Do the Twelve Steps Need God
How a programme that helped save my life might help more people if we separate spirituality from religion
By Chris Howarth • Approximately 10 minute read
Alcoholics Anonymous played a major role in saving my life. I want to begin there, because this is not an attack on AA and it is not an attempt to diminish what the Twelve Steps have done for millions of people.
It is a question from inside the experience: if the practical, psychological and spiritual principles of the Twelve Steps can transform lives, why present them in language that some of the people who most need help cannot get past?
The usual answer is that AA is spiritual, not religious, and that each person is free to understand God or a higher power in their own way. I know that interpretation. It enabled me to work the Steps without becoming religious. But it does not remove the problem. A newcomer still encounters words such as God, Him, prayer and surrender, often in a church hall, before anyone has earned enough trust to explain what those words might mean.
For some, that language offers hope. For others, it sounds like a condition of entry. My argument is not that AA should abandon faith. It is that recovery should not depend on a person first learning to translate religious language into something they can use.
I did not need another reason to walk away
When I first examined this question in depth, I was approaching six years sober. My route into recovery had begun several years earlier, when I was 29 and drinking at a level that had left me isolated, physically unwell and mentally exhausted.
I asked my GP for help and was referred to a local service. The first appointment took four weeks. I was advised not to stop drinking suddenly because withdrawal could be dangerous, and to reduce my intake gradually while keeping a diary. The advice was medically understandable. The difficulty was brutally simple: controlling my drinking was the very thing I could no longer do.
My family helped me enter private treatment for ten days. I attended group therapy and AA meetings, but I went looking for reasons to reject what I heard. I noticed the person who appeared intoxicated, the language I disliked and the anxiety I felt in the room. Beneath all of that was a more important truth: although I knew alcohol had become a serious problem, I still did not believe I was like the other people there.
Two years later I returned to treatment, this time for 28 days. The situation felt different because it had become a choice between continuing towards an early death or learning how to live without alcohol. I was finally ready to listen.
Treatment gave me context before asking me to engage with AA. Therapists built trust, explained addiction and helped me understand what I was walking into. That preparation mattered. Had I arrived alone at an unfamiliar meeting, frightened and unwell, I am not convinced I would have returned. I might have used the religious language as one more reason to leave.
That is why accessibility is not a cosmetic issue. At the point someone seeks help, the first encounter can determine whether a potentially life-changing resource feels open or closed to them.
What the Twelve Steps actually changed
AA is both a fellowship and a programme. The fellowship offers identification, routine, accountability and the rare relief of being understood by people who do not need the experience translated for them. The Twelve Steps ask for something more demanding: an honest examination of how we live.
The work is not finished when the drinking stops. The programme asks us to acknowledge loss of control, accept help, examine our conduct, admit harm, make amends, continue taking personal inventory, develop reflective practice and support other people. None of that is easy. Much of it is intensely practical.
What changed my life was not a sudden supernatural intervention. It was learning, repeatedly and often uncomfortably, about acceptance, control, resentment, courage, fear, honesty, communication, empathy, compassion, self-respect and gratitude. It was becoming willing to hear things I did not want to hear, to take responsibility for the consequences of my behaviour and to act differently.
Those principles can produce what many people reasonably call a spiritual change. But spirituality and religion are not synonyms. Spirituality can describe how a person relates to themselves, to other people and to a world larger than their immediate wants. It can be experienced as release, gratitude, humility, tolerance, forgiveness and belonging. None of those experiences requires belief in a deity.
This is also where the contemporary evidence deserves a fair hearing. A major Cochrane review published in 2020 examined 27 studies involving 10,565 participants. It concluded that professionally delivered Twelve Step Facilitation designed to increase AA participation can improve continuous abstinence compared with some other established treatments, while AA and non-manualised Twelve Step approaches generally perform at least as well on several other alcohol-related outcomes. The latest UK clinical guidelines treat AA, SMART Recovery and other forms of mutual aid as legitimate parts of a personalised recovery system.
In other words, the serious question is no longer whether AA can help. It can. The better question is how to make effective recovery support accessible to more people without stripping out the challenge, accountability and connection that make it valuable.
Spiritual but not religious is not always enough
AA in Great Britain now explicitly explains that God in the Steps does not have to be a religious entity; a higher power might be nature or simply what happens when people come together to help one another. That is a useful clarification. It is also an acknowledgement that the language needs explaining.
The original wording contains repeated references to God, including explicitly masculine language, prayer and divine will. A committed member may see those words as flexible symbols. A newcomer does not necessarily have the benefit of that interpretation. They see the words as written.
The cultural context has changed too. In the 2021 Census, 37.2% of people in England and Wales reported having no religion, up from 25.2% a decade earlier. Any public-facing recovery route that appears to require religious belief therefore risks creating friction for a large and growing part of the population.
Friction matters because shame, fear, denial and ambivalence are already powerful obstacles. We should be careful before dismissing a person’s reaction to religious language as an excuse or evidence that they are not desperate enough.
One experienced AA member I interviewed took precisely that view: if someone truly wanted sobriety, he argued, they would go to any lengths; remove God and they would simply find another reason to resist. There is an uncomfortable truth in that. Recovery does require willingness, and no form of wording can remove the hard work.
But willingness should not become a test designed by people who have already found their way through. If an avoidable barrier prevents someone from reaching the useful part of the programme, preserving that barrier is not rigour. It is poor access design.
The strongest objection
The most thoughtful objection to secularising the Steps is not that God must be protected. It is that the underlying mechanism must be protected.
Recovery can fail when it becomes a negotiation with ourselves: accepting only the parts that feel comfortable, avoiding challenge and continuing to believe that our unaided judgement is sufficient. The language of a power greater than ourselves interrupts that pattern. It asks us to accept that help, wisdom and accountability exist beyond the individual ego.
That idea should remain. But a source of strength beyond the self need not be supernatural. It may be the collective wisdom of a group, the discipline of a tested programme, a clinician, a sponsor, a community, evidence, nature, love, service or a set of principles that the individual has chosen to live by.
A secular interpretation must therefore do more than delete the word God. It must preserve surrender without passivity, humility without self-erasure, responsibility without shame, and support without dependence. It must still require action.
This is important because prayer can become dangerous when it displaces practical responsibility. If someone is facing a medical, legal or safeguarding problem, spiritual practice may support them, but it is not a substitute for a doctor, solicitor or appropriate professional help. Good recovery should make us more willing to face reality, not less.
A secular reading of the Twelve Steps
I do not believe there is one authorised secular rewrite that everyone must adopt. The purpose is not to create a new orthodoxy. It is to make the working principles visible. In plain language, I understand them like this:
Acknowledge honestly that alcohol has taken control and that life has become unmanageable.
Accept that recovery will require help, knowledge and strength beyond your present resources.
Choose to draw on the experience, evidence and collective wisdom of people who have travelled this path before.
Examine your behaviour, motives, fears and resentments with courage and honesty.
Tell the truth about your conduct to yourself and to another trusted person.
Become willing to change the habits and character patterns that cause harm.
Seek support, practise humility and take concrete steps to change those patterns.
Identify the people you have harmed and become willing to repair what you can.
Make amends wherever doing so is safe and will not cause further harm.
Keep reviewing your behaviour and admit mistakes promptly.
Use reflection or meditation to deepen awareness and live these principles more consistently.
Share what has helped you, support others who seek recovery and apply these principles throughout your life.
The issue is choice, not replacement
Some people I interviewed welcomed a secular version immediately. They recognised the same actions without language that could frighten or alienate a newcomer. Others worried that changing the words would weaken the programme, breach AA traditions or encourage people to avoid the difficult idea of relying on something beyond themselves.
Those objections deserve respect. AA is independent, peer-led and free. Its autonomy is part of its strength, and I am not arguing for a public body to take it over or for religious members to lose a framework that sustains them.
Nor should a secular Twelve Step pathway be presented as the only answer. The current UK clinical guidance rightly emphasises personalised treatment and recovery planning. It recognises multiple forms of mutual aid, including AA and SMART Recovery, alongside psychological treatment, structured support and peer-led services. Different people need different doors into recovery.
This matters because a meeting is not the same thing as the whole fellowship, and one awkward encounter should not be allowed to close off every version of mutual aid. Better introductions, more varied settings, online options, secular groups and clearer language can all reduce the chance that people reject the mechanism before experiencing it.
Keep what works and widen the door
AA helped save my life. The fellowship gave me connection and the Steps gave me a way to examine how I was living. I remain grateful for both.
Gratitude, however, does not require silence. If a programme works, we should be confident enough to ask which parts create change and which parts reflect the culture in which it was written. Protecting the mechanism is not the same as preserving every word.
The Twelve Steps can ask people to be honest, accept help, make amends, practise humility, live reflectively and support others without telling them what they must believe about God. Faith can remain available to those for whom it is essential. It simply need not be the price of admission for everyone else.
After one of my interviews, a participant took a copy of a secular version of the Steps to a woman who had been struggling with AA’s religious language. She told him that she could now work with the programme and continue attending meetings because she had found a way to interpret it that made sense to her.
He called me afterwards and said, “There you go. You’ve saved one person already.”
I would put it differently: the programme was already capable of helping her. Changing the language simply allowed her to reach it.
How many more people might find a way into recovery if we widened that door?
Sources and further reading
Cochrane review of Alcoholics Anonymous and Twelve Step Facilitation
UK clinical guidelines for alcohol treatment on recovery support and mutual aid
UK clinical guidelines for alcohol treatment on psychosocial interventions
Alcoholics Anonymous Great Britain explanation of the Twelve Steps
Office for National Statistics Census 2021 religion data
NHS guidance on alcohol use disorder and withdrawal
Important
This article shares personal experience and commentary; it is not medical advice. If you are physically dependent on alcohol, stopping suddenly can be dangerous. Seek medical advice from a GP or alcohol service before trying to stop. In an emergency, call 999.
