The group as higher power: Analyzing the spiritual model of the 12-Step program
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it