Is AA a Cult? Or Do You Just Not Like the Show?

There’s a certain kind of recovery influencer who has discovered a very profitable higher power: hating Alcoholics Anonymous.

You’ve probably heard the litany: “AA is a cult. AA is dangerous. AA doesn’t work. The Big Book is outdated. Sponsors are untrained. Powerlessness is harmful. God is a problem. Meetings are depressing.” Somewhere in there is usually a story about an overzealous sponsor, a terrible rehab, or something that happened in a church basement in Ohio in 1997, all of which apparently justifies burning the whole thing down.

Some of those criticisms are valid, and I’ve made plenty of them myself. I’ve also been sober for 29 years and spent much of that time in AA, which means I’m capable of holding two thoughts in my head at the same time: AA has problems, and AA has helped an enormous number of people, including me.

That shouldn’t be a particularly radical position, but this conversation tends to demand allegiance to one of two camps. AA is either the answer, handed down on stone tablets and applicable to every person with a substance problem, or it’s the enemy, an antiquated religious cult that should be dismantled for the good of humanity. Once you’ve decided it has to be one or the other, you’re not really evaluating AA anymore. You’re defending a position.

Is AA Actually a Cult?

“Cult” is one of those words that has been beaten nearly senseless by the internet. It can refer to Jonestown, Scientology, a CrossFit gym, Taylor Swift fans, or basically any collection of people doing something you find irritating.

But if we’re going to accuse an organization of being a cult, we should probably have some idea what the word means.

Definitions vary, but discussions of cults and coercive groups generally involve some combination of centralized authoritarian leadership, coercive control, financial exploitation, punishment or severe consequences for leaving, isolation from outsiders, suppression of dissent, and increasing loss of personal autonomy.

Now run AA through those criteria.

AA certainly has features that can make outsiders suspicious. It has its own language, literature, rituals, slogans and spiritual framework. People identify themselves as members. There are sponsors and Steps and Traditions, and if you walk into enough meetings you will absolutely encounter someone who can turn “One Day at a Time” into a four-hour philosophical treatise.

None of that makes something a cult.

AA has no charismatic leader sitting at the top controlling the membership. Bill Wilson has been dead since 1971, which makes his ability to exercise authoritarian control somewhat limited. There are no mandatory dues, no required financial contributions and no membership contracts. AA doesn’t maintain a membership roll tracking whether you showed up Tuesday night. You can walk into a meeting, sit in the back, refuse to identify yourself, put nothing in the basket, leave halfway through and never return.

Nobody from AA headquarters is coming to your apartment.

More importantly, AA’s own structure is intentionally decentralized. Individual groups are largely autonomous, and AA explicitly describes participation as voluntary. The organization doesn’t claim authority over how every alcoholic should pursue recovery.

Does that mean every AA meeting is healthy or every sponsor knows what they’re talking about? Of course not. I’ve been around AA for nearly three decades. I’ve met controlling sponsors, rigid zealots, people giving medical advice they have absolutely no business giving, and people who seem to think the Big Book conferred upon them a combined MD, PhD and law degree.

Human beings are involved, so inevitably there is some monkey shit at the zoo.

But “I encountered unhealthy behavior in AA” and “Alcoholics Anonymous is a cult” are very different claims. If the presence of controlling personalities, bad advice and ideological rigidity were enough to establish cult status, we’d have to start with Congress and work our way down through most universities, corporations, religions, families and condo boards.

The Inconvenient Problem: AA Actually Works

This is where the anti-AA argument often becomes less critique and more ideology, because we actually have research on whether AA helps people with alcohol problems.

The strongest evidence comes from a major Cochrane systematic review examining 27 studies involving more than 10,000 participants. Researchers found that manualized Twelve-Step Facilitation, the professional intervention designed to connect people with AA and encourage Twelve-Step participation, generally produced higher rates of continuous abstinence than other established treatments. On several other alcohol-related outcomes, it performed at least as well as alternative clinical approaches, while also showing evidence of reduced healthcare costs.

That does not prove AA is the only thing that works, nor does it establish that everyone with an alcohol problem should attend meetings. It certainly doesn’t prove that every AA meeting is wonderful or that every person who walks through the door is going to benefit.

It establishes something considerably less dramatic but apparently harder for some people to accept: AA works for many people, and for some people it works extremely well.

You can dislike AA. You can think the Big Book desperately needs an editor. You can hate the God language, cringe at “the women folk,” find meetings boring, dislike the disease model, or decide that listening to a retired insurance salesman named Frank explain acceptance every Thursday night isn’t how you want to spend the rest of your natural life.

Fine.

Don’t go.

We invented an off button for television because not everybody likes the same show. Recovery might benefit from a similar concept.

What becomes intellectually dishonest is moving from “I don’t like AA” or “AA harmed me” to “AA doesn’t work and nobody should go.” At that point you’re no longer defending individual choice. You’re simply imposing your preferred recovery ideology on someone else.

Who Is Actually Responsible for Coercing People Into AA?

This is the question I think gets lost in the argument.

AA has absolutely been coercive in many people’s experience of recovery, but we should be precise about who was doing the coercing.

For decades, rehabs, courts, therapists, probation departments, families and other institutions routinely sent people to AA. Treatment programs frequently presented Twelve-Step participation not as one possible avenue of recovery but as the avenue. Get a sponsor. Work the Steps. Do 90 meetings in 90 days. If you don’t like AA, you’re resistant. If you question the program, that’s your disease talking. If you relapse, apparently you weren’t willing enough.

I hate that.

I don’t hate it because I hate AA. I hate it because I believe the person whose life we’re talking about should retain some definitional authority over his own recovery.

If somebody was ordered into AA by a judge, AA didn’t issue the order. If a rehab told a patient that AA was his only chance at survival, AA didn’t necessarily make that claim. If a family threatened to cut off their adult son unless he attended five meetings a week, that’s a family decision, not an AA policy.

That distinction doesn’t erase the experience of people who felt coerced into Twelve-Step recovery. Their resentment may be completely understandable. But if we’re trying to fix the problem, it helps to identify the right problem.

Maybe the real failure wasn’t that AA existed. Maybe the failure was that we didn’t offer enough options.

We Need a Bigger Menu, Not Another Dogma

This is where I find myself agreeing with the anti-AA movement right up until the moment it becomes an anti-AA movement.

People should know there are other ways to recover.

They should know about SMART Recovery, medications for alcohol and opioid use disorders, psychotherapy, psychiatric care, harm reduction, secular recovery communities, Recovery Dharma, moderation approaches for appropriate people, exercise, community and the many other ways human beings change their relationships with substances.

They should also know about AA.

Put the fucking menu on the table.

Explain the options honestly, including what we know and what we don’t know. Then give the person we’re supposedly trying to help enough dignity to investigate those options and decide what fits.

That means I don’t want a $90,000 rehab telling a 24-year-old that AA is his only chance at having a meaningful life. It also means I don’t want an influencer with a podcast telling the same 24-year-old that walking into AA means he’s joining a cult.

They’re mirror images of the same arrogance: I know what your recovery should look like better than you do.

No, you don’t.

Go. See. Decide.

AA meetings aren’t even particularly uniform. A young people’s meeting in Manhattan can feel like an entirely different universe from a 7 a.m. men’s meeting in suburban Atlanta. Some rooms are deeply religious; others barely mention God. Some are funny, warm and irreverent. Some are so miserable you start wondering whether drinking might have been more cheerful.

So go see for yourself.

Go to several AA meetings. Go to SMART. Talk to a therapist. Talk to a physician. Learn about medication. Read the research. Meet people who have built good lives through different forms of recovery and ask them what actually helped.

Then decide.

If you go to AA and hate it, you don’t need to submit an application for release. Walk out the door and try something else.

But if you go to AA and six months later you’re not drinking, you’re sleeping again, your mother answers your calls, you have people to spend Saturday night with, you’re doing better at work and the meeting you initially dreaded has somehow become an important part of your week, don’t let an influencer convince you that you’ve been brainwashed.

Maybe you found something that helps.

Twelve-Step life can be a very good life. I know because I’ve lived one for 29 years, and I’m enormously grateful for it. That experience gives me the right to tell you what AA has meant in my life; it doesn’t give me the right to determine what role it should have in yours.

Coercing people into AA is wrong. Demonizing AA and trying to coerce people away from it is the other side of the same coin.

Go. See. Decide what is right for your recovery.

Your life. Your recovery.