The group as higher power: Analyzing the spiritual model of the 12-Step program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 12-Step program remains the most prolific avenue for addiction recovery. The program is resourced by a model of spirituality that centers the personal experience and belief of the individual within a larger context of mutual support, thus locating a personalistic spiritual quest within a framework for social cohesion. Despite the program’s prolific reach and apparent effectiveness, however, critical attention has not been given to how the 12-Step model of spirituality relates to, and illuminates, broader trends in spirituality-religion in late modernity. The program’s model arose in response to the pressures of secularization, drawing mutually on Jamesian analyses of spirituality-religion and the revivalist subculture of American evangelicalism. The enduring problems related to holding these influences in tension offer insight into the kinds of ‘spiritual but not religious’ models that were, in part, vitalized by the 12-Steps. Examining the program’s model of spirituality, both historical and contemporary, demonstrates that its success lies in its capacity to nurture community and shared purpose while promoting a relativistic approach to belief, thereby underscoring how belief in a ‘Higher Power’ can be de-centered, while not wholly discarded, in meaningful models of spiritual community.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".