to them.”
He says it plainly from the very start: no demand, no requirement, up to you. Here’s another quote from Bill W. on the importance of openness and acceptance in AA meetings, from a conference held in 1953 on “Variations in the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions”:
“The more we insist on strict conformity with these Steps and Traditions, the more resistance against them we create.”
Despite these very clear conceptual guidelines established by the founders of AA themselves, we completely understand why people think they may need to believe in God, be Christian, or adhere to some other form of religion to benefit from AA. However, that’s a mistaken belief, and is simply not the case.
Take What You Need and Leave the Rest
We encourage you to read that subheading again. That’s not something people who aren’t in AA or left AA for something better say.
That’s an official AA saying.
If you want to quit drinking, you can come to AA, take any ideas, insights or tips that help you, and leave the rest at the meeting, including the God, religion, and spirituality.
But, as we mention above, we do understand why people think they need to be religious to participate in AA. We get that not every AA meeting people attend gives that openness impression. We understand why they wonder if AA will work for them if they don’t believe in God, in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word.
Here’s why we get that:
- The twelve steps talk directly about God five or six times and refer to “Him” several more.
- Most AA meetings in the U.S. happen in churches.
- At some AA meetings, members recite the Lord’s Prayer.
- At some meetings, members advocate for their religion and encourage other attendees to accept their point of view.
- For people who’ve had negative experiences with organized religion, it’s easy to see how items 1-4 might discourage them from going to, or returning to, an AA meeting.
We can offer people reluctant about AA for these reasons practical solutions to their reservations and reluctance. The most important thing to realize is that it’s possible to rewrite all of the 12 steps without mentioning God or religion, and the process will still work.
We’ll provide several Alternate 12 Steps examples below, many of which are fully approved and endorsed by AA.
The next most important thing to realize is that AA is a peer-led, community-based program made up of regular people from the community. That means, with some exceptions, that the location of a AA meeting will often reflect the community where it’s located.
For instance, if you go to a meeting in a small town in the Bible Belt, you might hear some bible talk, if not in the meeting, then afterwards, during the fellowship/chat/look-at-the-pamphlets-on-the-snack-table time. But if you go to a meeting in Salt Lake City, you might hear a completely different kind of bible talk. And if you go to a meeting in another location, you might not hear anything even remotely religious at all.
How Do You Find the AA Meeting for You?
Here’s the rule of thumb for meetings:
Keep going to different meetings until you find your tribe.
There’s a meeting out there for you, we’re almost one hundred percent certain. Also, the presence or absence of religiosity may not be the deciding factor. Your deciding factor may be the people who regularly attend the meeting.
For instance:
- A meeting in Greenwich Village in NYC will likely have a different vibe and attract a different group of people than a meeting on the Upper West Side, and a meeting in Queens might have an entirely different feel and group from those in Manhattan.
- A meeting in rural Texas will likely be far different than a meeting in the Castro in San Francisco.
- In Los Angeles, it’s virtually guaranteed a meeting in Brentwood will feel different than a meeting in Venice Beach, which will feel different than a meeting in Long Beach.
Here’s another example. We know a college-age person who went to their first AA meeting and was put off completely. They thought it totally wasn’t for them. They had this reaction:
It was just a bunch of old guys sitting in a circle in uncomfortable metal folding chairs complaining about their businesses, their relationships, and basically their lives.
Fair enough: old business guys weren’t their tribe. But that person persisted, went to different meetings, and found a meeting that resonated with them. Here’s how they reacted to that meeting:
It was great. Everyone sat around in bean bag chairs, the lights were low, they had lava lamps, music playing, and everyone was talking about how hard it was to stay sober while in college, and how you can stay sober while being under age 25, when literally everyone and everything is saying come drink.
They found their tribe. And that’s how you do it. You keep going to different meetings until you find one that resonates with you, with people you can relate to, with people who say things you’ll actually listen to. If you can’t find one in your area, there are also a significant number of virtual/online AA meetings you can attend.
With all of that said, we still encourage you to go to meetings that aren’t your home meeting. That way, you’ll hear from new people and get new perspectives. And sometimes you hear things from the old timers that are pure gold, that you’d only hear at an AA meeting, from an AA old-timer.
Now we’ll share several variations of the 12 steps that might help you understand how and why they can work for you.
The 12 Steps: Concepts for Seeking Sobriety and Guidebook for How to Quit Drinking
When you attend AA meetings or commit to a residential treatment center for alcohol addiction that employs the 12-Step model, one thing you spend significant time doing is called step work. Step work means you focus on one of the 12 steps – usually with a sponsor – and explore all the ways it may apply to you and your life.
By explore we mean go deep, and mine the concepts embedded within the step to learn how taking that step might help you get closer to your goal, i.e., how taking that step might help you quit drinking. We compiled these Alternative 12-Step Examples from two sources:
Atheists, Agnostics, and All Others
We’ll start with a version of the 12 Steps created by White Bison, an organization dedicated to supporting mental health among Native Americans. These steps are central to the Native American Wellbriety Movement, which supports Native Americans with alcohol and drug addiction problems. We’re starting here because these 12 steps are distilled and reduced to a single word that represents the concept associated with that step.
White Bison (Native American) 12 Steps
- Honesty
- Hope
- Faith
- Courage
- Integrity
- Willingness
- Humility
- Forgiveness
- Justice
- Perseverance
- Spiritual Awakening
- Service
For comparison – and to expand your understanding of what we means by alternative 12 steps – here are the traditional 12 Step of AA. In this article, we won’t spend time connecting all the dots between the versions: we’ll allow you to make those connections in a way that makes the most sense to you.
Alcoholics Anonymous: The Traditional 12 Steps
Source: Alcoholics Anonymous
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
- Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Now let’s look at a version of the 12 Steps created by renowned psychologist B.F. Skinner.
Humanist Twelve Steps
Source: Proactive 12 Steps
- We accept the fact that all our efforts to stop drinking have failed.
- We believe that we must turn elsewhere for help.
- We turn to our fellow men and women, particularly those who have struggled with the same problem.
- We have made a list of the situations in which we are most likely to drink.
- We ask our friends to help us avoid those situations.
- We are ready to accept the help they give us.
- We honestly hope they will help.
- We have made a list of the people we have harmed and to whom we hope to make amends.
- We shall do all we can to make amends, in any way that will not cause further harm.
- We will continue to make such lists and revise them as needed.
- We appreciate what our friends have done and are doing to help us.
- We, in turn, are ready to help others who may come to us in the same way.
We’ll offer two more variations of the 12 steps, formulated by people active in AA, originally presented at official AA chapters, and accepted by the official – but informal – AA establishment.
Agnostic AA 12 Steps
Source: AA Agnostics of the San Francsico Bay Area
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to believe and to accept that we needed strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to entrust our will and our lives to the care of the collective wisdom and resources of those who have searched before us.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to ourselves without reservation, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were ready to accept help in letting go of all our defects of character.
- With humility and openness sought to eliminate our shortcomings.
- Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
- Sought through meditation to improve our spiritual awareness and our understanding of the AA way of life and to discover the power to carry out that way of life.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
This final example of an adapted 12 steps comes from an AA group in Toronto, Canada called AA Toronto Agnostics. We include this set because it’s almost identical to the set above, with minor variations in wording that make a world of difference to the people in this group.
12 Steps: AA Toronto
Source: AA Toronto Agnostics
- We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.
- Came to accept and to understand that we need strengths beyond our awareness and resources to restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the AA program.
- Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admitted to ourselves without reservation, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
- Were ready to accept help in letting go of all our defects of character.
- Humbly sought to have our shortcomings removed.
- Made a list of all persons we harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible accept when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- Sought through mindful inquiry and meditation to improve our spiritual awareness, seeking only knowledge of our rightful path in life and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Do you spot the differences?
They’re not huge, but they do make a difference to the people who matter: the people in that specific Toronto group who want to quit drinking and stay sober. That’s a prime example of why and how AA can work for you even if you don’t believe in God.
You take what works, and leave the rest.
To learn more about AA, please read the following article on our blog:
Does AA Really Work? – Honu House Hawaii
