Is AA A Cult? Why You Don't Know You're In AA's Cult.
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
The AA member will naturally have a rebuttal when I accuse Alcoholics Anonymous of being a cult. This is no surprise. The first rule of a cult of any genre is to deny that you are a cult. If you don’t believe me, find a local Hare Krishna on the street corner and ask him if he belongs to a cult. He will adamantly deny this and so will the member of the rooms.
The question is why don’t the long-time members of AA, who still reside in the circle, realize they are in a cult? The former members, who have left the program, certainly understand now what they were associated with and some of them have created anti Alcoholics Anonymous content. I was in AA briefly and figured their method out quickly as I was eleven months sober before I entered their doors. It is pretty easy to see what AA actually is when your mind is already clear from advancing sobriety.
This is an important point. Most don’t walk into the rooms at eleven months sober. They amble through the doors right after initial detox. AA is still the go-to, unfortunately, for those trying to beat alcohol addiction. A person is in the weakest state imaginable right after the initial five day detox from John Barleycorn. They aren’t thinking about getting on the net and looking up outcomes for this program of so called recovery. They aren’t sifting through other treatment options like SMART Recovery or Sinclair Method. They are terrified and anxiety-ridden and are prone to listen to the first person who declares himself an expert because he is ten years sober in AA.
When I walked into the doors of Alcoholics Anonymous, no one gave a history of the organization, who founded it or his background. The senior member there assumed I was new to sobriety and informed me AA is the only way. Then they told me about the Twelve Steps, sponsors and rehashed the Serenity Prayer. I have this very inconvenient trait of being able to think for myself in rugged individualism on all fronts and that includes the verbiage coming from circle story time in the rooms. I have a brother who had been in AA for years and left it. He remains decades sober, by the way. But even with this familial knowledge of their program in advance, I didn’t know its founding history until recently. And I can promise most of the sitting members of AA don’t know it either.
It is well known by every member in the rooms who Bill Wilson was. Wilson founded the Alcoholics Anonymous program in 1935. Now I am not one who believes you have to have certain collegiate initials in order to be an authority on a topic. Experience counts, probably more than anything. And Bill Wilson was an experienced alcoholic. The members of AA are well versed with his story.
But many of the members have never researched the background or intention of Wilson when he formed the AA organization. You can tell from their comments back to us anti AA content creators they never actually went back to the origin on which the AA and Twelve Step principles were established. Because if they did, they would realize that they belong to a cult, not a support group. And this cult is founded on fanatical Christianity. The members will adamantly deny this. They state that Christian principles are not propagated in the meetings. They insist there is no religious philosophy being advanced in the circle. And they are wrong. Completely.
The entire premise of AA is based on religion and that religion is of that fanatical type Christianity. The tenets came directly from the Oxford Group. This group was evangelistic in nature, which by axiom means fanatical. I am well versed with evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians. They aren’t just people of faith, they are zealots who attempt to intrude on everyone they come into contact with. Bill Wilson came to his sobriety directly under the influence of this fanatical organization. He established his principles from their tenets. The Twelve Steps were modeled after the Five C’s, the core principles of the Oxford Group. Most AA members aren’t aware of Wilson’s involvement with the Oxford Group.
They also don’t know that Wilson came to his spiritual awakening under the influence of psychedelic drugs. So we have a combination of hallucinogens mixed with extreme religious fanaticism, which Wilson modeled Alcoholics Anonymous after. Wilson didn’t create a support group. He created a religious cult. And that cult was in the realm of Christian evangelistic fanaticism.
I don’t have to prove my point. The Big Book proves it for me. It states repeatedly that only divine intervention can rescue the alcoholic. It clearly states he can’t fight his addiction without God’s help. Not only can he not win this battle without God, everything is to be surrendered to Him. Only God will grant him day after day of sobriety and only God can remove his deficits. The member in the rooms is powerless, remember? These aren’t mantras of a secular recovery program. They are rantings of a religious Christian cult.
Now the member will argue that they don’t bring up Christianity in their meetings. That’s correct, they didn’t in the meetings in which I attended. They don’t have to. They are practicing the tenets from the fanatical Oxford Group today. Every step, every declaration, every time they utter the Serenity Prayer, they are resurrecting the ghost of Frank Buchman, the founder of the Oxford Group.
If I decided to move to a commune, where all wages were divided among the communal members, but no one declared we were practicing Communism, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t. We just aren’t saying it. The AA member may never declare himself a Christian and he may not even be one. But he is practicing the cult tactics of Christian fanaticism advanced by this Christian cult just the same. Whether you say it out loud is irrelevant. You, AA member, are in a long established Christian cult.
When a member has sat in the circles long enough in the rooms, the behavior will confirm that Alcoholics Anonymous is indeed not a support group for recovery but a cult. There are certain traits that all cults have that AA members mimic. Other support groups like SMART Recovery don’t have these traits.
First of all, AA is authoritative. It does not cater to dissent to any of its founding principles. It claims it has no leaders but it certainly does. All you have to do is contradict their principles in a meeting and they will emerge. I told them in my brief stay in the circle that I was eleven months sober and was a former alcoholic. No one congratulated me. The senior member there, however, lectured me that no one was a former alcoholic and I really needed to start the steps. If I had gone to SMART Recovery, no one would be defensive that I had established my own recovery program, was almost a year sober and reinventing my entire life on all planes toward becoming the best version of myself possible. They probably would adopt some of my techniques for others. Because SMART Recovery isn’t a cult. Alcoholics Anonymous is.
Cults don’t want you to leave. This is true for fundamentalist Christian churches as well. They are threatened with someone’s independence. The only thing that SMART Recovery or Sinclair Method would be interested in would be that I find sobriety, stay that way and then go on with my life. They don’t need to keep validating themselves with my continual presence. Why? Because these are examples of recovery programs, not programs based on a never ending attendance in a Christian cult. This is why AA isn’t just another way to stay sober as some of the rebuttals from their members state. The rooms are more interested in you being in lockstep march with their mantras for life than your sobriety.
Look at their reaction to those of us who maintain long term sobriety without them. They lash out. They will not concede that we stayed sober without the AA guidebook. They tell us we aren’t recovered, we are just dry drunks. The prophesize that we will go back to drinking and there will be a chair waiting in the rooms when we do. Those are tenets of a cult, AA. No different than the fundamentalist church because your group was founded on the same tenets.
The reason the members of AA don’t know this is because they never looked up the history of their own program upon initial entry to it. And once they are members of the circle long enough, it doesn’t matter if they do because now they are completely indoctrinated. When a cult member is fully indoctrinated at that point, no reason or rationale will reach him. He will just keep repeating the mantra. The purpose has switched from recovery to defending the cult. Just like a Christian fundamentalist will deny evidence in front of him that the world is not four thousand years old, the long-time AA member will not acknowledge the dismal outcomes of his own program nor concede that people should live a life without having to be permanent members of the rooms. I have long stop trying to make the AA member see reason.
I can only hope they come to reason on their own and escape the cult.
And to reinvent all of your planes to progress forward check out:
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For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK
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To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
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John Barleycorn: taken from Jack London's memoir of his alcoholism. John Barleycorn: First published, 1913
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