Christian Science

Christian Science

The First Church of Christ, Scientist on the left with its reflecting pool, Boston, Massachusetts
Founder	Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910)
Headquarters and Mother Church	The First Church of Christ, Scientist (founded 1879), Christian Science Plaza, Back Bay, Boston
Key texts	Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures (first published as Science and Health, 1875) and Manual of the Mother Church (1895)
Membership	100,000–400,000 worldwide, as of 2008
Number of churches	1,100 in the United States, 600 elsewhere, as of 2010
Key beliefs	Scientific statement of being: "There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual."
Website
christianscience.com

Christian Science was developed in the United States by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), author of Science and Health (1875), the religion's central text along with the Bible. Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879, and in 1894 The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the religion's Mother Church, was built in Boston, Massachusetts. By April 2001, according to the church, Science and Health had sold ten million copies.

A census at the height of the movement's popularity in 1936 counted nearly 270,000 Christian Scientists in the United States; as of 2008 there was a worldwide membership of 100,000–400,000. The religion is known for its Christian Science Reading Rooms, which are open to the public in around 1,200 cities.

Christian Scientists see their religion as consistent with traditional Christian theology, despite several key differences. In particular they subscribe to a radical form of philosophical idealism, believing that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion. This includes the view that disease is a spiritual rather than physical disorder, that illness and even death are simply illusions caused by mistaken beliefs, and that the sick should be treated, not by medicine, but by a special form of prayer intended to correct those beliefs.

The church does not require that Christian Scientists avoid all medicine – adherents use dentists, optometrists, physicians for broken bones, and vaccination when required by law – but maintains that Christian Science treatment is most effective when not combined with medical care. Between the 1880s and 1990s the avoidance of medical treatment and vaccination led to the deaths of several adherents and their children; parents and others were prosecuted for manslaughter or neglect, and in a few cases convicted.

The Christian Science Publishing Society publishes several periodicals, including the Christian Science Monitor (founded 1908), which won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002.

Background and theology

Metaphysical–Christian Science–New Thought family

Further information: Great Awakening and History of New Thought

The history of the United States is one of "religious sects that have sanctified the power of self," Caroline Fraser wrote in 1999, some of them "cultists breaking away from cultists who had themselves broken away from England." Two periods of Puritan and Protestant revival – the First and Second Great Awakening (1730–1760) and 1800–1830) – nurtured a proliferation of cults and sects, particularly in New England. These included Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Scientists, Emma Curtis Hopkins's New Thought movement, Ann Lee's Shakers, the Latter Day Saints, Millerites, Seventh-day Adventists, Swedenborgians and Unitarians.

Interest grew in alternatives to allopathic medicine (as traditional medicine was known), including homeopathy, and in the power of the mind and Mind (what was called the metaphysical), resulting in the study of mesmerism, the law of attraction, astrology, phrenology, and the relationship between mind, body and diet.

The metaphysical family of new religious movements includes several groups that believe the mind is the key to physical health, including Christian Science and a set of closely related ideas known as New Thought or mind-cure. Both emerged in the 19th century as the popular expression of philosophical idealism, the idea that an ultimate reality lies behind the perception of the senses, a school of thought that stretches back to Plato (428–348 BCE).

New Thought and Christian Science grew out of the work of three key sources: faith healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866); his patient Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who founded Christian Science and was accused of having plagiarized Quimby's work; and Eddy's student Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925), whose Christian Science splinter group, the Christian Science Theological Seminary, became the precursor of New Thought. The movements saw themselves as applying scientific principles: spiritual laws they believed they had discovered and were applying in a methodical manner. Philip Jenkins wrote that Christian Science and New Thought "both viewed themselves as representing the apex of modern thinking."

William James (1842–1910) saw in New Thought (and this applied to Christian Science too) traces of Berkeleyan idealism, spiritism, Hinduism, and Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism. The point above all was to maintain a cheerful attitude, which James welcomed for its apparently positive effect on the body and mind, although he remarked on the "verbiage of a good deal of the mind-cure literature," calling it "moonstruck with optimism." Complaining too much, even about the weather, was suddenly bad form.

Christian Science and New Thought differ in that New Thought regards the material world as real, whereas Christian Science dismisses matter as an illusion caused by mortal mind. As a result Eddy taught, unlike New Thought, that the mind alone cannot cure disease, because it cannot cure what it has caused (she called mind-cure "Mind Quack"). What heals, she argued, is Divine Mind, "not one mind acting upon another mind ... [but] Truth over error."

Christian Science theology

Further information: Nontrinitarianism and § Classification as cult, sect or denomination

Scientific statement of being

There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual.

— Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health.

Christian Science leaders see their religion as part of mainstream Christianity and reject the identification with the New Thought movement. There are nevertheless key differences between Christian Science theology and that of traditional Christianity. The Christian Science Publishing Society wrote in 1990 that Christian Science "does not even fit comfortably under the wide umbrella of Protestantism, for it conflicts with tenets held by most denominations."

Contemporaneous Christian writers linked Christian Science and New Thought to theosophy and saw them all as alien ideas; the foundation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, the year Eddy's Science and Health was first published, seemed to confirm the relationship. Eddy, on the other hand, saw Science and Health as an inspired text and a return to the primitive Christianity of the New Testament, a kind of second coming. To the more conservative of the Christian clergy, this was a heretical challenge to the Bible's authority.

Eddy redefined the Christian vocabulary using allegories that led to very different views of the Trinity, creation narrative, divinity of Jesus, atonement, resurrection, heaven and hell. She argued that spiritual reality is the only reality, and that the material world – including sickness, death and evil – is an illusion or mistake of mortal mind. The most concrete description of her ontology is the "scientific statement of being" (right), which she called the "first plank in the platform of Christian Science." Nicholas Rescher likened it to the subjective idealism of the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) or to ancient Oriental panpsychism. Some members of the clergy interpreted it as gnosticism, a heresy.

Eddy saw God not as a person, but as "incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love." She denied that in rejecting the idea of a personal God, and referring to God as "All-in-all," she was committing Christian Science to pantheism – she said Christian Science "loom[ed] above the mists of pantheism higher than Mount Ararat above the deluge" – but that was nevertheless how the clergy interpreted it.

They believe it is a Christianity that is in the New Testament; that it has always been there, that in the drift of ages it was lost through disuse and neglect, and that this benefactor has found it and given it back to men, turning the night of life into day, its terrors into myths, its lamentations into songs of emancipation and rejoicing.

— Mark Twain, Christian Science (1907)

According to Philip Jenkins, there is no original sin in Christian Science, no Trinity, virgin birth, miracles, resurrection or atonement, "or at least [Eddy] so allegorized these concepts that they seemed to vanish." Eddy rejected the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis (c. 950–500 BCE) as a literal account, although she accepted it as spiritually authoritative. There is also no death, final judgment, heaven or hell; heaven and hell are states of mind, the former the realization that all is Mind, the latter the presence of negative beliefs. A person who seems to die simply adjusts to a level of consciousness inaccessible to the living; Eddy wrote that in burying a body we bury only our own false sense of the person.

Just as God is a power, not a person, and the Holy Ghost is "Divine Science," Jesus was a human being, not a deity. Eddy saw Jesus as the first person fully to manifest Divine Mind, a "natural and divine Scientist ... a Christian Scientist" and a "Way-shower" between humanity and God; she regarded his death, like any other, as an illusion. In 1907 Mark Twain (1835–1910) described the appeal of the new religion to Eddy's followers:

She has delivered to them a religion which has revolutionized their lives, banished the glooms that shadowed them, and filled them and flooded them with sunshine and gladness and peace; a religion which has no hell; a religion whose heaven is not put off to another time, with a break and a gulf between, but begins here and now, and melts into eternity as fancies of the waking day melt into the dreams of sleep.

Birth of the religion

Mary Baker Eddy

Further information: Mary Baker Eddy

Christian Science
Earliest known photograph of Mary Baker Eddy, probably from the early 1850s
More details Born Mary Morse Baker (1821-07-16)July 16, 1821 Bow, New Hampshire Died December 3, 1910(1910-12-03) (aged 89) Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Resting place Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts Spouse(s) George Washington Glover (m. 1843–1844) Daniel Patterson (m. 1853–1873, separated 1866) Asa Gilbert Eddy (m. 1877–1882) Children George Washington Glover II (born 1844) Parent(s) Mark Baker (d. 1865) Abigail Ambrose Baker (d. 1849)

Eddy was born Mary Morse Baker on July 16, 1821, on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest and last of six children, three boys followed by three girls. The family were Protestant Congregationalists. Her father, Mark Baker (d. 1865), was a deeply religious man who would lead the family in lengthy prayer every morning and evening. In common with most women at the time, Eddy was given little formal education, but by some accounts she read widely at home.

Eddy experienced protracted ill health throughout her childhood and into adulthood, with conditions she or others described as chronic dyspepsia, spinal inflammation, neuralgia and stomach cankers. The literary critic Harold Bloom described her as "an extraordinary wreck, a monumental hysteric of classical dimensions, indeed a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments."

Eddy established a pattern from childhood of appearing to be seriously ill then quickly recovering. McClure's magazine wrote in 1907–1908, in a series of 14 highly critical articles about Eddy and the church: "Nothing had the power of exciting Mark Baker like one of Mary's 'fits,' as they were called. His neighbors ... remember him as he went to fetch Dr. Ladd, how he lashed his horses down the hill ... shouting in his tremendous voice: 'Mary is dying!'"

Christian Scientists regard the criticism of Eddy as an "hysteric" as sexist and unfair, part of what Christian Scientist Jean A. McDonald called the "biological rhetoric" of insanity that was deployed against women in the 19th century. Eddy was an obvious target because she was challenging the hegemony of the clergy and medical establishment, two of the most powerful male groups.

Stephen Gottschalk, who until 1990 worked for the church's Committees on Publication, argued that Eddy did, in fact, suffer serious illness and tragic personal loss. Her first husband died shortly before her 23rd birthday, six months after they married and three months before the birth of their son, leaving her penniless. As a result of her poor health she lost custody of the child when he was four, although sources differ as to whether she could have prevented this. Her second husband, who left her after 13 years of marriage, promised to become the boy's legal guardian – per the legal doctrine of coverture, women at that time in the United States could not be their own children's guardians – but it is unclear whether he did, and Eddy lost contact with her son until he was in his thirties. Her third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died five years after they married.

She wore an imported black satin dress heavily beaded with tiny black jet beads, black satin slippers, beaded, and had on her rarely beautiful diamonds. ... She stood before us, seemingly slight, graceful of carriage, and exquisitely beautiful even to critical eyes. Then, still standing, she faced her class as one who knew herself to be a teacher by divine right.

– C. Lulu Blackman, student of Mary Baker Eddy, 1885

Gillian Gill, one of Eddy's biographers, wrote that Eddy was by all accounts charismatic – charming and flattering when she needed to be – and able to inspire great loyalty, although she could also be irrational, capricious and unkind. Called "Mother" by her followers, it was in part because of Eddy's unusual personality that Christian Science flourished, despite the disputes she caused throughout her life, including among her closest followers.

McClure's wrote of her: "She was like a patch of colour in those gray communities. ... She never laid aside her regal air; never entered a room or left it like other people. There was something about her that continually excited and stimulated, and she gave people the feeling that a great deal was happening." Mark Twain, although highly critical of her, wrote in 1907: "In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

Further information: Spread of mesmerism in America

Eddy tried every available remedy for her ailments, including homeopathy, mesmerism, hydropathy at the Vail's Hydropathic Institute in Hill, New Hampshire, and the vegetarian Graham diet of the Rev. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), who took the view that "ALL MEDICINE, AS SUCH, IS ITSELF AN EVIL." Ronnie Numbers and Rennie Schoepflin write that alternative practitioners were much sought after at a time when physicians, or allopaths as they were known, regularly "bled, puked and purged" their patients.

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

In 1862 Eddy heard of "Quimbyism," a healing method developed by Phineas Parkhurst "Park" Quimby (1802–1866), a former clockmaker turned professional mesmerist, who worked in Portland, Maine. McClure's wrote of Quimby in 1907 that, although he had had only six weeks' schooling, he was regarded locally as a "mild-mannered New England Socrates" because of his refusal to accept anything on authority. So far as local legend was concerned, McClure's wrote, when he practised his mesmerism consumptives recovered and the blind saw.

Quimby called himself "a teacher of the science of health and happiness," and his philosophy was "the truth is the cure." This would sometimes consist of shouting at a patient who could not walk, "you can walk!" At other times he would massage his patients' heads, arms or legs in an effort to acquire their symptoms. He described his methods, in a "circular to the sick," as correcting his patients' errors and thereby "chang[ing] the fluids of the system":

Dr. P.P. Quimby would respectfully announce to the citizens of ____ and vicinity, that he will be at the ____, where he will attend to those wishing to consult him in regard to their health. And as his practice is unlike all other medical practice, it is necessary to say that he gives no medicines and makes no outward applications, but simply sits down by his patients, tells them their feelings, etc., then his explanation is the cure; and if he succeeds in correcting their error, he changes the fluids of the system and establishes the truth or health.

Eddy wrote to Quimby in August 1862, telling him she could barely sit up; she had to be carried up the stairs to his consulting rooms. She felt better immediately and returned to see him several times in 1863 and 1864, but found that she was well only while being treated; without Quimby's attention the symptoms returned, which, she wrote later, meant he had not really effected a cure. She began to practice his methods on patients herself, with some success, except that, as Quimby had warned, she would sometimes acquire their symptoms; when she tried to help her nephew stop smoking, for example, she found that she wanted to smoke herself.

The fall in Lynn

Eddy's father died in October 1865 when she was 44 years old, followed a few months later, in January 1866, by the death of Quimby. Two weeks after that, on February 1, Eddy experienced what Christian Scientists call the "fall in Lynn," the birth of their religion. Eddy said it was a revelation, "human and divine coincidence." She was out walking in Lynn, Massachusetts, when she slipped on some ice, injuring her spine and knocking herself unconscious. Two women who looked after her declared that she was paralyzed. On the third day after the fall Eddy read a Bible passage about one of Jesus's healings and was able to rise from her bed, apparently well. Christian Scientists regard her recovery as an example of Christian Science healing.

Both the extent of her injury and the degree to which she considered herself healed at the time are disputed. A homeopathic doctor who treated her after the fall, Alvin M. Cushing – when asked by McClure's in 1907, over 40 years later – said the injury had not been a serious one, and that Eddy had responded to a homeopathic remedy (highly diluted arnica) and some morphine that he had given her.

Two weeks after the accident she wrote to a friend of Quimby's, Julius Dresser (1838–1893), telling him she had awoken after the fall to find herself "the helpless cripple I was before I saw Dr. Quimby," and asking him to treat her. She also asked the city for damages months later "for serious personal injuries from which [she had] little prospect of recovering." Gill wrote that Eddy may have done this under financial pressure; she was in an emotionally and financially strained marriage at the time to Daniel Patterson, her second husband, and she asked for the damages just months before they separated, when she knew she would have to fend for herself.

In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection (1891), Eddy was clear about attributing her discovery of Christian Science to the fall in Lynn, calling it "the great discovery." But in the first edition of Science and Health (1875), she wrote that she had discovered her healing method while struggling with dyspepsia (indigestion) as a child, or what Gill argued was probably an eating disorder.

Eddy offered more than one version of this. In the first edition she wrote that she had spent years of her youth following a rigid version of the Graham diet to treat her dyspepsia: vegetables, water and a slice of bread, consumed once a day. She wrote: "Thus we passed most of our early years, as many can attest, in hunger, pain, weakness and starvation." She continued that: "After years of suffering ... our eyes were suddenly opened, and we learned suffering is self-imposed, a belief, and not truth." In later editions of Science and Health (for example, in the 40th edition in 1889), when the fall in Lynn took precedence, Eddy attributed the dyspepsia to a woman she had known, and offered its disappearance as an example of Christian Science healing. In later editions, she wrote that it had happened to a man she had known.

Writing and teaching

The Science of Man

Eddy wrote that she withdrew from society for three years after the fall in Lynn "to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind ... and reveal the great curative Principle, God." She moved from boarding house to boarding house, and tried to earn a living by teaching her healing method, first advertising for students in July 1868 in a spiritualist magazine, the Banner of Light (see right). She called her method Moral Science, Divine Science, Metaphysical Science, Metaphysical Healing, the Christ-cure and (clearly echoing Quimby) the Truth-cure, but settled on Christian Science. She wrote that she called it Christian "because it is compassionate, helpful, and spiritual."

Eddy's ad (second ad, as Mary B. Glover) in the Banner of Light, July 4, 1868, offering to teach her healing method

Eddy worked from her home at 8 Broad Street, Lynn, with a sign outside saying "Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists," and several people gathered around her as students and patients. A religion teaching that evil and sickness did not exist, and that their appearance could be conquered simply by thinking them away, was very attractive.

In 1870 she charged $100, and later $300, for a three-week, 12-lecture course, using an unpublished manuscript as a textbook, which she called "The Science of Man." McClure's and others charged that this manuscript was Quimby's. Eddy wrote in Science and Health (1875) that she had written and copyrighted the manuscript in 1870 in the form of a pamphlet, The Science of Man, By Which the Sick are Healed, although it was not published until 1876.

Eddy's students agreed to pay her 10 percent annually of any income they derived from using the healing method. In June 1875 one of them, Daniel Spofford – who after completing Eddy's course advertised himself as a "Scientific Physician" – arranged for eight of her students to put up $10 to hire a hall and pay Eddy $5 to speak. On July 4, 1876, the same group formed the Christian Scientists' Association.

Science and Health

Further information: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

Two of Eddy's students, George Barry and Elizabeth Newhall, paid a Boston printer $2,200 to have the first edition of Science and Health published on October 30, 1875. Barry also helped by copying 2,500 pages of the manuscript in long hand, and ended up having to sue Eddy for his fee.

From Eddy's Christ and Christmas (1897), portraying her writing the first edition of Science and Health in her skylight room in Lynn, Massachusetts.

The first edition has been criticized as poorly written; Stephen Gottschalk wrote that it is "convoluted and at points confusing." Eddy added Key to the Scriptures to the sixth edition in 1884, and for the 16th edition in 1885 hired an editor, James Henry Wiggin (1836–1900), a Unitarian clergyman. According to Gottschalk, the issue of how much Wiggin contributed to the text is one of Christian Science's most controversial questions. Wiggin told his literary executor that he rewrote it from top to bottom, although he told others, including Mark Twain, that he had only polished it.

Eddy continued to revise the book until her death in 1910, issuing 432 editions in all; the first edition contained eight chapters and 456 pages, and the final edition 18 chapters and 600 pages. She encouraged members to buy a new copy whenever she published a major revision, which brought in significant earnings. Other income derived from the sale of rings and brooches, pictures of Eddy, and in 1889 the Mary Baker Eddy Souvenir Spoon; Eddy asked every Christian Scientist to buy at least one, or a dozen if they could afford to.

When the copyright on Science and Health expired in 1971, the church managed to persuade Congress to pass a law extending it to the year 2046; Gardner reports that the bill was supported by two of President Nixon's aides, H.R. Haldeman (1926–1993) and John Ehrlichman (1925–1999), both Christian Scientists. The law was overturned in 1987 as unconstitutional. By April 2001, according to the church, the book had sold ten million copies; it has been translated into 16 languages and is available in English Braille.

Christian Science healing: sickness as error

Further information: § Prayer and treatment

The idea that at the core of Christian Science healing is that, as Eddy wrote, "[e]very sort of sickness is error." She wrote: "Palsy is a belief that attacks mortals through fear, and paralyzes the body ... Destroy the fear, show mortal mind that no muscular power can be lost – for Mind is supreme – and you will cure the palsy." She said she had personally healed consumption (tuberculosis), diphtheria, and "at one visit a cancer that had eaten the flesh of the neck and exposed the jugular vein so that it stood out like a cord. I have physically restored sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, and have made the lame walk."

My experiments in homeopathy had made me sceptical as to material curative methods. ... [T]he drug is attenuated [diluted] to such a degree that not a vestige of it remains; and from this I learn that it is not the drug that cures the disease or changes one of the symptoms ... thus it should be seen that Mind is the healer, or metaphysics, and that there is no efficacy in the drug.

– Mary Baker Eddy

Eddy reached her position on healing in part because of her skepticism about homeopathy, after arguably witnessing what would now be called the placebo effect. She wrote in Science and Health: "I have attenuated Natrum muriaticum (common table salt) until there was not a single saline property left. The salt had 'lost its savor': and yet with one drop of that attenuation in a goblet of water, and a teaspoonful of the water administered at intervals of three hours, I have cured a patient sinking in the last stage of typhoid fever. The highest attenuation of homeopathy, and the most potent, steps out of matter into Mind."

Reading about disease is sufficient, she wrote, to externalize thoughts as physical symptoms. "The press unwittingly sends forth many sorrows and diseases among the human family. It does this by giving names to diseases and by printing long descriptions which mirror images of disease distinctly in thought. A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it." She argued similarly against the recording of ages: "Timetables of birth and death are so many conspiracies against manhood and womanhood."

To counter the argument that people can be killed by poison even when they harbor no belief that it is poison, she referred to the beliefs of others: "[T]he vast majority of mankind, though they know nothing of this particular case and this special person, believe the arsenic, the strychnine, or whatever the drug used, to be poisonous ... Consequently, the result is controlled by the majority of opinions, not by the infinitesimal minority of opinions in the sick-chamber."

She allowed exceptions from Christian Science healing for going to the dentist and basic surgical procedures, such as fixing broken limbs; she said she had healed broken bones using "mental surgery," but that this branch of Christian science healing would be the last to be learned. She herself wore glasses, used morphine, had her third husband treated by a physician, and arranged for an autopsy when he died. But for the most part (then and now), Christian Scientists believe that medicine and Christian Science healing are incompatible, because they proceed from contradictory assumptions. Medicine asserts that something is physically broken and needs to be fixed, while Christian Science asserts that the spiritual reality is harmonious and perfect, and that any belief to the contrary is an error that needs to be corrected.

Eddy's debt to Quimby

The Christian Scientist believes that the Spirit of God (life and love) pervades the universe like an atmosphere; that whoso will study Science and Health can get from it the secret of how to inhale that transforming air ... the healer's mind performs no office but to convey that force to the patient; that it is merely the wire which carries the electric fluid, so to speak, and delivers the message. Therefore, if these things be true, mental-healing [Quimbyism] and Science-healing [Eddyism] are separate and distinct processes, and no kinship exists between them.

– Mark Twain, Christian Science (1907)

Gill argued that the nature of Eddy's debt to Quimby became the single most controversial issue of her life. Eddy drew a distinction between her methods and Quimby's – which she dismissed as "Mind Quack" – arguing that her approach was purely spiritual, whereas his was physical, both in the sense that he touched his patients, and because he maintained that matter was real.

According to Gottschalk, the mind curers such as Quimby believed that illness was something real that thought could overcome; that mind could both cause and cure illness. Against this, Eddy argued that "mortal mind" was the source of the sickness, and that what it caused it could not cure: "The theology of Christian Science is based on the action of the divine Mind over the human mind and body; whereas 'mind-cure' rests on the notion that the human mind can cure its own disease, or that which it causes ..."

Ernest Sutherland Bates (1879–1939) and John V. Dittemore (a former director of the Christian Science church) argued in their biography of Eddy, Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition (1932), that Science and Health is "practically all Quimby," except for the idea of malicious animal mesmerism.

The similarities they identified were: the conception of God as the sole reality, the non-existence of matter (though it is unclear whether Quimby subscribed to this), the soul as unchanging, disease as error, the appeal to a higher power to correct that error, the practice of treatment from a distance, healing children through the beliefs of their parents, the notion of "chemicalization" as part of the process (which they described as "mental disturbances accompanying new ideas"), and that the healer begins to feel the patient's symptoms. They also wrote that Quimby, like Eddy, saw his belief system as a science.

Plagiarism allegations

In February 1883 one of Quimby's followers, Julius Dresser (1838–1893), accused Eddy in a letter to the Boston Post (1831–1956) of having plagiarized Quimby's unpublished work. She denied the charge; on the contrary, she insisted, it was she who had influenced Quimby. The issue ended up in court. Eddy filed a complaint in April that year that a former student of hers, Edward J. Arens, was using her work; he counter-claimed that she had plagiarized it from Quimby in the first place. Quimby's family was unwilling to produce his manuscript for the lawsuit, and Eddy won the case.

Part of the disputed text, entitled The Science of Man. Eddy gave this manuscript to a student; the student wrote at the top that it was Quimby's.

Eddy suggested that some original writings of hers were being confused for the work of Quimby; she had handed her manuscripts out to her students and now "the evil-minded" were saying those texts did not originate with her. She was accused again in July 1904 in an anonymous article in the New York Times entitled "True Origin of Christian Science." The newspaper had obtained one of Quimby's unpublished manuscripts, "Extracts from Dr. P.P. Quimby's Writings." It said that "the ideas and form of expression are those of Science and Health," except that Quimby did not claim divine inspiration.

A series of McClure's articles in 1907–1908 repeated the charge of plagiarism. Its authors wrote, in a later book: "For 20 closely written pages, Quimby's manuscript, Questions and Answers, is word for word the same as Mrs. Glover's manuscript, The Science of Man."

The Quimby Manuscripts were eventually published in 1921 by Julius Dresser's son, Horatio Dresser (1866–1954). Martin Gardner (1914–2010) maintained in 1993 that Eddy had copied "huge chunks" of Quimby's Questions and Answers manuscript into her 1870 pamphlet The Science of Man, which was then edited to become the chapter "Recapitulation" in Science and Health (1875). This is the chapter Christian Scientists must study to become practitioners. Against this J. Gordon Melton wrote that when Quimby's papers were published it became apparent that Eddy's work was quite different in its emphasis.

Eddy was also accused, by Walter M. Haushalter in his Mrs. Eddy Purloins from Hegel (1936), of having copied material "with lavish abandon" from "The Metaphysical Religion of Hegel" (1866), an essay by Francis Lieber (1798–1872). The theologian Charles S. Braden accused Eddy of having plagiarized "Man of Integrity," an essay by Lindley Murray (1745–1826), and wrote that another article, "Taking Offense," was printed as Eddy's when in fact it was written by someone else and first published by an obscure newspaper. Martin Gardner listed several other writers whose words he said she had used without attribution, including John Ruskin (1819–1900), Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Charles Kingsley (1819–1875), Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881), and Hugh Blair (1718–1800).

Malicious animal magnetism

Further information: Salem witchcraft trial (1878)

Despite her view that evil was not real, Eddy became obsessed with the idea that, if mental powers could be used to heal, they could also be used to destroy. She called the latter "malicious mesmerism," or "malicious animal magnetism," known within Christian Science as MAM. MAM was a "mental error," a manifestation of mortal mind, rather than Divine Mind. Everything that went wrong in her life from the late 1870s onwards was blamed on someone using MAM against her. She said that when she died it would be because of MAM.

Eddy accused Daniel Spofford, one of her first students, of practising malicious mesmerism on her.

Eddy came to believe that two of her students, first Richard Kennedy, then Daniel Spofford, were using MAM against her; a third student, Edward J. Arens, was also later accused. Spofford had been a favorite of Eddy's – indeed, had wanted to marry her – but he quarrelled with her over money, and found himself expelled from the Christian Scientists' Association that he had helped to set up.

In May 1878 a lawsuit was brought against Spofford in Salem, Massachusetts, by another of Eddy's former students, Lucretia Brown. Brown alleged that Spofford had practiced malicious mesmerism on her, although it was clear that Eddy was behind the allegation. Eddy held a power of attorney allowing her to appear in court on Brown's behalf, but the court declined to hear the case. Afterwards several newspapers wrote that Eddy had tried, before the case, to persuade them to publish attacks on Spofford.

In preparation for the trial, Eddy organized 24-hour "watches" in her home, during which her students (known as "mental workers") were asked to use their minds to block MAM originating from Kennedy or Spofford. She continued to organize watches for the rest of her life. In her home at Pleasant View in Concord, New Hampshire, where she lived from 1889, she required the watchers to attend hour-long meetings twice a day to address issues that might be manifestations of MAM, such as a negative newspaper article. Gill wrote that Eddy took the term watch from the New Testament story about Jesus's night in Gethsemane with his disciples.

In October 1878 – in what Gill wrote was "[t]he most puzzling event in the often puzzling history of early Christian Science" – Eddy's third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, and one of her students, Edward Arens, were arrested for conspiring to murder Daniel Spofford. A barman, James Sargent, said they had offered him $500 to carry out the killing; after a complex series of claims and counter-claims, the charges were dropped when a key witness retracted his statement. Defenders of Eddy attributed the allegations to a plot to harm her launched by another former student, but biographers hostile to Eddy regarded the case as strong enough to assume that Eddy's husband and Arens had indeed plotted to have Spofford killed.

Growth of the movement

Establishing the church and college

Numbers 569 and 571 Columbus Avenue, Boston, in or around 1907, where Eddy set up home and the Massachusetts Metaphysical College

On April 12, 1879, shortly after the conspiracy-to-murder allegation had receded – and three years before her third husband died – the Christian Scientists' Association voted to form a church in Boston. They chose the name The Church of Christ (Scientist), and were granted a charter on August 23 that year with 26 members. The church at first held its services in members' homes in Lynn and Boston; the numbers attending were small, from around six to 20.

Several members left after tiring of Eddy's focus on malicious mesmerism, as well as the legal and other disputes she was by that time involved in. They resigned formally in October 1881, signing a document that referred to her "frequent ebullitions of temper, love of money, and the appearance of hypocrisy." According to Cather and Milmine, Eddy rallied the remaining ranks, who pledged their loyalty to her in February 1882, publishing a resolution that said "unless we hear Her voice we do not hear His voice."

On January 31, 1881, a charter was granted to form the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston, as the name under which Eddy conducted her teaching. It said its purpose was: "To teach pathology, ontology, therapeutics, moral science, metaphysics, and their application to the treatment of disease." When she moved from Lynn to Boston in 1882, Eddy set up the college in her new home at 569 Columbus Avenue, and later next door at number 571.

Eddy's third husband's death

Eddy's third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died of heart disease on June 4, 1882, shortly after the move from Lynn to Boston. On the day of his death she asked the Boston Globe to send a reporter to the Metaphysical College. The newspaper said she appeared "much overcome" and "could scarcely control herself enough to make the following statement":

When Eddy's third husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, died she blamed malicious mesmerism.

Her husband, she said, had died with every symptom of arsenical poisoning. Both he and she knew it to be the result of a malicious mesmeric influence exerted upon his mind by certain parties here in Boson, who had sworn to injure them. She had formerly had the same symptoms of arsenical poison herself, and it was some time before she discovered it to be the mesmeric work of an enemy. Soon after her marriage her husband began to manifest the same symptoms and had since shown them from time to time; but was, with her help, always able to overcome them. A few weeks ago she observed that he did not look well, and when questioned he said that he was unable to get the idea of this arsenical poison out of his mind. He had been steadily growing worse ever since, but still had hoped to overcome the trouble until the last. After the death the body had turned black.

Fraser wrote that the Boston Globe article made Eddy a local household name, a real-life version of the charismatic and beautiful Verena Tarrant in Henry James's The Bostonians (1885–1886), with her interest in spiritualism, women's rights and the mind cure.

After her husband's death, several of her students moved into her home on Columbus Avenue, and lived, studied and offered treatment there. Eddy held her classes in the house, and the students had rooms in which they saw patients. According to Fraser, Eddy's two-week, 12-lesson "primary class" – which taught adherents how to become practitioners and during which they were not allowed to take notes – cost $300, while during the same period Harvard Medical School charged $200 for a year's tuition.

First journal, first church building

Further information: The First Church of Christ, Scientist

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, Massachusetts, 1900

In 1883 Eddy founded the Journal of Christian Science, later called the Christian Science Journal, which spread news of her ideas still further. Cather and Milmine wrote: "Copies found their way to remote villages in Missouri and Arkansas, to lonely places in Nebraska and Colorado, where people had much time for reflection, little excitement, and a great need to believe in miracles. ... Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science began to be talked of far away in the mountains and in the prairie villages."

The first church building was erected in 1886 in Oconto, Wisconsin, and still stands at the corner of Main Street and Chicago Street. The original building of The First Church of Christ, Scientist (known as the Mother Church) was completed on Saturday, December 29, 1894 – in time for the first service held there the following day – on Huntington Avenue in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. An extension was built in 1906 to accommodate 5,000 people, at a cost of $2 million donated by Christian Scientists. This attracted the criticism that Christian Scientists were willing to spend money on a magnificent new church, but maintained no hospitals, orphanages, or missions in the slums.

By the end of 1890 the church had 8,724 members in 221 Christian Science groups around the United States, and owned property worth $40,666. In November 1906 the New York Times reported that the church had 80,000 members. There were seven Christian Science church buildings in the United States in 1890, according to the United States census; by the year of Eddy's death in 1910, according to the 1922 Encyclopædia Britannica, there were 1,077 Christian Science churches in the United States, 58 in England, 38 in Canada and 28 elsewhere.

American Medical Association, prosecution of Abby Corner

From the 1880s onwards, several adults and children died after being given Christian Science healing instead of medical care, leading to around 50 prosecutions for manslaughter and other charges. The American Medical Association (AMA) declared war on Christian Science, calling adherents in 1895: "Molochs to infants, and pestilential perils to communities in spreading contagious diseases." The Journal of the American Medical Association wrote in 1899 that "[s]teps should be taken to restrain the rabid utterances and irrational practices of such ignorant and irresponsible persons."

The first prosecution was in March 1888, that of Abby H. Corner of Medford, Massachusetts. Corner was a Christian Science practitioner who had attended to her own daughter, Lottie James, during childbirth; James bled to death and the baby did not survive. Physicians argued in court that the bleeding could have been prevented, but Corner was acquitted of manslaughter on the grounds that the hemorrhage might have been fatal even with a physician in attendance.

Christian Scientists' Association picnic near Lynn, Massachusetts, on July 16, 1885, to celebrate the 9th anniversary of their association and Eddy's 64th birthday.

Eddy responded on April 29, 1888, with a letter to the Boston Herald distancing herself from Corner; the letter was signed "Committee on Publication, Christian Scientists' Association," but according to Cather and Milmine it was published without the association's knowledge and contained several of Eddy's expressions:

The lamentable case reported from West Medford of the death of a mother and her infant at childbirth should forever put a stop to quackery. There has been but one side of this case presented by newspapers. ... Mrs. Abby H. Corner never entered the obstetrics class at the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. She was not fitted at this institute for an accoucheur [obstetrician or midwife], had attended but one term, and four terms, including three years of successful practice by the student, are required to complete the college course.

Cather and Milmine wrote that the obstetrics course was a recent innovation of Eddy's, and that she had been allowing her students to attend women in childbirth for many years. She had even called herself "Professor of Obstetrics" in 1882. They wrote: "Hundreds of Mrs. Eddy's students were then practising who knew no more about obstetrics than the babes they helped into this world."

Christian Scientists were shocked by Eddy's withdrawal of support from Corner, seeing it as a betrayal. According to Cather and Milmine, the Christian Scientists' Association felt that Christian Science itself was on trial, and had warmly supported Corner over Eddy's objections, including paying for her defence. The dispute led to several members being dismissed from the association and another 36 withdrawing in protest, out of around 200 overall.

Gill wrote that several of Eddy's biographers cited the Corner case as evidence of Eddy's coldness and hypocrisy, but Gill argued that Eddy's response should be viewed within the context of the increasing medicalization of childbirth at the time, which involved an almost entirely male medical profession seeking more control over women's bodies. Eddy knew that the case could trigger a public backlash that would jeopardize the pain-free experience of childbirth several women said they had had with Christian Science. It was this outcome that Eddy sought to prevent, as well as a split within the movement between the purists and those who wanted to compromise over the medical issues.

View of Mark Twain

Further information: Christian Science (book)

Mark Twain was an early critic.

The writer Mark Twain was a prominent contemporaneous critic of Christian Science, and particularly of Eddy. He called her: "Grasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees – money, power, glory – vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish."

He first wrote about Christian Science in October 1899 in Cosmopolitan, in an article called "Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy." He had a further three articles about it published in North American Review between December 1902 and February 1903, then published the articles as a book, Christian Science (1907).

Twain believed in the power of mind over matter and admired Christian Science healing. Members of his family had reportedly been helped by mental healing, and his daughter, Clara, became a Christian Scientist. He nevertheless took strong exception to Eddy's writings, calling them "incomprehensible and uninterpretable," and argued that she had not written Science and Health herself.

Twain was incensed by the thought that Eddy was using Christian Science to accrue wealth and power, writing: "From end to end of the Christian Science literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be real, except the Dollar." His fear that Eddy could gain great power as a religious figurehead was the basis of his satirical story, "The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire" (1901–1902), in which Christian Science replaces Christianity and Eddy becomes the Pope.

McClure's articles

Further information: The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science

Willa Cather, winner of the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for the novel, was the principal author of the McClure's articles.

The first detailed biography of Eddy, and the first history of Christian Science, appeared in McClure's magazine (1893–1929) in a devastating critique published in 14 installments between January 1907 and June 1908, preceded by an editorial in December 1906 announcing the series. The essence of the articles is that Eddy was an uneducated, dishonest plagiarist whose chief concern was money. The material, which included court documents, news articles from the 1880s, and affidavits from people who knew Eddy, was published in book form in 1909 as The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. It became the key primary source for most subsequent non-church biographies of Eddy and histories of the religion.

The editor-in-chief S.S. McClure (1857–1949) assigned five writers and researchers to work on the series: Willa Cather (1873–1947), who was the principal author, Burton J. Hendrick (1870–1949), Will Irwin (1873–1948), the political columnist Mark Sullivan (1874–1952), McClure's researcher Georgine Milmine (1874–1950), and briefly Ida Tarbell (1857–1944). The book was out of print from early in its life after the Christian Science church bought the original manuscript. It was republished in 1971 when its copyright expired, and again in 1993 by the University of Nebraska Press.

McClure's maintained that the articles were "as close to truth as history ever gets." David Stouck, in his introduction to the 1993 edition, wrote that Cather's portrayal of Eddy contains "some of the finest portrait sketches and reflections on human nature that Willa Cather would ever write." Gillian Gill took a different view of the material. She argued that a great deal of it was based on anonymous sources and was designed to damage Eddy during a lawsuit, the so-called "Next Friends" suit, in which her relatives sought to have her declared unable to manage her own affairs. Gill regarded it as unfortunate that details from the McClure's articles were repeated by so many secondary sources.

Next Friends suit, Christian Science Monitor

The "Next Friends" lawsuit was brought in March 1907 by Eddy's son, George Glover, and several other relatives. These included her nephew George W. Baker, and Ebenezer Johnson Foster Eddy, a homeopath and physician she legally adopted in November 1888 when he was 41 and she was 68. The idea behind the adoption, according to Cather and Milmine, was for Eddy to have someone who was unquestionably loyal to her.

Mary Baker Eddy in her later years

The lawsuit was ostensibly brought on Eddy's behalf against members of her household staff and others – particularly Calvin A. Frye, her closest assistant – who, the petition alleged, were misusing her property and abusing her. The purpose was to show that Eddy, by then 85 years old, was unable to conduct her own affairs, and thereby to secure a portion of her fortune.

According to Gill, the suit originated in claims by Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), owner of the New York World (1860–1931). He had heard rumors since 1904 that McClure's was preparing a major piece on Eddy, and tried to engineer his own story to rival McClure's. The World began to report that Eddy was sick and dying; it even paid for some of the early expenses in the lawsuit. Four psychiatrists (then known as "alienists") were sent to Eddy's home to interview her over the course of a month as part of the proceedings. They decided that she was mentally competent and able to manage her affairs. One of them, Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton (1848–1919), told the New York Times that, although he disagreed with her teachings, the attacks on Eddy were the result of "a spirit of religious persecution that has at last quite overreached itself."

In response to the actions of the World and McClure's, Eddy instructed the Christian Science Publishing Society to found the Christian Science Monitor as a platform for responsible journalism, as opposed to the yellow journalism that Eddy believed was attacking her. Eddy asked the Publishing Society on August 8, 1908, to create a daily newspaper, and it was published for the first time on November 25. The Monitor went on to win seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002.

Eddy died two years later, in December 1910, aged 89. According to Philip Jenkins, the criticism of Christian Science mostly diminished after her death and the movement became more mainstream. The Nation wrote in 1923 that Christian Science was "popular, powerful, and almost conservative now."

Practices and governance

Christian Science treatment

Practitioners, nursing homes

Further information: Christian Science practitioner

The church's Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston, Massachusetts

Christian Scientists who wish to become practitioners – Scientists who offer Christian Science treatment – take what is called primary-class instruction, a 12-lesson course based on the 24 questions and answers in the Recapitulation chapter of Science and Health. This is the chapter that several commentators say relies heavily on, or was plagiarized from, Quimby. When they have completed the course, they can apply to be listed in the Christian Science Journal.

Around 1,400 practitioners were Journal-listed as of 2010, charging (in the United States) $25–$50 for a telephone or e-mail consultation, and more for house calls. Experienced practitioners wanting to teach primary class themselves must apply to take an additional six-day "normal class," which is held in Boston just once every three years.

Christian Science nursing homes have been run independently of the church since 1993, accredited by the Commission for Accreditation of Christian Science Nursing Organizations/Facilities. The homes are regarded by adherents as sanctuaries, where their desire to rely on prayer will be respected. The nurses are Christian Scientists who have completed a course of religious study and training in basic skills – such as feeding and bathing – in a Christian Science training center. No medical or nursing qualifications are required, and the homes offer no medical services. Several of them are Medicare or Medicaid providers.

Prayers and testimonies

Further information: § Christian Science healing: sickness as error

We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have smallpox because others have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection.

– Mary Baker Eddy

There is no physical manipulation in Christian Science treatment, no laying on of hands, and practitioners do not need to be near the patient. Christian Scientists do not appeal to God for help, or see their prayers as examples of faith healing or miracles. Rather than focusing on what is wrong with the body, they try to re-adjust the apparent misalignment with Mind. They believe that the effect of this spiritualization of thought is moral, physical and emotional health.

Eddy wrote in 1897: "Your aid to reach this goal [of healer] is spiritualization ... let all my thoughts and aims be high, unselfish, charitable, meek,—spiritually minded. With this altitude of thought your mind is losing materiality and gaining spirituality and this is the state of mind that heals the sick."

There are no set words or practices during treatment. According to Robert Clark of the church's Committee on Publication for Florida, treatment is the "replacing of fear and doubt with certainty of the divine presence in one's life. It doesn't take a formulaic approach, there really isn't any step-by-step process. The process is really one of foresaking matter, and matter-based thinking, for spirit and spiritually-based knowing."

The treatment may be performed by telephone from the practitioner's home or office, which is known as "absent treatment." The aim is to calm the patient by denying the existence of the symptoms; one practitioner told the New York Times in 2010 that a patient with a lump under his arm is displaying a "manifestation of fear, not a lump." Fraser described a Christian Science treatment as the practitioner silently arguing about the nature of reality. The practitioner might tell herself, "the allness of God using Eddy's seven synonyms – Life, Truth, Love, Spirit, Soul, Principle and Mind," then that "Spirit, Substance, is the only Mind, and man is its image and likeness; that Mind is intelligence; that Spirit is substance; that Love is wholeness; that Life, Truth, and Love are the only reality."

"[T]here is no person to be healed, no material body, no patient, no matter, no illness, no one to heal, no substance, no person, no thing and no place that needs to be influenced. This is what the practitioner must first be clear about."

— Christian Science practitioner Frank Prinz-Wondollek, 2011

She might continue by denying various ideas, including other religions, the existence of evil, mesmerism, astrology, numerology and the symptoms of whatever the illness is. She concludes the treatment, according to Fraser, by asserting that disease is a lie, that this is the word of God and that it has the power to heal.

The Christian Science Journal and Christian Science Sentinel publish anecdotal testimonies from adherents who say they were healed in this way. To be published a testimony must be accompanied by three (similarly anecdotal) statements offering verification; the publications require that verifiers be "people who know [the testifier] well and have either witnessed the healing or can vouch for [the testifier's] integrity in sharing it." The church published 53,000 such testimonies between 1900 and 1985; 647 of the testimonies published between 1971 and 1981 were about illnesses that had been medically diagnosed, according to the church, including leukemia, diphtheria, club foot and gallstones. A church spokesman said in 2001 that Christian Science treatment had seen people "cured of cancer, diabetes, asthma [and] HIV." Philosopher Margaret P. Battin wrote that the seriousness with which the accounts are treated by Christian Scientists ignores factors such as false positives caused by spontaneous recovery and self-limiting conditions, and that no negative accounts are published, which feeds into people's tendency to over-rely on anecdotal accounts when making decisions.

Children's rights

The main criticism that Christian Science has faced is that its adherents impose their ideas about the illusory nature of sickness on their children. According to Fraser, writing in 1999, children in pain, or with conditions such as diabetes or deafness, have been told by their Christian Science parents, teachers and nurses that that there is no such thing as pain and nothing wrong with them. Several of those raised within Christian Science families have written about how distant their parents became when there was any mention of suffering; trials of parents and others have heard evidence to the same effect. "That infuriating, smug calm in the face of crisis," Fraser wrote, "is part of what makes Christian Science so dangerous." The attitude has led to worsening illness, even death, as well as undermining the children's self-confidence and making them feel guilty that their "incorrect" thoughts have made them ill or disabled.

A Christian Science reading room, Boston, Massachusetts

The insistence that all physical ailments are mistaken beliefs can paradoxically cause hypochondria by making children obsessed with their bodies the more they try to control their thoughts about them. Rockwell Gray, brother of actor and writer Spalding Gray (1941–2004), worried at the age of eight that he would have a heart attack because he had been told by his Christian Scientist parents that thinking about it could make it happen.

According to the New York Times, the Christian Science church has always said publicly that its members were free to choose medical care, although some members have said that doing so risks them being ostracized. In 1999 the church issued a statement that, "when it comes to the care of children ... Scientists [should] consider well their individual spiritual readiness, their own past experience and record, and the mental climate in which they live ..." The statement asked church members to be supportive of families who choose medical treatment for a child.

In 2009 a church spokesman again said that adherents may seek medical treatment if they wish. Paul Vitello wrote in the New York Times in 2010 that the church sought to present Christian Science treatment as a supplement to conventional medical care, similar to biofeedback, chiropractic and homeopathy. The Christian Science Board of Directors issued a statement in response saying that the article contained "numerous errors," and that "Christian Science treatment is practiced most effectively when not combined with medication, and experience has shown this to be true."

Child deaths and prosecutions

Further information: Freedom of religion in the United States

In over 50 cases, from the prosecution of Abby Corner in 1888 to the early 1990s, prosecutors charged Christian Scientists with manslaughter or murder after both adults and children died of treatable illnesses without medical attention. In 1955 seven-year-old David Cornelius died in Philadelphia of complications arising from diabetes when his Christian Scientist parents refused to give him insulin; they were charged with involuntary manslaughter but the charges were dropped. The first of the "child cases" (as Christian Scientists call them) to result in a conviction was in 1967, when five-year-old Lisa Sheridan died of pneumonia in Cape Code, Massachusetts, without medical care; her mother was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to probation.

Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty was set up in 1983 by former Christian Scientists Rita and Douglas Swan after their 16-month-old son died of bacterial meningitis.

After the case the church successfully lobbied the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to add to the Code of Federal Regulations in 1974: "A parent or guardian legitimately practicing his religious beliefs who thereby does not provide specified medical treatment for a child, for that reason alone shall not be considered a negligent parent or guardian; however, such an exception shall not preclude a court from ordering that medical services be provided to the child, where his health requires it."

The Department of Health and Human Services eliminated the regulation in 1983, but according to Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty – which lobbies against religious-exemption laws – 38 states and the District of Columbia still had religious-exemption statutes in place as of 2013 that were based on the old regulation. Christian Scientists in other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom, are obliged to allow their children access to medical care, but the United States Constitution, specifically the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, guarantees the protection of religious practice from intrusion by government, and this has been used to persuade states to pass and retain these religious-exemption laws. The laws say that in life-threatening situations the children must be given access to medical care, but without access to physicians the seriousness of the illnesses may not be recognized.

In July 1977 16-month-old Matthew Swan died of bacterial meningitis in Detroit, Michigan, after his parents were persuaded by two Christian Science practitioners not to take him to a physician; they did eventually take him to hospital, but the infection had by then caused irreversible brain damage. The parents, Douglas and Rita Swan, responded by founding Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty in 1983. Between 1980 and 1990 another seven Christian Scientist parents were prosecuted after their children died without medical care, three of them in California; two cases were dismissed and four resulted in convictions, two of which were later overturned.

In June 1988 a child died in a Christian Science nursing home in Arizona after having lived for months with a tumor on her leg the size of a watermelon, according to the prosecutor who handled the case against her parents; they pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment. Another prominent case was Commonwealth v. Twitchell. David and Ginger Twitchell were convicted in 1990 in Massachusetts of involuntary manslaughter after failing to seek medical help for their two-year-old son who died in 1986 of peritonitis caused by a bowel obstruction. The conviction was overturned in 1993 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the couple had "reasonably believed," based on a church publication they had read, that they could rely on Christian Science treatment without being prosecuted.

Lundman v. McKown

The first time the church itself was held liable in a wrongful death suit was in August 1993, when a jury in Minnesota ordered it to pay damages to the father of 11-year-old Ian Lundman, who died of hyperglycemia in May 1989 as a consequence of undiagnosed juvenile-onset diabetes. The case is regarded as important because, although the award against the church was overturned, the judgments against several individuals, including a Christian Science practitioner and a Christian Science nurse, were upheld.

The boy had been ill for weeks, but when his condition worsened his mother, Kathleen McKown, asked a Christian Science practitioner to pray; she also sought advice from a Christian Science nursing home and the church's Committee on Publication. The home sent a Christian Science nurse to sit with the boy, and the nurse's notes were later entered into evidence.

The first entry at 9 pm noted that the boy's breathing was labored, he was vomiting, and he seemed barely responsive. The nurse read hymns, rubbed his lips with Vaseline and tried to give him water as he lay in a diabetic coma. Over five hours after she had arrived, and 16 minutes before she wrote that he had stopped breathing, she wrote "passing possible." Doctors testified that he could have been saved by an insulin injection up to two hours before his death. The boy's mother and stepfather were charged with manslaughter, but the charges were dismissed.

Ian's father, Douglass Lundman, sued his son's mother and stepfather, the practitioner, nurse, nursing home and the church. In August 1993 he was awarded $5.2 million compensatory damages divided between all the defendants, later reduced to $1.5 million, and $9 million in punitive damages against the church. The Minnesota State Court of Appeals upheld the judgment against the individuals in 1995, but overturned the award against the church and the nursing home, finding that a judgment that forced the church to "abandon teaching its central tenet" was unconstitutional, and that, while the individuals had a duty of care toward the boy, the church and nursing home did not. The mother, stepfather, practitioner and nurse appealed to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the importance of the case to Christian Scientists could "scarcely be overstated," but the court declined to hear the case. It also turned down an appeal by the father to reinstate the punitive damages against the church.

Avoidance of vaccination

The Compulsory Vaccination Act was introduced in England in 1853, requiring children to be vaccinated against smallpox. Massachusetts made vaccination against smallpox compulsory for schoolchildren in 1855, and other states soon followed. Christian Scientists protested against the laws. A Christian Scientist in Wisconsin won a legal case in 1897 that allowed his unvaccinated son to attend public school, and several Christian Scientists were arrested for avoiding vaccination during a smallpox epidemic in Georgia in 1899. In 1900 Eddy issued advice to adherents: "Rather than quarrel over vaccination I recommend that if the law demand an individual to submit to this process he obey the law and then appeal to the gospel to save him from any bad results." In 1902 she added, in the Christian Science Sentinel, that Christian Scientists should report contagious diseases to health boards when the law required it.

Forty-eight states allow religious exemptions to compulsory vaccination as of 2013. Christian Scientists are less likely to recognize and report illness to physicians, and Christian Science practitioners are not allowed to diagnose (which might expose them to allegations of practising medicine without a licence), so infection may remain undetected. There were at least four significant outbreaks of infectious diseases at Christian Science schools and camps between 1972 and 1994. In 1972, 128 students at a Christian Science school in Greenwich, Connecticut, contracted polio and four were left partially paralyzed. In 1982, a nine-year-old girl died of diphtheria after attending a Christian Science camp in Colorado. In 1985, 128 people were infected with measles at Principia College, a Christian Science school in Elsah, Illinois, and three died. In 1994, 190 people in six states were infected with measles spread by a child from a Christian Science family in Elsah, after she was exposed to it on a skiing holiday in Colorado.

Christian Science church

Classification as cult, sect or denomination

Further information: Sociological classifications of religious movements

logo

The Christian Science seal includes the Cross and Crown and words from the New Testament

Christian Science has "moved back and forth on a cult–sect–denomination continuum," according to philosopher John K. Simmons, usually categorized as a sect or cult because of its rejection of medical care and, in particular, because of the child deaths.

The New York Times regularly referred to Christian Science as a cult during Eddy's lifetime; indeed, one of the first uses of the modern sense of cult was in Anti-Christian Cults (1898) by A.H. Barrington, a book about Spiritualism, Theosophy and Christian Science. Eddy's interpretation of the Lord's Prayer – "Our Father–Mother–God, all harmonious" – was often quoted in cult exposés, the writers taken aback by the notion that God might be female.

Mainstream Protestants mostly regarded Christian Science as heretical – in 1905 the Bishop of London Arthur Winnington-Ingram (1858–1946) called it a "gigantic heresy" – but several ministers defended the new religion, arguing that it was an understandable rejection of the materialism of the day. In a few cases Christian Scientists saw themselves expelled from Christian congregations, although increasingly it was the Christian Scientists who were leaving willingly; a correspondent in the Times of London wrote in May 1885: "Scores of the most valued church members are joining the Christian Science branch of the metaphysical organization, and it has thus far been impossible to check the defection."

Sociologists Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge argued in 1996 that Christian Science met the criteria of a cult "because of the amount of novel culture it added to Christian doctrine." They wrote that they were using the word in its purely technical sense for a group whose "religious culture is quite different from that of the standard denominations in the society in which it is being observed," without implying that the group is necessarily harmful. J. Gordon Melton listed it as a cult in the 1992 edition of his Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America and in The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements (2003). It was also included in the 2003 edition of Walter Ralston Martin's (1928–1989) religious reference book, The Kingdom of the Cults, first published in 1965.

The Christian Science church began an ecumenical dialogue in the 2000s with mainstream Christian churches, with a view to fostering closer relationships. In 2008 Michael Kinnamon, then general secretary of the National Council of Churches (NCC), invited Christian Scientists to visit the NCC governing board and several joined NCC commissions. According to Shirley Paulson of the Christian Science church, the stumbling blocks for better relationships continue to be the "surface similarities" between Christian Science and gnosticism (regarded as heresy) and the church's rejection of medical care.

Governance and services

Further information: First Church of Christ, Scientist (disambiguation) and Reader (Christian Science Church)

The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, is headquartered in a 28-story building on its original site in Boston; the site covers 14 acres and includes a plaza with a 670-foot reflecting pool. The organization is led by a five-person executive created by Eddy, the function of which is defined by the Manual of The Mother Church (1895), a set of by-laws written by Eddy.

The Manual lists 83 requirements and prohibitions for members. Requirements include daily study of the Bible and Science and Health, and daily prayer. Members are required to say each day: "Thy kingdom come; let the reign of divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in me, and rule out of me all sin; and may Thy Word enrich the affections of all mankind, and govern them!" They must also subscribe to church periodicals if they can afford to, and pay an annual tax to the church of not less than one dollar. Prohibitions include joining other churches, publishing articles that are uncharitable toward religion, medicine, or the law and courts, engaging in public debate or writing about Christian Science without board approval, and engaging in mental malpractice.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, showing the original church, built in 1894, and the later extension

Christian Science churches have no clergy, sermons or rituals, and perform no baptisms, marriages or burials. There are Sunday morning and evening services in which excerpts from Science and Health and the Bible are read out loud, Sunday Schools, and meetings on Wednesday afternoons or evenings during which members give testimonies of healing. There are also online Wednesday meetings and online Sunday Schools.

Members have tended to be white, middle-class, well-educated and comfortable financially. Forty two percent had a college education as of the late 1990s, and most Christian Science practitioners were women. Outside the United States the religion was practiced most in the 1990s in Australia, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, although since then membership in Africa has increased.

The church has been accused at times of silencing criticism from Christian Scientists by firing them, delisting them as practitioners, or excommunicating them. For example, Stephen Gottschalk – author of The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (1973) and Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism (2005) – who had spent his life in the church and had worked for 13 years for its powerful Committee on Publication, was forced to leave his position in 1990 after advising the board to be more accepting of internal criticism. By the end of the year, five of Gottschalk's associates had resigned or been fired, Fraser wrote.

In 1985 a group of LGBTQ Christian Science students formed Emergence International (EMI), a coalition advocating change in the way the church treats sexual minorities. Eddy saw sexuality as mainly about procreation, and as a result the church has treated homosexuality, sex outside marriage, excessive sexuality within marriage, and masturbation as practices to be discouraged. A lesbian reporter was fired in 1982 from the Christian Science Monitor after rumors circulated that she was gay. According to an EMI member writing in 2004, the church had become more accepting of sexual minorities.

Notable members

Further information: List of Christian Scientists (religious denomination)

Notable Christian Scientists have included two former Directors of Central Intelligence, William H. Webster and Admiral Stansfield M. Turner, as well as Richard Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's White House Counsel John Ehrlichman, and Judge Thomas P. Griesa. There used to be a concentration of Christian Scientists in the film industry (see right). Other notable Scientists have included physicist Laurance Doyle and NASA astronaut Alan Shepard. In England the viscountess Nancy Astor and naval officer Charles Lightoller, the highest-ranking officer to survive the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, were both Christian Scientists.

Those raised within Christian Science include comedian Robin Williams, television host Ellen DeGeneres, musician James Hetfield, jurist Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, and actors Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and Anne Archer. Archer left Christian Science when her son, Tommy Davis, was a child; both became prominent in the Church of Scientology.

Membership figures

Church rules prohibit publication of membership totals, but lists of churches and practitioners are published each month in the Christian Science Journal. This information, along with census results, has been used by scholars to estimate church membership totals. Early in its history the church experienced rapid growth, with membership in the United States rising from fewer than 10,000 in 1890 to approximately 270,000 by 1936. Membership peaked sometime in the 1940s and has continued to decline ever since. The number of practitioners in the United States declined from 11,200 in 1941 to 1,820 in 1995. Although the decline in membership began in the 1940s, the number of churches in the United States continued to increase until the 1960s, as a result of expansion into suburban areas. In 1968 there were 1,821 churches there, reduced to 1,300 by 1995, and around 1,100 as of 2010. Scholars estimate that the number of Christian Scientists in the United States had dropped to approximately 100,000 as of the year 2000.

Although the church has experienced a decline in membership, the American Religious Identification Survey has shown fluctuation in the number of Americans who self-identify as Christian Scientists. In 1990 it estimated there were 214,000 Christian Scientists, in 2001 the estimate dropped to 194,000, but in 2008 it jumped to 339,000. Also in 2008, Judy Valente of NPR reported that the church estimated it had 400,000 members worldwide. While United States and European membership has declined, the church has reported growth in Africa. In 2009 it announced that for the first time there were more new members admitted from Africa than from the United States.

Christian Science Publishing Society

Journals, television

Christian Science Monitor offices, Boston, Massachusetts

The Christian Science Publishing Society publishes several periodicals from the headquarters of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, including the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper with a reputation for high-quality international news coverage. The winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes and 427 other awards, the Monitor was founded by Eddy in 1908 under the slogan: "To injure no man, but to bless all mankind." At its height in 1970 it had a circulation of 220,000, which by 2008 had contracted to 52,000. Citing losses of $18.9 million a year and $12.5 million in revenue as of 2008, the magazine moved in April 2009 to a largely online presence, with a weekly, instead of daily, print run.

The church also publishes the weekly Christian Science Sentinel, the monthly Christian Science Journal, and the Herald of Christian Science, a non-English publication available in several languages. In April 2012 a project known as JSH-Online was completed to make all back issues of the Journal, Sentinel and Herald available online. The Journal and Sentinel include contributions, called testimonies, from people who say they were healed through Christian Science prayer. Testimonies have to include the names of three "verifiers," one of whom must be a member of the Mother Church, who "witnessed the healing or can vouch for its accuracy based on their knowledge of [the person offering the testimony]," according to the church.

In the 1980s the church also produced its own television programs, Christian Science Monitor Reports and World Monitor. In May 1991 it founded the Monitor Channel, a 24-hour current affairs cable channel, which closed with heavy losses after 13 months.

The Destiny of the Mother Church

Further information: The Destiny of The Mother Church

The Christian Science Publishing Society, Boston, Massachusetts

The decision of the Christian Science Publishing Company to publish The Destiny of the Mother Church (1991), written decades earlier by Christian Scientist Bliss Knapp (1877–1958), led to a major scandal.

Knapp was a Christian Science practitioner, former president of the Mother Church, and son of Ira Oscar Knapp and Flavia Stickney Knapp, two of Eddy's students. He wrote and printed the book privately in 1947, and in it suggested that both the Old and New Testaments had predicted Eddy's coming, and that she was the Woman of the Apocalypse in the New Testament's Book of Revelation.

The Christian Science Publishing Society refused to publish it. Knapp was anxious to have it published as church-authorized literature, and so he, his wife and sister-in-law bequeathed their estates, worth around $98 million, to the church, on condition that it publish the book by 1993. If it failed to do so, the money would be left to Stanford University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The church refused at least once after the bequest was set up, but agreed to publish it in 1991, and made the book available in Christian Science reading rooms; the other parties disputed that this constituted authorizing it, and in the end the bequest was split three ways. Commentators linked the church's decision to its financial losses following its failed broadcasting efforts. In the view of some church members, the book tainted the religion's status as Christian and lent support to the view of the church as a cult. Several employees resigned over the decision, including the senior editors of the religious journals, and others were fired for refusing to support the book in public.

Works by Mary Baker Eddy

• Science and Health (1875)
• The Science of Man, By Which the Sick are Healed (1876)
• Christian Healing (1880)
• The People's God (1883)
• Historical Sketches of Metaphysical Healing (1885)
• Defence of Christian Science (1885)
• No and Yes (1887)
• Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science (1887)
• Unity of Good and Unreality of Evil (1888)
• Retrospection and Introspection (1891)
• Rudimental Divine Science (1894)
• Manual of the Mother Church (1895)
• Pulpit and Press (1895)
• Miscellaneous Writings, 1883–1896 (1897)
• Christ and Christmas (1897)
• Christian Science versus Pantheism (1898)
• The Christian Science Hymnal (1898)
• Christian Healing and the People's Idea of God (1908)
• Poems (1910)
• The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany (1913)
• Prose Works (1925)

See also

• Anne Hutchinson
• Ann Lee / Shakers
• Ellen G. White / Seventh-day Adventism
• Bone pointing / Voodoo death
• Efficacy of prayer / Faith healing
• Hindu idealism
• Iatrogenesis
• Law of attraction
• Mind over matter
• Placebo effect / Nocebo
• Psychosomatic medicine
• Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)
• Prince v. Massachusetts (1944)
• Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972)

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Further reading

External links

• Official Christian Science website
• Christian Science publications (Journal, Herald and Sentinel)
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Manual of the Mother Church, 89th edition.
• New York Times, The. "Mary Baker Eddy", archive of articles, 1899–the present.
• Commonwealth vs. David R. Twitchell, 1993.
• Mary Baker Eddy Library
• Mary Baker Eddy Institute
• Christian Science lectures
• Emergence International, LGBT advocacy within Christian Science.
• Longyear Museum, devoted to the life and work of Mary Baker Eddy.
• The Bookmark, independent source of literature on Christian Science.
• Doyle, Laurance. "Science & Spirit: Where Do They Meet?" (lecture on Christian Science), Stanford University, May 6, 2008.
• Ruetenik, Tadd. "The First Church of Christ, Pragmatist: Christian Science and Responsible Optimism", Journal of Religion and Health, 51(4), December 2012, pp. 1397–1405.

Encyclopedia articles

• The New International Encyclopedia. "Christian Science", 1905.
• Encyclopædia Britannica. "Christian Science", 11th edition, 1911.
• Encyclopædia Britannica. "Christian Science", 12th edition, 1922.
• Encyclopædia Britannica. "Christian Science", 2013.

Books by former Christian Scientists

• Fraser, Caroline. God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, Metropolitan Books, 1999.
• Kramer, Linda S. The Religion That Kills: Christian Science: Abuse, Neglect, and Mind Control, Bookworld Services, 1999.
• Simmons, Thomas. The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood, Beacon 1991.
• Swan, Rita. The Last Strawberry, Hag's Head Press, 2009.
• Wilson, Barbara. Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood, Picador 1997.

Books about New Thought

• Braden, Charles S. Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought, Southern Methodist University Press, 1963.
• Dresser, Horatio. A History of the New Thought Movement, 1919.
• Mosley, Glenn R. New Thought, Ancient Wisdom: The History and Future of the New Thought Movement. Templeton Press, 2006.

Biographies of Mary Baker Eddy (chronological order)

• Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgine. "Mary Baker G. Eddy". McClure's magazine, 14 articles, January 1907 – June 1908; McClure's editorial, December 1906.
• Wilbur, Sybil. The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1907.
• Meehan, Michael. Mrs. Eddy and the Late Suit in Equity, Ulan Press 2012, first published 1908.
• Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgine. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science, Doubleday 1909; can be read at unz.org, and archive.org. Republished in 1971 by Baker Book House, and in 1993 by University of Nebraska Press.
• Bancroft, Samuel P. Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her in 1870, Geo H. Ellis Co, 1923.
• Dickey, Adam H. Memoirs of Mary Baker Eddy, Bookmark 2002, first published 1927.
• Dakin, Edwin Franden. Mrs. Eddy, the Biography of a Virginal Mind, C. Scribner's Sons, 1929.
• Powell, Lyman P. Mary Baker Eddy: A Life Size Portrait, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1930.
• Springer, Fleta Campbell. According to the Flesh, Coward-McCann, 1930.
• Bates, Ernest Sutherland and Dittemore, John V. Mary Baker Eddy: The Truth and the Tradition, A. A. Knopf, 1932.
• Tomlinson, Irving C. Twelve Years with Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science Publishing Society, 1945.
• Studdert Kennedy, Hugh A. Mrs. Eddy: Her Life, Her Work and Her Place in History, Farallon Press, 1947.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1971.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1977.
• Gardner, Martin. The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy, Prometheus Books, 1993.
• Thomas, David. With Bleeding Footsteps: Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership, Knopf 1994.
• Nenneman, Richard A. Persistent Pilgrim: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy, Nebbadoon Press, 1997.
• Gill, Gillian. Mary Baker Eddy, Da Capo Press, 1998.
• Gottschalk, Stephen. Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism, Indiana University Press, 2006.