LifeRing originated from within SOS (Secular Organizations for Sobriety). To understand how and why LifeRing arose, it is useful to understand the history of SOS.
SOS originated from within Alcoholics Anonymous in the Los Angeles area. Small groups of alcoholics who had achieved sobriety in AA began to meet privately in each others' living rooms in 1983 in order to have the benefits of fellowship without the religious atmosphere of the parent organization. Among them was James Christopher, an aspiring actor who had come to Hollywood to seek employment in the film industry. In January 1984, Christopher attended a talk given to a Los Angeles secular humanist audience by Paul Kurtz, chairman of the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (CODESH). After the talk, Christopher handed Kurtz a short essay outlining Christopher's views that religion was unnecessary and could be an obstacle to recovery from alcoholism.
Kurtz published Christopher's essay a year and a half later in the Summer 1985 issue of Free Inquiry, the CODESH journal. Under the title "Sobriety Without Superstition," the article hit a responsive chord with the readership and brought a large flow of letters and phone calls to the journal's office. The public climate around this time was open to secular alternatives. In the same period, Jean Kirkpatrick's Women for Sobriety was gaining strength, and Jack and Lois Trimpey were beginning their critique of AA, later published as The Small Book. (The Trimpeys soon after formed Rational Recovery under the sponsorship of the American Humanist Association, the parent group from whom Kurtz had split off some years earlier to form CODESH.)
Christopher held the first public meeting of his new group in November 1986 in North Hollywood. He named his meeting "Secular Sobriety Group" (SSG), and Secular Sobriety Groups became the name of the grassroots movement that began to spring up around Christopher's initial and subsequent articles in Free Inquiry.
In the Spring of 1988, Christopher reached an agreement with CODESH whereby CODESH would publish a quarterly print newsletter in its Buffalo offices for the nascent SSG movement. However, Kurtz did not like the acronym SSG and coined what he believed would be the catchier acronym "SOS" to replace it. Kurtz then devised the name "Secular Organizations for Sobriety" to fit the new acronym. The first issue of the CODESH newsletter, dated Feb.-March 1988, announced the name change as a fait accompli. None of the meetings that used the SSG name was consulted on the issue. Production and final editorial control over the SOS newsletter has always rested with Free Inquiry.
The first national conference of SOS was held in August, 1989, in San Francisco, in conjunction with a meeting of CODESH members. There was lively participation and keen interest, and it appeared that SOS meetings were starting or were likely to start in dozens of other states.
In June, 1990, Christopher accepted a job offer from Kurtz to relocate from North Hollywood to Buffalo, N.Y. to work full-time at the CODESH offices as a CODESH employee promoting SOS. In November, 1990, there was a second SOS national convention in Boston, which also had a good attendance and lively interest. Almost directly thereafter, CODESH had its attorneys draw up legal papers to incorporate SOS under the name Secular Organizations for Sobriety Inc., as a nonprofit corporation of the State of New York. The new corporation adopted a set of Bylaws. The Bylaws disenfranchised all of the SOS meetings and members and gave sole control over SOS to CODESH. This was done through the device of making CODESH the sole Voting Member in SOS. Christopher signed those Bylaws and CODESH then appointed Christopher Executive Director of SOS. As with the original name change from SSG to SOS, none of the meetings was consulted in the drafting or adoption of the organization's constitution.
SOS then entered a period of national stagnation and decline. The SOS conventions in Kansas City in 1991 and Orlando (1992) failed for lack of attendance, and no national SOS conventions were planned for 1993-95. Directly after Christopher's departure from California to Buffalo, a schism developed in the San Francisco Bay Area chapter over the abstinence issue, leading ultimately to trademark litigation. Christopher published a purported national SOS meeting directory in 1994 that consisted almost entirely of bare zip codes without specific meeting information. Christopher's published claims that SOS had a thousand or two thousand meetings met with profound skepticism inside the organization. A purported grand international SOS conference in Mexico City in 1996 drew only six attendees.
SOS revived in influence and its internal life became re-energized primarily as a result of what became known as the "unofficial SOS" -- the SOSmail email list begun by Tom Shelley in early 1995, and its progeny, including the www.unhooked.com website (founded June 1996). At an unofficial SOS gathering in Florida in the Spring of 1997, participants formed an autonomous publishing house (LifeRing Press) and attempted to form an autonomous collective national leadership for the organization. See, UU in the Pines '97. Ultimately, as the official SOS maintained its addictive dependency on CODESH (now CSH), and proved itself unable or unwilling to clean up its messes and move forward, the "unofficial SOS" became an independent organization under the name LifeRing Secular Recovery (LSR).
-- Marty N. 1/1/01