By Walter Armstrong

12/12/11

 When presidential candidates—especially the current crop of Republican hopefuls—need to cite a text on spirituality, they usually thumb through carefully selected Bible passages or the Ten Commandments. But Newt Gingrich has always liked defying convention. A startling video of the former House Speaker, who’s enjoying a widening double-digit lead over Mitt Romney just three weeks before the Iowa Caucuses, shows the Roman Catholic convert speaking not of God or Jesus, but of a “greater authority,” as described in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Although careful to avoid official AA language like a “higher power,” Gingrich offers plenty of clues that in the two decades since he left the House of Representatives, he’s acquired a more than passing familiarity of Bill W.’s spiritual treatise.

In late November, at a televised GOP candidate forum in Iowa hosted by a Christian evangelical group—a “Thanksgiving Family Forum”—Gingrich stole the show. Asked to elaborate on his religious beliefs, he told an anecdote about “a doctor friend in Atlanta” who gave him “the two books that make up Alcoholics Anonymous”—the Big Book and the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions—and spoke movingly about how AA’s principles had saved him from a professional and personal crisis two decades before.

“I wasn’t drinking, but I had precisely the symptoms of somebody who was collapsing from under its weight,” he said, skirting discussion of his divorces and infidelities. ‘My life was full of accomplishments and achievements,” but “there was part of me that was truly hollow. I had to recognize how limited I was and how much I had to depend on the spiritual.”

And then he discovered AA: “Had I not had that intervention, I might have collapsed totally. That was the beginning of turning my life around,” Gingrich said.

Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachman, who claim a direct line to Jesus Christ Himself, could only stare at the prop pumpkin at the center of the cozy wooden table, their frozen smiles melting into consternation and confusion, as if wondering for the first time, Is the drunks-in-recovery vote big enough to court?

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Last June, with his campaign floundering, Gingrich started to once again talk up his affection for AA. On Fox and Friends, he defended President Obama against host Gretchen Carlson’s charges of hypocrisy for invoking “God” and “prayer” in a speech despite the fact that the president does not attend church every Sunday. Gingrich said, “Look, in my new book To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, I reprint the entire 12-step program from Alcoholics Anonymous. Six of the 12 steps involve a higher authority…” The relevance of his statement to the issue at hand was less then exact, apart from it being a plug for his book. But it was notable, nonetheless, because Gingrich, never hesitant to heap forgiveness of himself, struck this tone of forgiveness toward the president, and forgiveness is an ethic central to AA.

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And for a man who says he was saved by the Big Book and the Twelve And Twelve, he seems deficient in the very quality—empathy—that drives the thriving fellowship in the rooms. Gingrich may have found his Higher Power, but he seems to have missed AA’s deeper point as articulated in the Twelfth Step: “the art of helping others and selfless service.” “Addictive drugs deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American,” he said in November, laying on the stigma pretty thick.

http://www.thefix.com/content/video-new-gingrich-thumps-big-book8787?page=1