The Serenity Prayer: Secularism and Spirituality in Gamblers Anonymous
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gamblers Anonymous (GA) has long been described in the scientific literature as more secular in orientation than similar 12-step fellowships such as Alcoholics Anonymous. Through interviews and meeting observations during the course of two studies (beginning in 2003), we found this reputation well earned, with GA putting considerably less emphasis on the “12 steps” themselves. The latter is a spiritual process designed to facilitate and enhance recovery from addictive behaviors and lifestyles. Instead, GA favors an arguably pragmatic emphasis on abstinence from gambling and tasks such as dealing with debts. Yet much of the available literature is nonetheless dated. We also found that GA has become more spiritual in orientation during the last two decades. In this article, we explore the uneasy tension between secularism and spirituality in GA, with special attention to the role played by the Serenity Prayer in this fellowship. The prayer invokes God yet is favored even by the most ardently secular GA members we interviewed. Here, the Serenity Prayer is used as a window into a highly creative approach to spiritual matters—one that is arguably unique to GA in the world of 12-step recovery.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".