Step Two

“Came to believe that a Power greater than

ourselves could restore us to sanity.”

THE moment they read Step Two, most A.A. newcom-

ers are confronted with a dilemma, sometimes a serious
one. How often have we heard them cry out, “Look what
you people have done to us! You have convinced us that we
are alcoholics and that our lives are unmanageable. Hav-
ing reduced us to a state of absolute helplessness, you now
declare that none but a Higher Power can remove our ob-
session. Some of us won’t believe in God, others can’t, and
still others who do believe that God exists have no faith
whatever He will perform this miracle. Yes, you’ve got
us over the barrel, all right—but where do we go from
here?”
Let’s look first at the case of the one who says he won’t
believe—the belligerent one. He is in a state of mind which
can be described only as savage. His whole philosophy of
life, in which he so gloried, is threatened. It’s bad enough,
he thinks, to admit alcohol has him down for keeps. But
now, still smarting from that admission, he is faced with
something really impossible. How he does cherish the
thought that man, risen so majestically from a single cell
in the primordial ooze, is the spearhead of evolution and
therefore the only god that his universe knows! Must he
renounce all this to save himself ?

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At this juncture, his A.A. sponsor usually laughs. This,

the newcomer thinks, is just about the last straw. This is
the beginning of the end. And so it is: the beginning of
the end of his old life, and the beginning of his emergence
into a new one. His sponsor probably says, “Take it easy.
The hoop you have to jump through is a lot wider than you
think. At least I’ve found it so. So did a friend of mine who
was a one-time vice-president of the American Atheist So-
ciety, but he got through with room to spare.”
“Well,” says the newcomer, “I know you’re telling me the
truth. It’s no doubt a fact that A.A. is full of people who
once believed as I do. But just how, in these circumstances,
does a fellow ‘take it easy’? That’s what I want to know.”
“That,” agrees the sponsor, “is a very good question in-
deed. I think I can tell you exactly how to relax. You won’t
have to work at it very hard, either. Listen, if you will, to
these three statements. First, Alcoholics Anonymous does
not demand that you believe anything. All of its Twelve
Steps are but suggestions. Second, to get sober and to stay
sober, you don’t have to swallow all of Step Two right now.
Looking back, I find that I took it piecemeal myself. Third,
all you really need is a truly open mind. Just resign from
the debating society and quit bothering yourself with such
deep questions as whether it was the hen or the egg that
came first. Again I say, all you need is the open mind.”
The sponsor continues, “Take, for example, my own
case. I had a scientific schooling. Naturally I respected,
venerated, even worshiped science. As a matter of fact, I
still do—all except the worship part. Time after time, my
instructors held up to me the basic principle of all scien-
 STEP TWO 27

tific progress: search and research, again and again, always

with the open mind. When I first looked at A.A. my re-
action was just like yours. This A.A. business, I thought,
is totally unscientific. This I can’t swallow. I simply won’t
consider such nonsense.
“Then I woke up. I had to admit that A.A. showed re-
sults, prodigious results. I saw that my attitude regarding
these had been anything but scientific. It wasn’t A.A. that
had the closed mind, it was me. The minute I stopped ar-
guing, I could begin to see and feel. Right there, Step Two
gently and very gradually began to infiltrate my life. I can’t
say upon what occasion or upon what day I came to believe
in a Power greater than myself, but I certainly have that
belief now. To acquire it, I had only to stop fighting and
practice the rest of A.A.’s program as enthusiastically as
I could.
“This is only one man’s opinion based on his own experi-
ence, of course. I must quickly assure you that A.A.’s tread
innumerable paths in their quest for faith. If you don’t care
for the one I’ve suggested, you’ll be sure to discover one
that suits if only you look and listen. Many a man like you
has begun to solve the problem by the method of substitu-
tion. You can, if you wish, make A.A. itself your ‘higher
power.’ Here’s a very large group of people who have solved
their alcohol problem. In this respect they are certainly a
power greater than you, who have not even come close to a
solution. Surely you can have faith in them. Even this mini-
mum of faith will be enough. You will find many members
who have crossed the threshold just this way. All of them
will tell you that, once across, their faith broadened and
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deepened. Relieved of the alcohol obsession, their lives un-

accountably transformed, they came to believe in a Higher
Power, and most of them began to talk of God.”
Consider next the plight of those who once had faith,
but have lost it. There will be those who have drifted into
indifference, those filled with self-sufficiency who have cut
themselves off, those who have become prejudiced against
religion, and those who are downright defiant because God
has failed to fulfill their demands. Can A.A. experience tell
all these they may still find a faith that works?
Sometimes A.A. comes harder to those who have lost
or rejected faith than to those who never had any faith at
all, for they think they have tried faith and found it want-
ing. They have tried the way of faith and the way of no
faith. Since both ways have proved bitterly disappointing,
they have concluded there is no place whatever for them to
go. The roadblocks of indifference, fancied self-sufficiency,
prejudice, and defiance often prove more solid and formi-
dable for these people than any erected by the unconvinced
agnostic or even the militant atheist. Religion says the ex-
istence of God can be proved; the agnostic says it can’t be
proved; and the atheist claims proof of the nonexistence of
God. Obviously, the dilemma of the wanderer from faith is
that of profound confusion. He thinks himself lost to the
comfort of any conviction at all. He cannot attain in even
a small degree the assurance of the believer, the agnostic,
or the atheist. He is the bewildered one.
Any number of A.A.’s can say to the drifter, “Yes, we
were diverted from our childhood faith, too. The overcon-
fidence of youth was too much for us. Of course, we were
 STEP TWO 29

glad that good home and religious training had given us

certain values. We were still sure that we ought to be fairly
honest, tolerant, and just, that we ought to be ambitious
and hardworking. We became convinced that such simple
rules of fair play and decency would be enough.
“As material success founded upon no more than these
ordinary attributes began to come to us, we felt we were
winning at the game of life. This was exhilarating, and it
made us happy. Why should we be bothered with theologi-
cal abstractions and religious duties, or with the state of
our souls here or hereafter? The here and now was good
enough for us. The will to win would carry us through. But
then alcohol began to have its way with us. Finally, when
all our score cards read ‘zero,’ and we saw that one more
strike would put us out of the game forever, we had to look
for our lost faith. It was in A.A. that we rediscovered it.
And so can you.”
Now we come to another kind of problem: the intellec-
tually self-sufficient man or woman. To these, many A.A.’s
can say, “Yes, we were like you—far too smart for our own
good. We loved to have people call us precocious. We used
our education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons,
though we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly,
we felt we could float above the rest of the folks on our
brainpower alone. Scientific progress told us there was
nothing man couldn’t do. Knowledge was all-powerful. In-
tellect could conquer nature. Since we were brighter than
most folks (so we thought), the spoils of victory would be
ours for the thinking. The god of intellect displaced the
God of our fathers. But again John Barleycorn had other
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ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk turned

into all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or
die. We found many in A.A. who once thought as we did.
They helped us to get down to our right size. By their ex-
ample they showed us that humility and intellect could be
compatible, provided we placed humility first. When we
began to do that, we received the gift of faith, a faith which
works. This faith is for you, too.”
Another crowd of A.A.’s says: “We were plumb disgust-
ed with religion and all its works. The Bible, we said, was
full of nonsense; we could cite it chapter and verse, and we
couldn’t see the Beatitudes for the ‘begats.’ In spots its mo-
rality was impossibly good; in others it seemed impossibly
bad. But it was the morality of the religionists themselves
that really got us down. We gloated over the hypocrisy,
bigotry, and crushing self-righteousness that clung to so
many ‘believers’ even in their Sunday best. How we loved
to shout the damaging fact that millions of the ‘good men
of religion’ were still killing one another off in the name
of God. This all meant, of course, that we had substituted
negative for positive thinking. After we came to A.A., we
had to recognize that this trait had been an ego-feeding
proposition. In belaboring the sins of some religious peo-
ple, we could feel superior to all of them. Moreover, we
could avoid looking at some of our own shortcomings.
Self-righteousness, the very thing that we had contemp-
tuously condemned in others, was our own besetting evil.
This phony form of respectability was our undoing, so
far as faith was concerned. But finally, driven to A.A., we
learned better.
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“As psychiatrists have often observed, defiance is the

outstanding characteristic of many an alcoholic. So it’s not
strange that lots of us have had our day at defying God
Himself. Sometimes it’s because God has not delivered
us the good things of life which we specified, as a greedy
child makes an impossible list for Santa Claus. More of-
ten, though, we had met up with some major calamity, and
to our way of thinking lost out because God deserted us.
The girl we wanted to marry had other notions; we prayed
God that she’d change her mind, but she didn’t. We prayed
for healthy children, and were presented with sick ones,
or none at all. We prayed for promotions at business, and
none came. Loved ones, upon whom we heartily depended,
were taken from us by so-called acts of God. Then we be-
came drunkards, and asked God to stop that. But nothing
happened. This was the unkindest cut of all. ‘Damn this
faith business!’ we said.
“When we encountered A.A., the fallacy of our defiance
was revealed. At no time had we asked what God’s will was
for us; instead we had been telling Him what it ought to
be. No man, we saw, could believe in God and defy Him,
too. Belief meant reliance, not defiance. In A.A. we saw the
fruits of this belief: men and women spared from alcohol’s
final catastrophe. We saw them meet and transcend their
other pains and trials. We saw them calmly accept impos-
sible situations, seeking neither to run nor to recriminate.
This was not only faith; it was faith that worked under all
conditions. We soon concluded that whatever price in hu-
mility we must pay, we would pay.”
Now let’s take the guy full of faith, but still reeking of
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alcohol. He believes he is devout. His religious observance

is scrupulous. He’s sure he still believes in God, but sus-
pects that God doesn’t believe in him. He takes pledges and
more pledges. Following each, he not only drinks again,
but acts worse than the last time. Valiantly he tries to fight
alcohol, imploring God’s help, but the help doesn’t come.
What, then, can be the matter?
To clergymen, doctors, friends, and families, the alcohol-
ic who means well and tries hard is a heartbreaking riddle.
To most A.A.’s, he is not. There are too many of us who
have been just like him, and have found the riddle’s answer.
This answer has to do with the quality of faith rather than
its quantity. This has been our blind spot. We supposed we
had humility when really we hadn’t. We supposed we had
been serious about religious practices when, upon honest
appraisal, we found we had been only superficial. Or, going
to the other extreme, we had wallowed in emotionalism and
had mistaken it for true religious feeling. In both cases, we
had been asking something for nothing. The fact was we
really hadn’t cleaned house so that the grace of God could
enter us and expel the obsession. In no deep or meaningful
sense had we ever taken stock of ourselves, made amends
to those we had harmed, or freely given to any other hu-
man being without any demand for reward. We had not
even prayed rightly. We had always said, “Grant me my
wishes” instead of “Thy will be done.” The love of God
and man we understood not at all. Therefore we remained
self-deceived, and so incapable of receiving enough grace
to restore us to sanity.
Few indeed are the practicing alcoholics who have any
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idea how irrational they are, or seeing their irrationality,

can bear to face it. Some will be willing to term themselves
“problem drinkers,” but cannot endure the suggestion that
they are in fact mentally ill. They are abetted in this blind-
ness by a world which does not understand the difference
between sane drinking and alcoholism. “Sanity” is defined
as “soundness of mind.” Yet no alcoholic, soberly analyz-
ing his destructive behavior, whether the destruction fell on
the dining-room furniture or his own moral fiber, can claim
“soundness of mind” for himself.
Therefore, Step Two is the rallying point for all of us.
Whether agnostic, atheist, or former believer, we can stand
together on this Step. True humility and an open mind can
lead us to faith, and every A.A. meeting is an assurance that
God will restore us to sanity if we rightly relate ourselves
to Him.