February 6, 2025 Show with Jason Wallace on “The Cult of Alcoholics Anonymous”

The Setting, Prayer Request, and Topic Introduction

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours and we hope to hear from you the listener with your own.

Questions. And now here's your host, Chris Arnson. Good afternoon, Cumberland.

County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth. We're listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this sixth day of February 2025.

Please continue to keep my sister Mary in your prayers. Tomorrow she is having her right leg all the way up to above the knee amputated, and so please pray for her not only physically, but pray for her mentally, emotionally, and most of all spiritually.

So please pray for Mary as she is having her surgery tomorrow. That's Friday the 7th of February 2025, and I will give you folks updates on how everything goes. But today I am thrilled to have an old friend of mine who I've interviewed many times.

I'm looking forward to today's interview quite significantly because it is a topic near and dear to my heart, having been one who has been brought to repentance by the grace and mercy of our Sovereign God of the sin of drunkenness and habitual scandalous drunkenness, that is, not only before salvation but even during a backslidden state after salvation.

And so this topic is very close to my heart because I joined my guest in warning my fellow strugglers with addiction out there, warning them to avoid the Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous organizations and systems and meetings and so on, in spite of the fact that there are many who have had success in achieving sobriety in those organizations and remain sober after even decades.

But my guest today believes many more experience failure in achieving sobriety in these organizations. But that's even an issue that's not the most important factor of what we will be discussing today.

We are discussing the cult of Alcoholics Anonymous, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome back to the program Jason Wallace, who is pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation.

He's also a documentarian, and he is an organizer of public moderated theological debates. Welcome back to the.

Program, Jason Wallace. Thank you, Chris, it's always good to be back with you.

Christ Presbyterian Church in Utah and the Documentary's Origin

Tell our listeners something about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah, also known as Christ Presbyterian Church. Well, we started from scratch 27.

Years ago, and Utah is a difficult place. Where I come from in Georgia, the nominal Protestant population is generally around 65 percent. That's anything remotely identifiable as sort of not Catholic and not, you know, some kind of cult or something like that.

Here in Salt Lake County, it's barely 4 percent, and the next county south, it's two-thirds of 1 percent. That's from lesbian Episcopalians to, you know, whatever could in the wildest imagination be called somewhat Protestant.

When you start talking evangelicals, the number gets very small. This is a very difficult place, but the Lord's blessed. We've been here 27 years. The Lord's blessed us with a building. It's actually an Old Mormon meeting house, and.

We have a sister congregation. Oh yeah. I never knew that. What irony.

One down, several thousand to go. We have a sister congregation, excuse me, just getting over the flu, but we have a sister congregation in Clearfield, which is about 35 -40 miles north of us, and we have a mission work on Provo that is about 45.

Miles south of us. Great. And what is the website for that fine congregation? GospelUtah .org. Great. Well, what were the compelling factors that led you to the opinion to add to the growing number of documentaries that you have created?

And by the way, folks, they're masterfully done. They're very professionally done. When you see Jason Wallace's documentaries, it's as if, you know, one of the multi-million dollar networks that created it.

There's nothing low-budget looking in these documentaries, and even more importantly, they're filled with very important information and so on. But what was the compelling, or what were the compelling factors that said to yourself, I've got to do a documentary on the cult.

Of Alcoholics Anonymous? You're very kind, by the way. Thank you. I had had some exposure through friends to a little bit of AA. I really didn't know that much about it, but I tried witnessing a couple of years ago to a Mormon guy who was in AA, and he kept telling me that there was real repentance going on.

And I told him, I said, you know, unless your repentance is toward God, it's a game. And so we had an appointment for lunch, and he calls me up and tells me he wants me to meet him at this place instead.

Well, it's where the AA meeting is taking place, and he brought lunch for us. And so I actually sat in on a meeting and got to hear things, and it was appalling. Someone said they had upgraded their higher power from a doorknob to a rock.

Why would that be an upgrade?

I don't know. I mean, the doorknob apparently is mentioned in AA materials that it can be whatever you want it to be. And so if you want it to be a doorknob, it can be a doorknob. So that's apparently what a fair number of people start out, that they're going to make their higher power that they're accountable to a doorknob.

And she was upgrading. And you know, I hear stories from other people. There's an atheist who says that, I'll leave out the flowery language, but he believes there's nothing to AA in terms of there being a God.

But if you pretend that there's a God, it works. And, you know, there were people that were talking about how they had been sober for a couple of weeks. And, you know, we went around, and it was when we got through, the Mormon guy who had invited me there, he says, do you see what I mean?

I'm like, that's, where is any sorrow for offending the God who made you and gave you everything? Where is there any concern about the holiness of God? And he looked at me like I was from another planet.

So. Like his God. Yeah. And I, I got exposed to some, there were some other things that I saw that AA is apparently very big in Mormon culture and had some other exposure. So I started looking into it and I found out it's, it's, it's the same old story that I've dealt with in numerous other documentaries that, you know, people are claiming that they're getting direct revelation from God better than the Bible.

And I joked with a friend of mine that I had spoken with him about this. He went through AA and he told me that it started out as a Christian organization, but it had been co-opted. And he pointed me towards some books written by a guy that goes by the name of Dick B, the initial B, you know, because the anonymity thing.

But this guy supposedly traces the history of how what started as a Christian organization has been co-opted and, you know, the Lord's prayer has been replaced with the statement of unity and things like this.

So, yeah, I read some of these things, but as I began to peel back the layers and actually listen to what Bill Wilson said about AA and, you know, found out it came straight out of the Oxford group, which was an earlier thing that had stressed meetings and confession, you know, confession of sins in front of groups and things like this, that essentially this was the alcoholic wing of the Oxford group and got into some of their history.

It was, it was amazing. It was like Joseph Smith 2 .0. I mean, it's the same basic story that people aren't content with the biblical gospel. They try to edit it and they're getting new revelations. Some of your listeners may be familiar with the book Jesus Calling.

It was written by Sarah Young. There's been some controversy over it in the last couple of years. It was supposedly direct revelations that she was getting from Jesus. Well, it was actually inspired by a book that came out of the Oxford groups called God Calling.

And you listen to these people, you know, Bill Wilson took it in a little bit different direction, but it's the same basic claim. You know, he thought he was getting direct revelations from God. And he was also doing seances and claimed he was getting revelations from St. Francis of Assisi and angels and everyone else.

But it's the same basic story. We have a newer New Testament and it's works-based and the group is your great hope. And so my friend that was, had been part of AA and was telling me that it was, had started as a Christian organization.

I don't know if you've seen the little cartoon that Lutheran satire put out a few years ago,.

Where they're dealing with St. Patrick's analogies. Oh yeah, that is brilliant. And I posted on Facebook every St. Patrick's day. It's hilarious. Oh yeah, it's fun. I mean,.

They did a great job with that. And so I had a picture of the two little Irish guys and I added the subtitle underneath. It's like, that's Mormonism, Patrick. It's the same story. It's just, it just keeps getting rehashed.

But would you like me to go back to the beginning of all of the Oxford groups and sort of bring you forward or how would you.

Want to? Yeah, that would be good. That would be good. Eventually, before we get too deep, maybe when we come back from the midway break, or I'm sorry, when we come back from the first break, we can have you tell our listeners about positive things about AANA, the 12-step movement, because there may be people that are going to dismiss us immediately who believe they've been helped enormously, that their lives have been changed, their families have been rescued, they've been transformed and are new people and all that kind of thing, because that does happen.

Just like the addicts have found sobriety in the Nation of Islam or in Islam or in Mormonism or, you know, a host of other cults and false world religions that these people have with certainty, many of them, become sober.

But is that worth the exchange if you are going to be adopting a false religious ideology and worldview? But please start as far back as you can, and we will get to the positive elements of AANA. Let me give a taste of that.

I mean,.

I can develop it further, but I think that there's enough biblical truth in the 12 steps that they can provide a measure of help. And some people have gotten sober and found Christ by following, you know, looking for the deeper principles beyond what they're giving.

So yes, you can get sober. And yes, there's some biblical truth there. The problem is, it's sort of like Mormonism. Mormonism tells you, do not murder, do not lie, do not steal, unless the prophet tells you to.

But in general, they have some biblical principles that can be helpful, but they're divorced from the biblical God and the biblical gospel. And therefore, they will, at best, leave you empty, if not create idols for you.

And I.

Think AA becomes an idol. Yeah. Yeah, even God's own breathed-out words in the book of Proverbs, for instance, there is much in there that one might call common-sense teaching. But if you divorce it from obedience to God, and specifically Jesus Christ and the Triune Godhead, it is ultimately going to bring you to the same damnation as the worst addict and serial killer.

On the planet. Yeah. And drunkenness is a symptom of a deeper issue. You can make the symptom go away. It's sort of like, you know, a psychiatrist can prescribe you something to make you feel better without ever dealing with the fundamental problem of what caused that symptom.

And AA can make the symptom of drunkenness go away and maybe help you stay sober. But Bill Wilson essentially went from being a drunk to being a chain smoker, a serial adulterer, experimented for years with LSD, mushrooms.

I couldn't document this one, but it seems fairly substantive. It's talked about a lot even by his defenders that, you know, he did marijuana for years. This is a guy who said that LSD was as harmless as aspirin.

He was compulsive. He just changed his compulsion. But anyway, in terms of the history, when you listen to Bill Wilson, if you watch, if you go to the big book, you'll see a couple of offhand references to the Oxford group.

But if you actually go back and listen to the speeches of Bill Wilson, if you look at things like Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age, you know, their history book and things like this, they will flatly admit, yes, they got their start in the Oxford group.

And they actually functioned as what they called the alcoholic squadron of the Oxford group from.

1935 until 1939 was the real break. Weren't they even being criticized for being a sex cult.

Back then in the early 20th century? Oh, yeah. Well, the Oxford group was. Yeah, that's what I mean. And and so, you know, you'll see Sam Shoemaker mentioned prominently, you know, he figures he was a board member of AA.

He was the rector of my mind just slipped to gear, but.

The Episcopal Church on Park Avenue in New York. Yes, I've been in that building. It has historically a reformed roots. Stephen H. Ting, a thoroughgoing five point Calvinist, a low church Anglican, was the pastor of that church with the founding pastor of St. George's Episcopal Church in Manhattan in the 19th century.

And by the way, you could get several of Stephen H. Ting's wonderful books from Solid Ground Christian Books. Let me give them a plug real quick. Solid Ground Books dot com. Solid Ground Books dot com.

Stephen H. Ting. That's T Y N G. And I believe Stephen is spelled with a P H. But I interrupted you there.

You'll hear Sam Shoemaker called the head of the Oxford group. Well, he wasn't. The founder and head of the Oxford group was a guy by the name of Frank Buckman. And he's from Pennsylvania originally, and he grew up in Lutheran church and was ordained a Lutheran minister.

He goes to Philadelphia and becomes involved in ministry there. He sets up a home to minister to these young men that are flocking into the cities in the late 1800s because of industrialization, things like this.

And he has a falling out with his board that's overseeing this mission for the Lutheran church. And so he leaves. They said he was being too extravagant. So he quits that and goes on a tour of Europe.

And while he's on this tour, he goes to Keswick. And the Keswick had started several decades earlier as this holiness conference that was taking place. And it had inspired a number of things, including Alexander Dowie had connections with Keswick.

The Azusa Street revival is said to have flowed at least partially out of the Keswick movement. But the Keswick conference was based on the idea that the reformers had neglected the doctrine of sanctification, and they were going to bring a cessation of all known sin by a second work of grace, perfectionism.

If you just let go and let God, then you could no longer have to wrestle with sin. You would have this mystical experience that would make you sinless. And it finds its roots in Wesley and other mystical traditions.

But Buckman goes there, and he went to hear a speaker who didn't show up, the fellow that—oh, my mind is—I'm getting old, Chris.

Yeah, it's great to hear because you're younger than me.

Barely. Barely. But, oh, what was the guy's name?

Maybe give me another reference. I don't know. Maybe I'll think of it.

Oh, the guy, the Christian secret of guidance. Oh, what was his—anyway, he goes to hear the author of that book, and whose name will come to me in a moment here. But at any rate, he goes to hear him. He's not there.

But this guided prayer was being practiced by lots of others that went to the conference. And so what they tell Buckman is that the secret of divine guidance is that you pray, and then you empty your mind, you take a pen in hand, and you write out what the Spirit is supposedly telling you.

And it's automatic writing is one of the things, what it's known as in occult circles. But these are supposed to be direct revelations from God. And while he's there at Keswick, he hears Jesse Penn Warren speak.

And these are people who are telling you that if you just have enough faith, you won't be sick, you won't wrestle with sin. You just have to have enough faith. And he hears this, and he commits himself to absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness.

And it's perfectionism is what he's committing himself towards. And it's coupled with this mystical experience of this feeling of warmth running over you that's supposedly to confirm all this.

Is F .B. Mayer the person you were trying to remember?

Yes, yes. That's who I was trying to think of.

Okay.

And I believe so.

He wrote the most of the secret of guidance.

Yes, that's who I was reaching for.

Okay.

So he went there to hear Mayer, and he wasn't there, but he heard a number of others that were in this holiness wing of things. And he has this experience, and he believes that if he can just initiate others into this experience, then they will be free from sin as well.

And this is going to transform the world if other people can be brought to experience this same thing. He becomes the YMCA secretary at Penn State for, I believe, four years, and he was essentially a campus minister.

And what he does is instead of preaching Christ crucified, he goes to the young men, and he tells them what he thinks that God has revealed to him about their sins. And surprise, surprise, he tells these 18, 19, 20-year-old young men in college that it's sexual sin that is their problem.

And he confesses his sins to them to elicit a confession from them. And as you might expect, this turns a lot of people off, but for those who hear him seeming to have this great spiritual insight into their lives, and he's claiming he's getting it by direct revelation from the Holy Spirit, they confess these things that they've been ashamed of, and they experience this catharsis.

That, how did you know that, you know, at 19 years of age, that sexual sin was a great problem? Temptation for me. It must be by divine revelation.

You need a divine revelation to know that.

Yeah, I remember my father saying, you know, water is wet, ice is cold, fire is hot. Yeah, it's not a great stretch in my mind to think that teenage boys, you know, boys in their late teens would have sex on their minds.

By the way, you got to pick up where you left off. We have to go to our first commercial break, so just pick up where you left off and don't forget where you left off. We'll be right back after these messages.

Don't go away.

I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.

At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession. We embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our triune God.

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We can be reached at securecommgroup .com. That's securecommgroup .com. But today, I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.

Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt God's pleasure when he ran.

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So please go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Trip and Zion Radio. We're now back with our discussion with my dear friend for many years, Pastor Jason Wallace of Christ Presbyterian Church, an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Magna, Utah.

We are discussing The Cult of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is also the title of his latest documentary that he produces through Ancient Paths TV, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com.

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Okay, and for some people, they don't want to hear about the Oxford group, they just want to focus on Bill Wilson, but you know, Bill Wilson says everything in AA came from the Oxford group. They functioned as the alcoholic squadron, they call themselves, of the Oxford group from 35 to 39.

Dr. Bob had been in the Oxford group for two and a half years prior to Bill Wilson meeting him, you know, the thing, the story of how they met and how AA was found and everything else.

And again, to repeat from what I said last half hour, the Oxford group was even being exposed in newspaper articles by concerned citizens as being a sex cult.

Oh yeah.

And why was that? Tell us why that was the case.

Okay, well basically this approach, you know, Buckman goes to Keswick in 1908 and has this experience, goes to Penn State, serves as the YMCA secretary until 1915. He goes and confronts these young men and tells them that God has told them their sin is sex, and he confesses his own sins and expects them to confess theirs, and then gets them all together and they all confess their sins together.

So he kind of hones this at the YMCA. 1915, he leaves for China and decides that the reason that they're not seeing great success there is that God has revealed to him that there's sexual sin on the part of the missionaries.

And he begins to make very specific personal accusations based on supposed direct revelation, and people get tired and they lash out at him and he ends up being sent home. So he comes back to the U .S. and he founds the First Century Christian Fellowship, and he draws a lot of the folks that he had met at Penn State become part of this.

Sam Shoemaker, he met him in China, he becomes his number one disciple, and they focus on college students. And in 1928, Time magazine ran an article on the Buckmanites, as they called them, and it started with a little ditty from Princeton, noisy, dirty, impolite, nobody likes a Buckmanite.

Oh yeah, and New York Times was calling this a sex cult because 1927, I think was the earliest article in the New York Times, but this was creating a scandal among the elite schools. One of the things that Buckman had complained about in China was that they were focusing on the people as a whole.

And he said what they should have been doing was focusing on the rich and powerful, that they were the ones who could really transform a nation. And so you see that mindset of convert the elite, and then that will carry down, applied in his First Century Christian Fellowship.

Now that name ends up getting changed to the Oxford Group. Later, he supposedly gets divine revelation to change it to moral rearmament. And I mean, we'll get to that, but some people may have heard of that.

Glenn Close grew up in moral rearmament, publicly denounced as a cult, yeah, the actress. But this First Century Christian Fellowship, this idea was not to go back to primitive Christianity, it was to jettison all theology in favor of experience.

Now, how did it, can you please explain, I'm still baffled, how did it go from being a puritanical movement of calling people to repent of their fornication and adultery to a movement that was scandalously known for participating in those sins?

David. Well, it was the public confession of these things that was creating the scandal. It wasn't that they were indulging in these things. So, the bugmanites would go up to a stranger and say, I've been praying and God has put it on my heart to come and confront you about your sexual sin.

And they would name a very specific thing. And, you know, if they didn't get punched in the teeth, you know, get punched out. Sometimes they, I mean, and they typically would aim towards college age guys.

But they got a big following. And there was an Episcopal magazine called The Churchman that did a series of articles on what they called the Frank Buckman, Sam Shoemaker cult. And talked about the religious frenzy.

New Time magazine talked about religious frenzy. And if you can imagine, here are people in the 1920s that have strangers coming up to them and telling them, God has told me to confront you with this sin.

And they end up confessing it in front of others. And they all get together and they all confess their sins in scandalous ways. And this is supposed to be the washing out that leads them to absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness.

And it has an effect on people. I mean, it's a catharsis. And Sam Shoemaker called it the salvation army for the educated. They really aimed at the top schools, especially Ivy League schools. I think Sam Shoemaker was a Yale grad, if I'm remembering correctly.

And so the Churchman described one of their campaigns, there was a broader, they sort of insinuated themselves in with other evangelical, even evangelistic groups like the YMCA early on. And so they had this revival that they tried to have back in the 20s.

And it's described in the video, you know, you have one person become so emotionally overwrought, they are hospitalized for an epileptic fit. You have a minister who is so overwhelmed, he said he saw Jesus on the side of the road and pulled over and walked into the woods with him and wept and wept with Jesus.

It creates this mania among a lot of folks. On the one hand, you've got this, these revelations of the deepest, darkest secrets publicly, but also this ecstatic experience that's being coined. And the funny thing is, even in those days, even in the 20s, when this first gets started, the Buckman said, we don't want to make Catholics and Jews into Protestants,.

We want them to be better Catholics and Jews. I wonder if that's where Mother Teresa got that.

Slogan. Oh, I think it goes back to Cain, personally.

Well, I didn't say she invented it, I said. Maybe she picked it up from them.

Oh, I understand. But it's a very moralistic, it's very ecstatic, very moralistic, and yet very optimistic. They believed they were going to remake the world. And so the Oxford group, you need to recognize this is between the wars.

And this found a ready audience. People ate it up. And when, when Buckman changes the name to Moral Rearmament, they issue a manifesto. And one of the signers of the manifesto is the guy who has just left being prime minister of Great Britain, along with, you know, just this litany of leading British and American politicians and sportsmen and others.

I mean, this thing's huge. They had followers, I think, by 1937, they were in 55 countries. So this was, this was, you know, in less than a dozen years, people ate up this, this thing. And Buckman was telling everybody, you can talk directly to God and get direct revelation.

And so one of the, he didn't write any new scriptures, but he got his followers to do it. And so one of the, one of the things that comes out of this,.