The Spiritual Heroes of 12 Step Recovery
Oxford Group founder Frank Buchman died in 1961 at the age of 83. Attending his funeral were dignitaries, both political and religious, from the four corners of the world; but his passing was hardly noticed within the circles of Alcoholics Anonymous. The man whose life and philosophy helped shape the 12 Steps arguably more than either Bill Wilson or Dr. Bob was laid to rest in his native Pennsylvania soil where the founding fathers of the A.A. fellowship hoped his memory and connection to their program would remain buried with him forever. But why was that? What great “family secrets” led A.A. to close the door and seal it so tightly on the memory of Frank Buchman? While the answer to these questions may never be fully known, two factors certainly contributed to it. Understanding these, I believe, may help us better understand the 12 Step programs and their traditions as they’ve been handed down.
While Buchman was always a controversial figure, in 1938 he outdid himself making a statement that escalated criticism of him and his followers to new heights. “I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler.” he said to a reporter in Europe. The statement made news around the world and Buchman’s reputation never really recovered from it. Buchman’s thinking was always black and white leaving no room for gray. He saw communism as posing the greatest threat to the world and anything that stood in opposition to it, even in the form of the Nazi madman, he thought, couldn’t be all bad.
In that same interview he went on to ask, “… what would it mean to the world if Hitler surrendered to the control of God? Or Mussolini. Or any dictator. Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem... Human problems …could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.” Fundamentalism, particularly the religious kind, always presents itself as having laid hold of very simple answers to all of the world’s complex problems. As we’re seeing again today, it can lead to tragic consequences.
But even through his errors, Buchman’s legacy lives on. We can probably trace him as a major contributing source of A.A’s 10th tradition assuring that “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues” and, therefore its name “ought never be drawn into public controversy.” Wilson witnessed firsthand the controversy that swirled around the Oxford Group as a result of their leaders dangerous and intemperate remarks. And it’s likely that the 11th tradition was similarly influenced by Bill Wilson’s memory of Buchman; and so he reminded members that they “…need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films.”
A second major area of controversy that led A.A. toward suppression of Buchman’s memory was centered on the Catholic Church. The Oxford Group beliefs and practices had been suspect in Rome for some time and plans were being developed to forbid Catholics from joining or participating in the Group. Fr. John Ford, a Catholic priest and friend of Wilson’s who “proof-read” much A.A. literature from a Catholic point of view before its publication, wrote of the Oxford Group that, “ this movement… is a religious movement with fundamentally Protestant, theological orientation, an involves Catholics in serious danger to their faith.” The church especially took exception to the Oxford Group’s emphasis on the sharing of one’s faults with other members in what seemed to circumvent the role of sacramental confession. It was beginning to warn Catholics to steer clear.
However, in the late 1930’s, much of the early growth of A.A. was centering in Cleveland, Ohio where many of its new members were first and second generation immigrants, many of Catholic descent. The writers of the Big Book wanted to avoid their young group’s connection with Buchman lest the church ban Catholics from participation and so nearly every reference or hint of association with the Oxford Group was carefully removed. References to the Four Absolutes (Absolute Honesty, Purity, Unselfishness and Love) were deleted since they were so closely linked in the public’s mind with the Group. Instead, Wilson cleverly reversed these and focused attention on their opposites stressing that the alcoholic’s problem stemmed from dishonesty, self-centeredness, selfishness and a lack of love. When he was later asked what became of the Four Absolutes in A.A., he said, “Look at Steps Six and Seven.”
In his later writings, Bill Wilson listed a number of individuals who contributed to the fellowship’s formation as “co-founders of A.A.” But he never included the name of Frank Buchman. In light of both the political and the Catholic controversy that surrounded Buchman’s life, it might be enlightening to close with some words written in eulogy for Buchman by Cardinal Franz Koenig, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Vienna who almost became pope. Koenig wrote, “Buchman was a turning point in the history of the modern world. In the last century, there was a feeling among intellectuals that we could build a better world without God. Then came the First World War, and many felt that many things had gone wrong. Buchman was among them, and he began to think what could be done. His great idea was to show that the teachings of Jesus Christ is not just a private affair but has the great force to change the whole structure of economics, of political ideas, if we combine the changing of structures with the changing of heart. In that sense he opened a completely new approach to religion, to the teachings of Jesus Christ, and to the life of modern man.”
Koenig never met Frank Buchman but he could see the living legacy of the Oxford Group not only in A.A., but also throughout the world where Buchman’s Group always sought reconciliation among warring parties through the kind of radical forgiveness and radical surrender that he believed Jesus practiced. “Wherever (they and their principles) are active, there emerges a new world – in small circles first, but the activity shows how great the force is…. If I consider the information which comes to me from all over the world, I see changes which are visible and social effects which are tangible. This must come from the faith of the man who was at the beginning, otherwise I could not explain what has happened since in so many places. ‘By their fruits you shall know them.’ From the fruit you go back to the root.” Frank Buchman, in spite of his notoriety and his shortcomings, was the taproot of 12 Step spirituality.