(LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former drug addict, said a “spiritual fire” is needed to overcome addiction.
Asked during CPAC 2026 about President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at healing addiction in America, Kennedy explained that the order requires reform of the federal government’s investment in recovery programs. He highlighted community and spirituality in particular as two necessary pillars of addiction recovery.
“One of the things that I learned from my own experience with addiction recovery is addiction is a disease of isolation,” said Kennedy, pointing out that addiction drives people to isolate themselves, and also that “isolation drives addiction.”
“And we have an epidemic of isolation now in our country,” he added.
The ultimate way to help addicts then is to connect them with community but also to “some kind of spiritual motivation,” Kennedy said.
He told how one of the “seminal milestones” of the 12-step program of Alcoholic Anonymous came from a conversation between Carl Jung and one of his clients, Rowland Hazard, a wealthy alcoholic. After continual relapses into alcoholism, Jung told Hazard that a “profound spiritual alignment” was the only hope of recovery for some as deeply addicted as he was.
This indirectly helped lead to the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous, with its 12-step program founded on surrender to God and designed to “induce a spiritual awakening,” as Kennedy put it.
“I believe that I was born an addict, that I’m hardwired to drink and drug myself to death. And in order to overcome that kind of biological drive, you need a spiritual fire,” Kennedy said.
The Health and Human Services Secretary has shared that he made a decision to start believing in God after he read that those of Jung’s patients who were believers had faster and more enduring recoveries. He then began to attend a 12-step program to overcome drug addiction. Now, he has been sober for over four decades.
Kennedy pointed out during his CPAC interview that Joe Biden’s administration excluded faith-based recovery programs from federal funding, a decision he said contradicts “everything that we know about recovery.”
He shared that just last week a friend from California wrote to him telling him her son was thrown out of a recovery program for talking about God.
Trump’s Executive Order “Addressing Addiction Through the Great American Recovery Initiative” will be bringing back federal funding for “faith-based recovery,” Kennedy said to applause.
