The AA steps were constructed in a culturally-Christian environment, for people who are also culturally-Christian, even if they’re atheists. (I.e., they are people who were taught Christian messages and then maybe rejected them, and who also have a mostly-Christian community around them.) Thus, they have to be read through this lens.

Basically, if you want to “translate” the AA steps for the modern era where things aren’t so culturally-Christian, try replacing “God” with “a Church congregation-community”, where a “Church” is any social technology designed for taking a group of average people and trying to extract the best, most empathetic/humanist/“moral” group behavior out of them.

When AA says to rely on the “power of God” which is “strong” while your own willpower is “weak”, what they’re really saying, stripping away the culturally-Christian assumptions, is to rely on the social technology of a Church-like organization to amplify and backstop your willpower in various ways.

• Most Church-like organizations, regardless of religion, have a membership that strive to practice moderation in things like drinking, so switching your “community” to be that of the Church-like organization means switching your friends (maybe people who love to go out and get drunk?) for people who don’t. (This is a similar idea to why some people say prisoners are better off paroled: the last people you want prisoners around are other prisoners. You want them around good role-models, not bad ones, if you want them rehabilitated.)

• Most Church-like organizations provide access to a confidant and therapist (in Christian churches, that’d be the priest.) If you bond with this confidant-and-therapist figure, you’ll feel less bad about temporary failures, because you’ll have someone to tell who will help you get back on the horse, rather than shunning you for your failure.

• In most Church-like organizations, if you don’t attend the regular community meetings, the community members will get worried about you and check up on you. This will help prevent you from degenerating further after falling off the wagon.

AA is already a bridge between two worlds; although it is constructed under a culturally-Christian lens, it assumes that its attendeees are not necessarily members of any Church-like organization. So one of the goals of AA group meetings is to be a Church-like organization, for people who don’t attend Church. It pushes you “back” toward the Christian Church because it knows it can’t help you forever and wants you to find a more permanent Church-like organization to help you. This is similar to how psychiatrists encourage people who are stable on a maintenance dose of some drug to stop seeing them, by instead getting a family doctor (if they don’t already have one) and getting the family doctor to perscribe the maintenance dose of the drug.

I think that, while AA could be rephrased to not be culturally-Christian, it’d be very hard to replace its insistence on accepting some kind of religious Church-like organization into your life... because there really just aren’t that many non-religious Church-like organizations. If there were, maybe there’d be fewer alcoholics.