Origins of AA, and The Seed...
"Although one can find parallels between AA and the Craigie Foundation, AA really owes its existence to the Oxford Movement, founded by Lutheran minister Nathan Buchman. Buchman, in response to what he believed to have been a personal mystical religious experience, started the First Century Christian Fellowship in 1921. The goal of this group was to establish a world culture based on what Buchman considered to be the beliefs and practices of the early Christian church. Buchman tended to see everything in the context of a battle between good and evil. His vision was messianic and he equated his work and goals with God. He believed that any philosophy or ideology, particularly Communism, which disagreed with his vision of a world-wide theocracy, was inspired by Satan. He established the Four Absolutes: absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness, and absolute love. He referred to himself as soul surgeon. New members of his group were expected to undergo rigorous self-examination, openly confess their sins and weaknesses, surrender themselves to God, and make restitution to anyone they had harmed in the past. Additionally, they were expected to promote the organization for no fee and fund raising was a key activity of members of the fellowship.
Buchman also promoted the Four Cs: confidence in Buchman the soul surgeon, confession of sins, conviction (or acknowledgement) of ones sins, conversion to the principles of the First Century Christian Fellowship, and continuance of practice of the Fellowship rules. Besides the Four Absolutes and the Four Cs, members were also encouraged to live by specific fellowship slogans, which included give news, not views, win your argument, lose your man, and J.E.S.U.S. just exactly suits us sinners. Buchmans explicitly stated goal was mass conversion that ultimately would lead to humanity being ruled by God-Control.
The First Century Christian Fellowship grew rapidly in the 1920s. Buchman targeted recruitment activities towards men of power and influence and towards college students. He fully expected his followers to adhere to his dictates totally and to accept the veracity of his mystical experiences without question. Not surprisingly, a considerable amount of negative publicity resulted from his methods of recruitment and his group was often called both a cult and Buchmanism.
In 1929, following a series of revivals he held in England, Buchman changed the name of his group to the Oxford Group and the organization continued to flourish under the new name. His hatred of communism allowed him to see fascism as a reasonable alternative and in 1936, he was quoted as saying I thank heaven for a man like Adolph Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism. Think what it would mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God? The world needs the dictatorship of the living spirit of God. Hitler is Christianitys defender against Communism. Although he later admitted that he had been duped by Hitler, he did not issue a retraction. Understandably, that interview did irreparable harm to the Oxford Movement and in 1939, Buchman again changed the name of his movement, this time calling it Moral Rearmament. The influence of Moral Rearmament peaked in the 1940s and its membership declined greatly following Buchmans death in 1961.
Although Buchmans movement faded from the public view, its message is very much with us in the form of Alcoholics Anonymous, founded by Mr. Bill Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith. Bill Wilson had been cured of alcoholism by a spiritual revelation he believed he had had while at a drying out clinic. The fact that this revelation may be caused by a combination of belladonna and other drugs given to him as part of the drying out process did not seem to have bothered him. Following this experience, he began a crusade to save other alcoholics through religion. While in Akron, Ohio in 1935, he feared that a relapse was imminent and asked an Akron Protestant minister for the name of someone he could talk to who had also been addicted to alcohol. He was given the name of Dr. Robert Smith. He and Smith met and held what many consider to be the first AA meeting. The two of them attempted to cure other alcoholics with such Oxford Group principles as confession, making amends and turning ones life over to God. They used Oxford Group principles because Dr. Smith was an active Oxford Group member and was using those same principles with his patients at an Akron hospital.
Wilson and Smith considered spiritual faith to be a cornerstone of sobriety and readily subscribed to Buchmans insistence that the individual alcoholic is powerless and must rely on divine intervention to maintain sobriety. It is worth pointing out that Dr. Smith, although a medical doctor and thus presumably well versed in scientific methodology, did not use scientific methods when treating hospitalized alcoholic patients. Rather, he relied strictly on the religious principles of the Oxford Group. Both he and Wilson remained active participants in Buchmans group until 1937.
The principles of AA were unquestionably taken from those of the Oxford Group. Frank Buchmans beliefs in human powerlessness, the necessity of confession of sin, the value of taking a moral inventory of oneself, the value of making amends to others, the necessity of carrying the message to others and redemption through turning ones life over to God were adopted wholesale by Bill Wilson. Wilson simply took those central Buchmanite principles and formatted them into the 12-Step program of recovery (Lemanski, 44).
In A History of Addiction and Recovery in the United States, Mr. Lemanski goes into considerable detail into the development of the addiction treatment industry in the United States and its overwhelming reliance on the 12 Step Model. Particularly, he discusses the 12-step inspired Minnesota Model of inpatient treatment and its absolute failure as a viable treatment method for addiction. Of course, the ultimate question is: Does AA really work? From the standpoint of 12-Step recovery, the scientific data is grim regarding its efficacy. In the 1990s, three meta-analyses of substance abuse treatment were done. These studies indicated that 1. Twelve-step treatment is, as a whole, ineffective; 2. The various components of 12-Step treatment are themselves ineffective; 3. Twelve-step (especially inpatient) treatment is among the most expensive types of treatment; 4. Several cognitive-behavioral treatments are effective. 5. These effective cognitive-behavioral treatments are all either low cost or very low cost. (Lemanski, 120). In other words, despite the fact that over 90% of substance abuse counselling treatment in the United States is based on the twelve-step model, it is not an effective treatment method for substance abuse and addiction.
Mr. Lemanski notes that the success rate for the AA model is about 5% (Lemanski, 102). He points out that many twelve-step recovery centers claim a success rate of 70% and higher but these claims are due to faulty research methodology. For instance, such centers routinely ignore people who drop out of the programs and the studies do not include former patients or clients that the programs have lost track of. Additionally, they use short term sobriety as the criteria for successful outcome and they dont bother to use comparison or control groups. Despite the low success for AA model recovery, it continues to flourish. Ironically, despite AA being an abstinence model of treatment, Mr. Bill Wilson experimented later in life with mescaline in a futile attempt to re-experience the mystical state he had had while under the influence of the medically administered drugs given to him at the drying out clinic. Mr. Wilson remained addicted to cigarettes his entire adult life and died of emphysema in 1971.
(A somewhat different version of this review appeared in the January-February, 2002 edition of BASIS.)"
- From Bay Area Skeptics website
Walter
