Now 70 and working in the film industry, Vic began drinking on a Saturday night at age 15 when his parents left their New Jersey home long enough for him and several friends to drain a bottle of Southern Comfort. Not for the last time, his binge ended with projectile vomit.

It was also during Vic’s teenage years when he began to reject the Roman Catholicism of his upbringing. The first doubt came when a priest informed him that if he ate a hamburger on Friday, in defiance of the Catholic Church’s tradition of forgoing meat on that day, he would go to hell.

During all the subsequent decades of drinking, the closest Vic got to faith was what he puckishly calls his “foxhole prayer” — to make it through his hangover. Liquor led to cocaine, and one night in 1979, Vic’s dealer laid out something new, a few lines of heroin. Even through the ethereal haze, Vic was frightened enough to decide to go to A.A.

That first meeting, characteristically enough, took place in a church. “I was willing to try anything,” Vic recalled. “If they say to pray on your knees morning and night ...” For his first several years in A.A., he did regularly pray, trying to reacquire a faith he thought sobriety required. Even after accepting the fact he still did not believe God existed, he kept attending meetings, feeling privately isolated despite the camaraderie and common purpose.

Glenn, a painter living in Manhattan, had a similar experience to Vic’s. When he first went to an A.A. meeting 27 years ago, he found himself confronted by religious language and ritual that he considered anathema. Desperate to stop drinking, he tried to fit in.

“They had this fake-it-till-you-make-it attitude,” recalled Glenn, 72. “This feeling that the religion will catch up with you. It worked in the sense that I got sober. But I got weary of it. It felt mindless.”

After 10 years without alcohol, Glenn ordered a glass of wine and spent the next five years suffering from what he wryly diagnoses now as “the merlot flu.”