Any Way They Liked

The Long Form gives two or three alcoholics a freedom so wide it alarms people, because the alternative is someone with the power to decide what A.A. is. The Long Form (Big Book, p. 563): "Any two or three alcoholics gathered together for sobriety may call themselves an A.A. group, provided that, as a group, they have no other affiliation." Bill W. did not soften it (A.A. Comes of Age): "This means that these two or three alcoholics could try for sobriety in any way they liked. They could disagree with any or all of A.A.'s principles and still call themselves an A.A. group." He saw the threat on the other side. Without that liberty, A.A. could harden into "a frozen set of dogmatic principles that could not be changed even when obviously wrong." Dogmatic means laid down as law, not to be questioned. And he trusted the bottle to do the correcting no office could: "In the end the innovators would have to adopt A.A. principles—at least some of them— in order to remain sober at all." Notice the one line the clause does draw. Not style, not format, not belief. Affiliation. Today the danger arrives as somebody's list of approved meetings. Test it tonight: when someone says a group "isn't real A.A.," ask whether they mean it has another affiliation, or only that it does things differently.