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Copyright © 2001, A. Orange Every twelve-step meeting begins with several people reading several standard texts, the articles of faith of the group. One of these articles of faith is of course the Twelve Steps. They are prefaced by a statement like "This is how we achieved sobriety." It implies that the original members of AA looked long and hard for something, anything, that would work to save alcoholics from self-destruction, and that these Twelve Steps were what finally worked. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Actually, Bill Wilson just sat down, in December, 1938, and wrote up twelve commandments for the new religious group that he and Doctor Bob had started. Those commandments were simply a repackaged version of Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman's religious philosophy, which was then going by the name of The Oxford Group, or the Oxford Group Movement. Bill W. and Doctor Bob had been members of that group until they were asked to leave, and take their alcoholics with them, because they were spending too much time with the alcoholics, and not enough time following the dictates of the cult leader, Frank Buchman. Still, Bill and Bob believed in the religious tenets of Buchmanism, so they just formed their own independent group, with exactly the same religious beliefs as before. Bill Wilson had been ambushed by his friend Ebby Thatcher at a very vulnerable moment, when he was detoxing in a hospital, December, 1934, and converted to believing in Buchman's cult. The conversion worked so well that Wilson continued to believe in Buchmanism even after he was kicked out of it.
The practices of the Oxford Group were:
1) Admission of
personal defeat (you have been
defeated by sin). There was also one more very important requirement, not listed in these six steps, "Go recruit more members." These were also the original six steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, before the group even had that name. Some of the very early AA members mention these original six steps in the "Big Book", Alcoholics Anonymous.
In December, 1938, while writing the Big Book, Bill W. simply rewrote the Buchmanism steps and practices, very verbosely, adding enough words to change the six or seven steps into twelve. Bill's wife, Lois, describes the process this way:
Then Bill presented the Twelve Steps to the other early AA members, who promptly freaked out and screamed bloody murder. They clearly foresaw that this dogmatic religiosity was going to drive away many of the very alcoholics whom the program was supposed to help.
So Bill Wilson toned down the language somewhat: The word "God" in step 2 was replaced by "a Power greater than ourselves". The phrase "as we understood Him" was added after the word "God" in steps 3 and 11. In step 7, the "on our knees" phrase was deleted from "Humbly, on our knees, asked Him to remove our shortcomings." But the rest of the steps were left pretty much unchanged, except for this one giant concession: the Twelve Steps were preceded by a statement saying that they are only a suggestion. (The true believers laugh, and say, "Yeh, it's only a suggestion. But you will die if you don't take the suggestion.") That partial editing produced a funny progression: In Step 2, we only have to believe in a nice, vague, "Power greater than ourselves." But then they pull a quick bait-and-switch stunt on us, and in Step 3, it's suddenly "God", a define-it-yourself "God, as we understood Him", into whose care we must give our wills and our lives. So it has to be some kind of a God capable of taking control of our wills and our lives, and also a God stupid enough to waste his time doing so... And then, in Step 5, it's just plain old "God", with no qualifiers at all. Then we are told that it's a God that we should confess to, and pray to, and then we are told what to pray for. That's a religion, not a quit-drinking program.
These are the Steps that came out of that process:
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had
become unmanageable.
Nowhere in the Twelve Steps does it say that you should quit drinking, or help anyone else to quit drinking. Nowhere do the words, "sobriety", "recovery", "abstinence", "quit drinking" or "health" appear in the Twelve Steps. The Twelve Steps are not a formula for curing alcoholism. They are twelve steps for exploiting alcoholics' troubles. They are twelve steps for starting a new evangelical proselytizing cult religion, just like Frank Buchman's steps were. The commandment in Step 12, which is repeated in Tradition 5, is to "carry the message" to alcoholics. What message? The message that Bill Wilson's version of Dr. Frank Buchman's religion is the answer to alcoholism. Bill Wilson believed that "the only radical remedy ... for dipsomania is religiomania." (Meaning: the only cure for alcoholism is religious fanaticism.) That suggestion came from Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, and when Carl said "mania", he meant "mania", as in maniac. So the Twelve Steps really were deliberately meant to start a new religion, right from the very start, and to turn the followers into religious fanatics, or religious maniacs. Bill Wilson says, religious fanaticism is the only answer for alcoholism.
But what if you disagree with that message? What if you would prefer to keep the religious beliefs you already have? What if you choose to not believe in the Twelve Steps, and, since they are only a suggestion, you freely choose to not do them?
Well, you can still join AA, because the only official requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking, but you won't really be a full-fledged member. The hard-core true believers have a deprecating name for such members: "One-steppers". People who only practice the first step, admitting that they have lost control of their drinking. People who want to quit drinking, and regain control of their lives, but without becoming religious fanatics, and without all of the neurotic wallowing in guilt and grovelling before God that the other eleven steps entail. The true believers will tell you that you can't do that: you have to practice all twelve steps all of the time, or you will relapse.
When people do quit without the Twelve Steps, and without even attending AA meetings, the AA true believers will say that those people are not really "in recovery"; they are only "abstaining." What's the difference? Some counselors have lists of such differences, like working on all of the problems and issues that led one to drink in the first place, versus just abstaining from drinking by will power alone. Also: recovery involves major lifestyle changes, and abstinence doesn't; recovery involves developing a support group or system, abstinence doesn't. Recovery requires working on yourself and fixing what is broken; abstinence doesn't. But the AA true believers don't even ask about such differences, they just automatically proclaim that anyone who doesn't drink, and who also doesn't attend AA meetings, is just abstaining, while someone who is attending AA meetings is of course "in recovery," whether they are actually working on any other issues or not. And the hard-core fanatics will proclaim that the abstainer is of course a "dry drunk." "Dry drunk" is yet another imaginary disease invented by Alcoholics Anonymous. The term originally referred to a rather rare condition that some people have during the first months of recovery: they stumble around in an uncoordinated manner as if they are drunk, even though they are 100% sober. But AA has turned it into a slur, which is supposed to mean that someone is thinking like a drunk man, even though he is sober. And supposedly, all sober men who won't do the Twelve Steps will suffer from that condition, and will also become bitterly unhappy as well...
If the AA member relapses, while the so-called "abstainer" doesn't, the AA fanatics will just blame their fellow AA member for "defects of character", and "constitutional incapability to be honest with himself", and for not practicing the Twelve Steps properly, while they simply ignore the nonmember abstainer, or proclaim that "He'll still relapse, it's just a matter of time." Under no conditions will the AA fanatics question the effectiveness of the Twelve Steps for quitting drinking.
To understand the Twelve Steps, or any of the rest of the Alcoholics Anonymous dogma, you have to understand the teachings of Frank Buchman, sometimes called Buchmanism, and the beliefs of his religious group, which was variously, over the years, named First Century Christian Fellowship, or The Oxford Group Movement, or Moral Re-Armament. Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman was born June 4, 1878, in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, USA, and died August 6, 1961, in Freudenstadt, Germany. He was quite an interesting nut. He was ordained as a Lutheran minister, June 1908. He then opened his own church in Philadelphia, which did well, but after a few years, he got into a squabble over money with his trustee committee, and in a huff, he resigned and got on a boat for Europe. He ending up at a large religious convention in Keswick, England, where he felt that he had a spiritual transformation. Feeling an urge to share this experience, he went to nearby Oxford University and formed an evangelical group there among the student leaders and athletes. Later the movement spread, and groups formed over the next twenty years in England, Scotland, Holland, India, South Africa, China, Egypt, Switzerland, and North and South America.
He left England to travel in China for a while. It was in China that he started his custom of having house parties. He would gather around himself whatever rich or influential people he could get, and hold informal church services, in a rich person's home or a large hotel suite, that were more like an open house than a church service. People would come and go as they pleased, and would hang out with Frank, as he was called (never Dr. Buchman or Rev. Buchman), or hang out in some other room, as they liked, playing cards or music sometimes. In the middle of all of this, Buchman developed and expounded his beliefs. And then, in the early nineteen-twenties, Buchman took his style of meetings to American campuses.
An important feature of the Buchmanism meetings was confession and "sharing." The Buchmanites were really big on public confession, and were always openly confessing everything they had done. And converts would "share" the message that their lives had been much improved by following Frank's guidance and principles.
This brings up another characteristic of Buchmanism: meetings, meetings, meetings. The Buchmanites were always forming groups and having lots of meetings, just like AA would do later. A slang term that others used for Buchmanism was "groupism," the religion of those people who just believed in groups and meetings.
Frank Buchman always maintained that converts should remain in their own church. New people may be converted to believing in Buchmanism, but they were supposed to continue as members of their original church. That seemingly generous attitude had the side effect of making everyone, no matter what their religion, fair game for conversion to Buchmanism, and the original church couldn't even complain about losing a member.
One of the peculiar features of Buchmanism was "guidance sessions." People would sit quietly, and God would speak to them, they believed. So the members of Buchman's groups were always receiving messages from God to do this or that... When people seriously believe that their own random thoughts are the Words of God, then they can become convinced of anything they wish. This can lead to just about any kind of insane behavior you could imagine, of course.
Curiously, none of the believers ever got any guidance that conflicted with any of Frank's guidance. You would think that some conflicts or collisions would be inevitable, because anybody could think anything, but apparently, God managed to keep his followers from making any mistakes. Convenient. Actually, Buchman implemented a system of checks for the regular followers: they had to submit their received guidances to the other members and the elders for approval. The other members, or, preferably, the elders, would interpret and approve the guidance, or not approve it. If it seriously conflicted with Buchman's guidance, then such mistaken guidance must have come from The Evil One, not God. In that way, no follower could get a message from God like, "Frank Buchman is crazy. Quit this stupid cult right now."
Buchmanites believe in a God who micro-manages the world. He has a grand plan for everything, right down to the germs. Everything is subject to the will of God, even the tiniest of details, like whether you choose to drink coffee or tea with lunch today. A follower who has properly Surrendered to Guidance will intuitively make the choice that pleases God. And God, in turn, will make things turn out right for those followers who please Him. To hear Buchmanites tell it, God is constantly kept busy pulling millions of puppet strings, to make events go the way He wants.
Another important concept in Buchmanism is the idea that everyone has been "defeated by sin", and is "insane". Only Frank Buchman and his arrogant followers were sane; everyone else in the world was insane and in need of Frank's guidance. This shines a whole new light on the first two steps of AA. In Step 1, when people admit that they are powerless over alcohol, and that their lives have become unmanageable, that is really just the Buchmanist defeated-by-sin confession, only slightly edited. The second Step, "We came to believe that only God ('a Power greater than ourselves') could restore us to sanity" is actually referring to Frank Buchman's idea of insanity, the one caused by sin, not some temporary insanity caused by drinking too much alcohol. If you think about it for a minute, it makes sense. You don't really need a miracle or God to get you out of the temporary insanity caused by drinking too much alcohol; a few days or weeks of sobering up will usually do it. You only need the Big Miracle to totally transform you, and remove all sin from your life. Now some of the current faithful may disagree, and say that they saw themselves as insane in the Second Step because they were suicidally drinking impossible quantities of alcohol, and couldn't stop. That may be; sometimes words just mean what we want them to mean. But plenty of the old faithful will tell you that the insanity refers to living a life of sin, and that sanity is living according to God's Will, rather than one's own. Buchman's program consisted of "personal evangelism" with emphasis on:
More Buchmanism: "The Five C's". These steps are the procedures for recruiting more members. The most important duty of members was to win more souls for the Group. The five C's are Confidence, Confession, Conviction, Conversion, and Conservation. What they mean is: First, get the prospect's Confidence, utilizing whatever mind games are required. Then, Confess something to him in order to manipulate his mind, and get him to Confess something in return. Then get him to Convict himself of sin and feel guilty. Then, to escape from the guilt, he must experience Conversion: he must surrender himself to God (really, to the Group). Last, Conservation means he has to go out and recruit more members. A very disturbing feature of these procedures is the idea that it is okay to deceive the prospective new member in order to get his confidence. The recruiting member should twist the truth, mask details, present only facts which will appeal to the prospect, "confess" or "share" stories -- true or untrue -- telling how Buchmanism saved the recruiter from misery, and tell half- truths in order to entice the prospect into joining. It's all okay, because it is all done in the service of God. The truth is, deceptive recruiting is a standard practice of most all evil cults. So is the rationalization that the end justifies the means.
You will notice that Frank Buchman just loved lists of steps, or step-like things. The Twelve Steps and The Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous are just another couple of iterations of the same old list-making routine. Frank had The Five C's, The Four Absolutes, The Five Procedures of the Sane, and The Six Steps or The Seven Steps.
As a matter of fact, we can very easily translate the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous backwards into Buchmanism steps, like this:
1) We admitted that we had been defeated by sin, and were
powerless over it. Notice the similarity between those steps, and the practices of the Oxford Group:
1) Admission of personal defeat by sin. Also, the AA steps 2 and 3 are covered by the Buchmanism concept of Guidance. The adherent is supposed to surrender to Guidance, which is the same thing as surrendering to God, which is the same thing as surrendering to God-control, which, according to Buchmanism, will restore one to sanity. And AA Step 12 is the same as Buchmanism's "Conservation" or "Continuance": go recruit more members. It is also the same as Buchman's earlier seventh step, carrying "the message" to those "still defeated" by sin.
Through the mid-nineteen-twenties, Buchman pursued his campus crusade at colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Bryn Mawr. Buchman established a pattern that he would continue for life, targeting "key people" for conversion, and then exploiting their names for more publicity, and for attracting more "key people." "Key people" were people like football stars, student body presidents, and famous rich men's sons. Buchman also established another pattern for life: He displayed an unhealthy obsession with sex. One Harvard graduate is reported to have said, "He started asking me intimate questions about sex before I'd been alone with him for five minutes. I left in a hurry."
Princeton University President John Hibben banned Frank Buchman and his campus crusade from Princeton in December 1923 because of Buchman's sexual obsession, his offensive and arrogant behavior, and the obtrusive zeal, invasion of privacy, and inappropriate confessions of sexual matters of some of his converts. It didn't help any that one of Buchman's converts took the innocent daughter of a Professor out on a date, and then gave her a full confession of every intimate detail of his sex life. Buchman attempted to pursue his "good work" at other campuses, but Buchmanism quickly faded into obscurity at virtually every institution where it had taken root. Following the collapse of his campus movement in the US, Buchman moved his base of operations to England, and conducted evangelical operations at Oxford and Cambridge. It was through recruits garnered at Oxford that his group was to get its new name: "The Oxford Group Movement." Buchman's group never attracted more than a very tiny minority of the students at Oxford, but apparently Buchman liked the prestigious sound of the name, and pretty soon, all of the Buchmanites, anywhere in the world, were claiming to be part of "The Oxford Group".
Buchman switched the emphasis of his house meetings from the students to their parents, preferably rich parents, on both sides of the Atlantic. Whenever Buchman got a rich and famous adherent, he would exploit the name for all it was worth, in order to attract more rich and famous people. In this way, Buchman habitually exaggerated the scope and importance of his movement. He always tried to connect with the "key people", the rich, the famous, and the powerful, in any country. In Germany, it was the Nazis.
In an interview published August 26, 1936 in the New York
World Telegram, Frank
Buchman stated: I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism... At the 1936 Olympics, Buchman offered to introduce British Member of Parliament Kenneth Lindsay to Heinrich Himmler, whom Buchman referred to as "a great lad." That "great lad" was the head of the Gestapo, and he was a thoroughly nasty fellow who got his jollies by terrorizing and killing people.
Frank Buchman was basically so "politically naive" (read: unrealistic and crazy) that he thought that an ideal world government would consist of a bunch of Christian Fascist dictators running all of the countries of the world. God would give the orders to the dictators, and then the dictators would give the orders to all of the people. Hence, we would have one world under God, easily, overnight, and Frank Buchman would be somewhere up there at the top, hanging out with the dictators and giving them advice and guidance. So Frank Buchman continued to visit Berlin and hang out with the highest-ranking Nazis, imagining that they would soon be on their knees, begging God to fix their moral shortcomings and defects of character...
Frank Buchman never recanted, or took back any of what he said, or even hinted that it was a mistake. He felt that he had spoken and acted under the Guidance of God, so there was no way he could or would take it back or amend it.
By 1938, with war with Hitler looming, Frank Buchman and the Oxford Group Movement was so thoroughly unpopular that they renamed the organization to "Moral Re-Armament." There was at least a hint in the naming that the USA and Great Britain did not need to re-arm with guns; that everything would be okay if they just got straight with God, and then God would take care of the situation with Hitler.
But World War Two happened anyway, in spite of Frank Buchman's best intentions. Once it came, Buchman and Moral Re-Armament were not opposed to it. Quite the contrary, they were very "patriotic", and all for it, just as long as somebody else served in the military services.
Some of the Moral Re-Armament members tried to dodge the draft, claiming that they were "lay evangelists" and essential on the home front, for such patriotic tasks as managing Moral Re-Armament, and writing morality plays like "You Can Defend America." (I love that -- not "We Can Defend America", but "You Can Defend America." "You do the slogging through the mud, and the fighting and the dying, and we will cheer you on.") Buchman maintained that "A true patriot gives his life to bring his nation under God's control." The draft board wasn't at all impressed with the arguments of the Moral Re-Armament guys, and they all soon found themselves drafted, shorn, and marching in uniform right alongside their less religious neighbors. All except Frank Buchman, that is; he was far too old to draft.
After the war, the Moral Re-Armament group was not very popular, to put it mildly. Both the American and the British people had long memories, and Buchman's admiration of Hitler, and the group's attempts at draft-dodging, didn't sit well. The group was reduced to being a mere shell of its former self. Still, it hung on for a good while longer. There were always still a few more rich arch-conservatives willing to make donations here and there, to keep Frank Buchman going for a little while longer. What particularly pleased rich ultra-conservatives was Buchman's preaching that labor's demands for higher wages were merely sinful greed; that if the workers would quit wasting their pay, then they wouldn't need raises. What the workers really needed to do was get down on their knees and confess their sins to God. Ebineezer Scrooge would have loved Frank Buchman.
That brings up yet another characteristic of Buchmanism: Frank believed that all social problems were due to sin. The cure for all social problems was to surrender to God, and start living a God-controlled life. Remember his remarks while praising Hitler: "Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures." Buchman regarded any attempts to fix the world through any means other than praying and surrendering to God as "immoral measures." Thus, to Frank Buchman, the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and women's suffrage were all "immoral."
As usual, Frank Buchman exaggerated and lied about his accomplishments. He loved to tell rich industrialists that he had saved some other industrialist millions of dollars by converting some labor leader, and the labor leader had gotten down on his knees and cried to God and confessed all of his sins and shortcomings to the business executive, who was so touched that he had gotten down on his knees, and confessed his sins. Then, the two of them successfully negotiated a fair labor contract. The only problem with that story is that it never happened. Still, Frank Buchman's preaching about labor's demands for higher wages being sin was music to big business' ears, and Frank got his donations.
Frank Buchman and his Moral Re-Armament group were viciously homophobic. A 1954 Moral Re-Armament tract tells readers how to spot homosexuals:
The son of one of Frank Buchman's disciples reported that among the inner circle, it was an open secret that Frank was a homosexual. The evidence supports this: Buchman never married, never had any romantic relationship with a woman, and there was never, ever, in his entire life, even the slightest hint of any scandal involving a woman. The same is not true of boys. (Remember his banishment from Princeton.) While collecting converts, Frank seems to have preferred young men. He would listen to their confessions, especially confessions of a sexual nature, tirelessly, while young women's sins do not seem to have particularly interested him. (He had his inventory of standard scathing denunciations of any woman who had sex, but listening to their confessions and saving their souls didn't seem to have the same appeal as boys'.) Frank's vicious homophobia was probably just a cover, to convince other people that he wasn't a homosexual, and also a way for him to deny his own feelings.
When Frank Buchman died in 1961, in Freudenstadt, Germany, one of his disciples, Peter Howard, took over the Moral Re-Armament organization, but he only lived a few more years himself. The organization has since languished, but still exists. Moral Re-Armament still maintains national offices in Washington, D.C., and London, and owns a large convention hall and estate in Caux, Switzerland. You can find them on the Internet at http://www.caux.ch/ http://www.mra-usa.org/ and http://www.mra.org.uk/ Most people have never heard of Frank Buchman or The Oxford Group or Moral Re-Armament, that they know of. But they might remember one thing: a squeaky-clean song-and-dance show called "Sing Out!" or "Up with People!" That show was the product of two members of Moral Re-Armament, who offered it as a "moral" alternative to the anti-war Hippies of the sixties and seventies. The show featured lots of mindless fluff and patriotic flag-waving, done by beautiful young people who were so well-shorn and properly dressed that they were ready for employment at Disneyland or on the Lawrence Welk show. The "Sing Out!" show was produced under the auspices of Moral Re-Armament, but that became a problem when corporate sponsors like General Electric did not wish to be associated with such a weird religion, so the producers renamed the show to "Up with People!", and hid any links to Moral Re-Armament.
The show's producers still managed to put their moral stamp on it: On the bus, young men and women were not allowed to sit together, for reasons of "purity." The young men were given lectures, advising against hot showers, lest the warm water arouse them to abuse themselves. And any Hippie who suggested that perhaps a good way to celebrate the wonderfulness of people would be to not drop bombs on them was escorted from the premises for being a trouble-maker.
One last interesting note: those young people in "Up with People!" worked hard at singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments. You would think they deserved to get paid for their work; they put on a large number of shows all across the country each year, and sold a lot of tickets, and even appeared on national TV in 1967. Did they get paid? No. Well, so they volunteered, and just got room and board, right? No, not even close. They were actually expected to pay $9200 per year for the privilege of working for free. (Although, in 1990, the last year of the show, about one-third of the cast did get some kind of financial aid.) It just seems to be another cult rule: rob your own people first. They are easier to hit up than strangers on the street.
This whole sordid pathetic tragic mess was the humble manger into which Alcoholics Anonymous was born. Bill Wilson did not accidentally join the Oxford Group. Rather, his old friend and drinking buddy, Ebby Thatcher, who, in 1934, was one of the enthusiastic new converts to Buchmanism, and sober, was actively recruiting, and he was out to get Wilson to join the cult. Ebby set him up and then ambushed him. Ebby set him up, by first getting him to a meeting where he was prompted to "give himself to God", and then by sending him to New York's Towns Hospital, where Ebby could ambush Wilson while he was at his weakest, sick and detoxing and tripping on delirium tremens, several hallucinogens, including belladonna and henbane, and morphine, barbiturates, and megavitamins. And the conversion worked. Bill Wilson was so completely taken in that he was a true believer for the rest of his life, even after the Oxford Group asked Bill W. and Doctor Bob to leave, because they were spending all of their time with alcoholics. (And, ironically, Ebby, the cosmic messenger who saved Bill Wilson, would relapse and die drunk.)
Ken Ragge, in his book More Revealed, describes Bill Wilson's conversion this way:
See the chapter The Funny Spirituality of AA for more detailed descriptions of Bill's hallucinogenic trip.
The rest of the story is pretty well-known, and has been covered from both sides in many books. Bill met Doctor Bob, who was also a member of the Oxford Group, and the two of them took a liking to each other. Together, they set out to convert other alcoholics. They built their "bunch of anonymous alcoholics" group within Frank Buchman's Oxford Group for the first three years or so, until Frank's other disciples tired of them. The alcoholics weren't rich (except for a young Firestone heir), they weren't famous, they couldn't be manipulated through guilt induction, they mainly wanted to just recruit more alcoholics, and the other Oxford Group members didn't like them. The Oxford Group told them to take a hike in 1937. So Bill and Bob set up their own independent organization, with the same religious beliefs, customs, and practices as before, except that now Bill W. and Doctor Bob provided the leadership, not Frank Buchman.
When Bill W. published the manual for the organization, Alcoholics Anonymous (popularly known as "The Big Book"), he carefully hid most of the connections to Frank Buchman and The Oxford Group, because the Catholic Church was unhappy with Buchmanism, and there was a very good chance that the Church would ban it. Bill didn't want to lose all of the Catholics. So Bill W. also renamed confession to "sharing" throughout the program, so as to not offend the Catholic Church. Likewise, Bill declared AA a "spiritual program", rather than a religion, for the same reason.
Also, there was that Hitler-admiration thing that Frank had going, and the Oxford Group was increasingly being criticized for arrogance due to the Oxford Group's belief that they alone were sane and getting direct messages from God, and also for undercutting churches, hypocrisy, self-congratulatory sanctimoniousness, and an inability to tolerate criticism. So Bill W. thought it best to not mention that AA ever knew Frank Buchman...
In the book Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson proudly bragged about connections to William James and his book Varieties of Religious Experience, and to Carl Jung, and claimed that they were the philosophical parents of AA. But William James and Carl Jung really only contributed one single line, one single idea, each. Bill W. got the idea of spiritual experiences in times of great stress, pain, and despair from Varieties. And Bill W. got the idea of substituting religious mania for alcoholism from Carl Jung. But that's it.
Poor old Frank Buchman got very little credit, just two tiny mentions for the Oxford Group, even though he contributed almost everything else. So it goes. Such is life in the evangelist's game.
The references are in the introduction: Six months earlier, the broker had been relieved of his drink obsession by a sudden spiritual experience, following a meeting with an alcoholic friend who had been in contact with the Oxford Groups of that day.
And: Though he could not accept all the tenets of the Oxford Groups, he was convinced of the need for moral inventory, confession of personality defects, restitution to those harmed, helpfulness to others, and the necessity of belief in and dependence upon God. That is hardly a ringing endorsement. That is like pointing to your mother, and saying, "Yes, I met her, and talked to her, more than once, but I couldn't agree with her about everything." So, anyway, Frank Buchman is dead and gone, and the whole Buchmanism/Oxford Group/Moral Re-Armament religious organization is dead and gone, and it's all history, right? No, unfortunately, that isn't quite true. Buchmanism lives on in Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and the whole host of other twelve-step programs, and it is far, far more popular and more powerful now than it ever was when Frank Buchman was alive. I seem to recall that Shakespeare, in the play Julius Caesar, had Mark Antony say something like, "The good that we do is oft' interred with our bones, but the evil that we do lives on after us." That surely is true of Frank Buchman.
For more information on Frank Buchman, and his connection to Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as the many other problems with AA, read the first chapters of the following two excellent books:
Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? by Charles Bufe,
1998.
More Revealed: A Critical Analysis of Alcoholics Anonymous and
the Twelve Steps by
Ken Ragge, 1992.
For the standard party line about everything, see "The
Big Book", really:
If you want a laugh, or want to barf, depending on your inner constitution, try this book: On the Tail of a Comet, The Life of Frank Buchman, by Garth Lean, 1985, Helmers & Howard, Colorado Springs, CO 80933. ISBN 0-939443-07-4. This book is a total whitewash, and a complete glorification of Buchman. Rarely will you find such a piece of total garbage, 590 pages of it. The back cover reads in part, "This is also the story of a controversial Christian statesman who was once denounced as a secret Nazi agent subsidized by Goebbels, while being suspected of operating a super-spy network for British intelligence." Then it gets worse inside the covers. If you were to believe half of the stuff in this book, you would have Frank cruising the world, talking to nothing but heads of state, and miraculously solving all of their problems.
For instance, according to this book, Buchman single-handedly solved the perplexing massive unemployment problem that cursed Denmark in 1939, by asking people whether it was God's will for a fifth of the work force to be unemployed. "No," was the answer. "Then go home and tackle it," Frank said. The result was a national campaign, and overnight, new jobs were created and the whole country went back to work. They had just been waiting for Frank Buchman to come and tell them what to do... (Pages 267-8.) The photographs in the book show Buchman with a long list of heads of state, and other high-ranking officials. But someone forgot to include any good photographs of Hitler, Himmler, or Goebbels... The author rewrote the history before World War II, so that rather than praising Hitler, Buchman warns the USA and Britain of the coming dangers in the chapters, "Awakening Democracy" and "America Has No Sense of Danger."
And Buchman and his group weren't kicked out of Princeton in 1923, this author says. Princeton President Hibben publicly stated that, in December 1923, he had forbidden Buchman to return to the campus, but Buchman and his friends insist that they were not aware of this, and remember only that Hibben had expressed "great confidence in Sam [Shoemaker] and the young men working with him" whom he knew to be products of Buchman's work. Then, some very strange logic follows: Enemies of Buchman at Princeton, whom the book hints were "practicing homosexuals", allegedly prepared a pamphlet called "The Cannonball" and showed proofs of it to President Hibben, and threatened to publish it unless the President denounced Buchman. This book does not say what the pamphlet contained, or why the President should care if it were published, or how the President of Princeton could be blackmailed by the anti-Buchmanite forces. Nevertheless, the story says, Hibben responded by getting an understanding from Sam Shoemaker that Buchman would not be invited back to Princeton. Buchman says that he had merely received a Guidance from God, in the spring of 1924, that he should "Clear out of Princeton completely." (Pages 103-5.) It seems that, even if Buchman could not understand that he had been banished from Princeton, God could understand it.
In 1958, Buchman and gang visited Japan, where they say they found that the Japanese cabinet was hopelessly corrupt, taking bribes and keeping mistresses. So one of the local Buchmanites, in three days, wrote a play exposing this evil, and they publicly performed it. When the Prime Minister allegedly found out about it, and investigated, and found it all to be true, he supposedly said to the Buchmanites: "You are the only people who love our country enough to tell me the truth. Go on talking to me like this. The door is always open to you." (Pages 508-9.) If you can believe that any politician would be delighted to have the misconduct of his cabinet so publicly, scandalously, exposed, and if you can believe that any Japanese Prime Minister would welcome such a public, humiliating, loss of face, then I own a major interest in a big bridge in Brooklyn that I'll sell to you cheap... At times, this book is so stupid that it insults the reader's intelligence.
If you are interested in any scholarly research, you will find the book to be maddening, because very little of anything can be verified. Most of the footnotes read like, "Buchman to unknown Yale student, 19 August 1920." (Question: if Buchman is dead, and the student is unknown, and probably dead too, how does anyone even know that such a conversation ever took place? What is the real source of the information?) Another footnote: "Buchman to mother, 19 March 1924." And: "Lady Hardinge in talks with author and others." And, naturally, it is the most questionable and controversial points that have the flimsiest of footnotes.
There are a few items of interest buried in there, however, like this:
I could swear I heard something like that in an AA meeting.What is Moral Re-Armament?
It is very interesting to see the roots of AA and NA in Buchmanism. For instance, on pages 150 and 151, we read about a fellow named Jim Driberg who had a drinking problem, and The Oxford Group had dried him out. But there was something about the Oxford Group that put him off, so he wrote a letter explaining that he could no longer work with the group. The Buchmanites' conclusion: "His elder brother John attributed the sudden move to the mental factor which has now and then sent Jim off on absurd tangents." In other words, he's crazy. "Alas, Jim Driberg could not make it alone. As Tom, his brother, relates in Ruling Passions, he soon turned back to the bottle and to massive borrowing." You are crazy if you quit the group and stop practicing Buchmanism, and you will never make it alone. The seeds of AA are all there.
Yes, all there, even the failure rate and the nasty habit of repeated relapses. Another famous drunk whom the Oxford Group supposedly dried out was Harvey Firestone, the prodigal son of the famous tire manufacturer. The father was so grateful that he sponsored Dr. Buchman and team of 60 in Akron, Ohio, for a ten-day campaign, which established an on-going functioning group in Akron, which ended up being the famous group that Doctor Bob of AA fame joined. But, much to the embarrassment of the Oxford Group, after they had publicized the new- found sobriety of Harvey Firestone for all it was worth -- the family doctor called it a "medical miracle" -- and had staked some of their reputation on it, Harvey relapsed repeatedly, publicly, spectacularly, in all of the wrong high-society places. (Ah, but this book doesn't mention that last part...)
Speaking of AA, it gets only a tiny mention. Literally, two and a half pages, 151 to 153. Bill W., Doctor Bob, and the anonymous alcoholics group are all dismissed with a cavalier wave of the hand, and an attitude of, "Oh, yeh. That's also another one of the minor great things that we did, but we've done much better than that." Bill and Bob got their original charter in the Oxford Group with the words, "You look after drunken men. We'll try to look after a drunken world." That was just a little condescending: "You play with some drunks while we save the world." Still, the Buchmanites claim AA and all of its clones as just some more of the many organizations that have benefited from Frank Buchman's brilliant morality.
If your sponsor wants your ego deflated, check this: This book details how Frank Buchman would regularly attack those around him, finding faults in them, and constantly deflating their egos whenever they felt any self-confidence or pride in their work. Then they would confess that they had needed such guidance, because they had been slipping into self-seeking. Why, it's just a regular good old sado-masochistic lovefest:
One day there was something wrong with Buchman's stomach. [Dr.] Campbell gave him his diagnosis. In fact, Frank Buchman seems to have written a new book, "How To Win Friends and Influence People By Putting Them Down":
Buchman held a meeting each morning. They were wholly unpredictable. One day he arrived with a peach in one hand. "Every woman should be like this," he said. "But some of you are like this," and he opened his other hand to disclose a prune. He felt that some of the women in his team had become dry in spirit because they had not given God unconditional control of their lives, and were therefore not free personalities. "It meant fearlessly tackling some of us dominating American women," one of them said later. "But it was done so delicately, with such hope." You know, I just had this funny, perverse thought. I just couldn't help but wonder what would have happened if Frank Buchman had ever encountered a real woman, a woman who would look him straight in the eye, and say, "Go to Hell, you stupid asshole," when he pulled a stunt like that... Then, if she were really mean, she would pick up a banana and a limp noodle, and say, "Every man should be like this, but you..."
I mentioned earlier how Buchman considered any do-good social movements (other than his own) as immoral. We have another example here, describing the conversion of Ted Sloan, a well-known East London militant:
He went in to the meeting and, as he later said, "got a basinful." He came to realize that his agitations on behalf of the unemployed and homeless, his fights for meals and boots for the school-children, essential activities which had sometimes landed him in jail, had inadvertently taken a wrong turning. "I'd always said that I loved my class and family... But I saw that the main thing I'd done was to teach them to hate. I'd said I was an idealist, but I'd made materialists out of them," he said. Campaigning for school-children to have meals and boots is wrong, because it makes "materialists" out of them? Those Buchmanite guys were really something else. I can see his point about it being wrong to teach people to hate -- don't do that -- but abandoning the unemployed, the homeless, and the children because we don't want to make materialists out of them? This is literally throwing the baby out with the bath water. Once again, Ebineezer Scrooge would be pleased. This gets to sounding so much like something out of a Charles Dickens novel that it is uncanny.
Many people hated the Buchmanists, and strongly criticized them for all of their faults. This book minimizes such controversy, but does not ignore it totally. They have a very interesting explanation for the criticism:
Oh? Really, Malcolm? You were so thoroughly hated that you were forced to resign, just because you would not give out free contraceptives? Why am I having trouble believing that? And, by implication, Frank Buchman and MRA were likewise viciously hated just because they wouldn't approve of people's immoral activities? So the people who disliked Buchman were all just a bunch of libertine sinners? The Hitler-worshipping, the weird religion, deceptive recruiting practices, and the homophobia had nothing to do with it? And the smug self-righteousness and arrogant sanctimoniousness had nothing to do with it? And the Buchmanite's insistence that only they had a hot-line to God, and that everyone else was insane, had nothing to do with it? The book says, "Why was he opposed? For the same reason as Jesus and His disciples were opposed." (Page 270.) Yeh, right. Jesus had a name for people like Frank Buchman, who do evil while wrapping themselves in the Bible: "wolves in sheep's clothing." Those Buchmanites were so insane and so weird and so evil that sometimes it becomes difficult to believe that this is all for real. Someone out there must be wondering if I am making all of this up. I can only say, "I wish, because if my imagination were really that good, and that wild and crazy and demented, then I could make a whole lot of money as a Hollywood script writer." How about a new slasher horror movie, "The Vampire Vicar"? "The Meeting Monster"? "The Group Godzilla"? "The Buchmanites from Brazil"? Oops! That one's been used. "An American Werewolf in London"? Nope, that's been done too. Oh well, enough of Buchman. Let's go on to something else equally depressing.
Secret Agent Orange working with www.AAdeprogramming.com |
Another crisis was brewing: Buchman was losing his old friend Sam
Shoemaker, a fellow evangelical minister. The two of them had
been working closely together ever since meeting way
back in the early days, in 1918, in China.
But Shoemaker was increasingly finding that he
could not follow Buchman's lead any longer. He was alienated by
the new direction which MRA was taking,
which seemed more and more to
dissociate it from the Christian churches and a
New Testament orientation. (And Shoemaker was
right -- go re-read all of those Buchmanism principles and
tenets again, and you will not see the words "Jesus" or "Christ"
anywhere.)
Also, there was a problem with power politics,
the gradual take-over of the facilities of Shoemaker's
church, Calvary House in New
York, by MRA. Through 1940 and 1941,
Shoemaker tried to resolve these issues with Buchman, but seems
to have been ignored.
Finally, in the
closing months of 1941, Calvary Church asked MRA to vacate the
premises of Calvary House.
And that was that. But Sam Shoemaker stays in the story of AA:
he is the same minister as Bill Wilson mentions repeatedly in the
Big Book. He was essentially Bill's minister, and the two grew
closer together for both having left, willingly or unwillingly,
Buchman's organization.
