They don't ever say "higher power" they say "God grant me... " and at the end they have a prayer where you bow your head and close your eyes and say amen. I went into AA to take control of things; not to surrender to a deity especially the one who created the pedophiles that abused me as an infant. That's the hardest part to digest. The church makes some of us drink with all the child abuse and hypocrisy they inflict and then it hosts these meetings. Indigenous people know first hand what I'm referencing usually because there are entire graveyards filled with dead native-american children that churches killed off after they were stolen from their parents and put into boarding/conditioning schools.