In current twelve-step program usage, a higher power can be anything at all that the member believes is adequate. Reported examples include their twelve-step group, nature, consciousness, existential freedom, God, science, and Buddha. It is frequently stipulated that as long as a higher power is "greater" than the individual, then the only condition is that it should also be loving and caring.
Alcoholics Anonymous
The terms higher power and power greater than ourselves appear in the "Big Book", on three occasions:
Sociologist Darren Sherkat researched the belief of Americans in a higher power. He based his research on data from 8,000 adults polled by the Chicago-based National Opinion Research Center between 1988 and 2000. Among his findings were that 8% stated "I don't believe in a personal god, but I do believe in a higher power of some kind." This is the same figure as found by the 1999 Gallup national poll of Americans. Sherkat also found that 16% of the Jewish people surveyed agreed with the statement about a 'higher power', while 13.2% of liberal Protestants and 10.6% of Episcopalians also agreed with it. An empirically based recovery framework likened faith in a higher power to motivation for personal growth as described by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.
Criticism
Christian
was founded by a group of Christians who criticized the higher power concept as being too vague. In the twelve-step derived group, Jesus is the only higher power allowed.
Gender theory
M. E. O'Hare-Lavin argues that the concept of a higher power represents a masculine perception of spiritual recovery, such as the hero's journeys of Moses, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Odysseus, Icarus and Percival, and that the archetypal feminine heroic journey is a chthonic underworld journey, lower and deeper; like those of Persephone, Psyche, Eurydice and Inanna. Her opinion is that the higher power spirituality may not necessarily be relevant to women in recovery.
The children's novelThe Higher Power of Lucky, which received the Newbery Medal in 2007, is a story of a child who follows the direction of her higher power, a concept she learned from a twelve-step group.
Rock groupBoston recorded a song called "Higher Power" about drug addiction that was included on their Greatest Hits album.
