The AA Preamble.

[Dan]

"The term 'Conference-approved' describes written or audiovisual material approved by the Conference for publication by GSO. This process assures that everything in such literature is in accord with AA principles. Conference-approved material always deals with the recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous or with information about the AA Fellowship."

"The term has no relation to material not published by GSO. It does not imply Conference disapproval of other material about AA. A great deal of literature helpful to alcoholics is published by others, and AA does not try to tell any individual member what he or she may or may not read."

"Conference approval assures us that a piece of literature represents solid AA experience. Any Conference-approved booklet or pamphlet goes through a lengthy and painstaking process, during which a variety of AAs from all over the United States and Canada read and express opinions at every stage of production."

A statement taken from service material released by the GSO in New York.
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" From 1951 on, the Trustees Literature Committee, the Conference Literature Committee, and the participants in the General Service Conferences have overseen the content of AA literature which was published by the AA General Service Office.

The Delegates whom the Areas elect and send to New York are of varying degrees of wisdom and experience. I still cringe at the memory of one unbelievably ignorant and obnoxious Delegate who was elected from an Area in my part of the upper midwest around twenty years ago, in a moment of panic when the candidate who was supposed to have run (and would have done an extremely good job) backed out at the last moment. Some Delegates have had years in the program and some have not much time at all. Almost none have any detailed knowledge of early A.A. history, and the way good old-time A.A. actually worked. All have their own individual points of view.

Their decisions as a group usually reflect a good deal of common sense when dealing with disputed issues. But none of the Delegates whom we elect are divinely inspired, and all of them are ordinary human beings who also have the capability of making disastrously wrong choices. They are no better and no worse than the people who are elected to the U.S. Congress or the British Parliament (neither of which bodies has ever been thought of as a source of divinely inspired and hence universally infallible Truth with a capital T). Actually attend one of your Area Assemblies and listen to the debates to see what I mean.

Drunks who try to get sober by mechanically following all conference pronouncements to the letter will find that there is no magical rule book anywhere which will allow people to heal their spiritual problems by blindly obeying hundreds and thousands of rules. People who try that are seeking the "easier, softer way" that never works, and refusing to take full adult responsibility for their own behavior and its consequences.

William James noted that the human race requires a variety of different kinds of religious experience, because different people are of different psychological types. This means that the Delegates as a group can talk about spirituality only in terms of bland generalizations and inoffensive little greeting card statements. If they back anything stronger, it will be greeted with cheers by one portion of the A.A. membership, but attacked on the spot by all the people whose personalities require a different kind of spirituality. And this in turn means that -- once Bill Wilson was dead and was no longer using the New York operation to publish works expressing his own powerful and highly individualistic spiritual vision -- the GSO has never been able to sponsor any publication written by anyone else which goes into spirituality at any real depth.

All of this means that there are limits to what we can expect from conference approved statements. But a crisis was created within A.A. at the end of the twentieth century when events which had taken place during the 1970's and 1980's created highly vocal groups of A.A. members in the 1990's who had forgotten this simple fact, and who also did not know enough about good old-time A.A. to realize that they were cutting the modern program off from the very roots of the A.A. tradition.

It is a major crisis -- bigger than many people realize -- because cut flowers (separated from their roots) may continue to bloom for a while when stuck in a vase of water, but are not going to continue to blossom for years to come. They will in time wither and die, and will not be able to rejuvenate themselves so that they can ever blossom again.

No one worried at all, you see, about whether a piece of literature about alcoholism and the A.A. program was or was not a conference-approved publication paid for and printed by the New York office until the 1970's, when passage of the Hughes Act eventually gave rise to thousands of self-proclaimed alcoholism treatment facilities living off the enormous amount of health insurance money which now started becoming available.

These places were all too often run by psychiatrists and psychotherapists who were hostile to the A.A. program and had their own unworkable theories about alcoholism treatment. In fact from the very beginning -- one can see it happening already in the debates and power struggles over the Hughes Act in the U.S. Congress when it was being passed -- a large number of psychiatrists were doing their best to divert all the funds and grants which had been intended to help suffering alcoholics, and transfer all this money into their own pockets.

Then alcoholics started coming out of some of these treatment programs, brainwashed by the kind of psychiatrists and psychotherapists who looked down on the twelve-step program with contempt, and indoctrinated by that group of mental health professionals who were convinced they could produce long-lasting recovery in more "scientific" fashion through their own bag of psychological gimmicks. When these treatment center graduates started attending A.A. meetings, bringing their treatment center books and pamphlets with them, it caused instant problems. The easiest way for A.A. old-timers to combat these unworkable strategies for recovery -- or so it seemed at the time -- was to say that "we cannot read and discuss that material here because it is not conference approved."

The actual enemy they were combatting when they used this tactic, we must realize, was that group of hostile psychiatrists and psychotherapists who had taken over so many of the newly created alcoholism treatment facilities and the vast body of "psychobabble" literature (written by them) that had now started flooding into the commercial bookstores. The people running the A.A. meetings were focused in such single-minded fashion on attacking that specific kind of literature that they did not stop to think about how much traditional A.A. literature was ALSO not conference-approved, at least not in that kind of legalistic fashion.

By the end of the 1990's, most of these insurance-money-financed treatment centers had disappeared, the commercial bookstores had quit carrying shelf after sheft of "recovery" books written to make money, and the issue should rightfully have died at that point.

That problem was that some of the younger A.A. people had come to believe during that period -- falsely -- that A.A. rules said that A.A. meetings were not allowed to read or discuss any material on alcoholism at all which was not "conference approved." And they began extending this imaginary rule (which was never an actual rule in the first place) and began insisting that intergroup offices and other A.A. functions were not allowed to sell even greatly admired traditional works such as Twenty-Four Hours a Day or The Little Red Book or Emmet Fox's Sermon on the Mount.

This was in spite of the fact that there have been endless statements coming out of the New York office itself for over sixty years saying that they "were not policemen" and that A.A. groups could read and sell any books they wanted to -- and in spite of the fact that the universal witness of the good old-timers from the 1940's and 50's is that A.A.'s back then had no rules about what people could or could not read, and that "we read anything that might get us sober" (see The Books the Good Old-Timers Read, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). Getting sober is not a matter of making up silly childish rules for people to follow, but a task which demands that we start thinking for ourselves, and taking personal responsibility for our own lives and our own decisions, and that we do whatever we have to do in order to save our lives.

This misunderstanding, by some of the younger A.A. people during the 1990's, has created a situation, a decade later, in which A.A. is now in danger of being completely cut off from its traditional roots because of this small but highly vocal group of people who fail to understand what the term "conference approved" actually means, and are invoking this phrase to try to turn A.A. into the kind of dangerously authoritarian cult where the gurus or cult leaders attempt to practice total thought control over all their members, and where salvation is believed to come from fanatically following hundreds of arbitrary rules laid out by a small circle of people at the top.

I am trying to avoid sounding overdramatic about this issue, but an A.A. which no longer follows the traditional A.A. program laid down by the good old-timers, will lose its heart and spirit, and its power to transform human lives and lift lost souls out of the miry pit where they had lain them down to die. The good old-timers took what they received from God and passed it on to us. We in turn must take their message and pass it on to the next generation of newcomers, or we will have failed to carry out the task which God assigned us.

How could it conceivably be "against the rules" in A.A. to read what these good old-timers wrote, and the books that they advised newcomers to read? Let's start using some simple common sense. The authentic tradition of the good old-timers -- the ones who were proved to be channels of grace by the hundreds of lives they saved -- is the most accurate touchstone we possess for judging the worth of our message and our practices today."
Glenn C.