Christian Science

Christian Science is a set of beliefs and practices which are associated with members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Adherents are commonly known as Christian Scientists or students of Christian Science, and the church is sometimes informally known as the Christian Science church. It was founded in 1879 in New England by Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote the 1875 book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which outlined the theology of Christian Science. The book was originally called Science and Health; the subtitle with a Key to the Scriptures was added in 1883 and later amended to with Key to the Scriptures.
The book became Christian Science's central text, along with the Bible, and by 2001 had sold over nine million copies.
Eddy and 26 followers were granted a charter by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1879 to found the "Church of Christ (Scientist)"; the church would be reorganized under the name "Church of Christ, Scientist" in 1892. The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1894. Known as the "thinker's religion", Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in the United States, with nearly 270,000 members by 1936 — a figure which had declined to just over 100,000 by 1990 and reportedly to under 50,000 by 2009. The church is known for its newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, which won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, and for its public Reading Rooms around the world.
Christian Science's religious tenets differ considerably from many other Christian denominations, including key concepts such as the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, atonement, the resurrection, and the Eucharist. Eddy, for her part, described Christian Science as a return to "primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing". Adherents 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 mental error rather than physical disorder, and that the sick should be treated not by medicine but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.
The church does not require that Christian Scientists avoid medical care—many adherents use dentists, optometrists, obstetricians, physicians for broken bones, and vaccination when required by law—but maintains that Christian Science prayer is most effective when not combined with medicine. The reliance on prayer and avoidance of medical treatment has been blamed for the deaths of several adherents and their children. Between the 1880s and 1990s, parents and others were prosecuted for, and in a few cases convicted of, manslaughter or neglect.
Several periods of Protestant Christian revival nurtured a proliferation of new religious movements in the United States. In the latter half of the 19th century, these included what came to be known as the metaphysical family: groups such as Christian Science, Divine Science, the Unity School of Christianity, and (later) the United Church of Religious Science. From the 1890s, the liberal section of the movement became known as New Thought, in part to distinguish it from the more authoritarian Christian Science.
The term metaphysical referred to the movement's philosophical idealism, a belief in the primacy of the mental world. Adherents believed that material phenomena were the result of mental states, a view expressed as "life is consciousness" and "God is mind." The supreme cause was referred to as Divine Mind, Truth, God, Love, Life, Spirit, Principle or Father–Mother, reflecting elements of Plato, Hinduism, Berkeley, Hegel, Swedenborg, and transcendentalism.
The metaphysical groups became known as the mind-cure movement because of their strong focus on healing. Medical practice was in its infancy, and patients regularly fared better without it. This provided fertile soil for the mind-cure groups, who argued that sickness was an absence of "right thinking" or failure to connect to Divine Mind. The movement traced its roots in the United States to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a New England clockmaker turned mental healer. His advertising flyer, "To the Sick" included this explanation of his clairvoyant methodology: "he gives no medicines and makes no outward applications, but simply sits down by the patients, tells them their feelings and what they think is their disease. If the patients admit that he tells them their feelings, &c., 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. The Truth is the Cure. This mode of practise applies to all cases. If no explanation is given, no charge is made, for no effect is produced." Mary Baker Eddy had been a patient of his (1862–1865), leading to debate about how much of Christian Science was based on his ideas.
New Thought and Christian Science differed in that Eddy saw her views as a unique and final revelation. Eddy's idea of malicious animal magnetism (that people can be harmed by the bad thoughts of others) marked another distinction, introducing an element of fear that was absent from the New Thought literature. Most significantly, she dismissed the material world as an illusion, rather than as merely subordinate to Mind, leading her to reject the use of medicine, or materia medica, and making Christian Science the most controversial of the metaphysical groups. Reality for Eddy was purely spiritual.
Christian Science leaders place their religion within mainstream Christian teaching, according to J. Gordon Melton, and reject any identification with the New Thought movement. Eddy was strongly influenced by her Congregationalist upbringing. According to the church's tenets, adherents accept "the inspired Word of the Bible as [their] sufficient guide to eternal Life ... acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God ... [and] acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's image and likeness." When founding the Church of Christ, Scientist, in April 1879, Eddy wrote that she wanted to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing". Later she suggested that Christian Science was a kind of second coming and that Science and Health was an inspired text. In 1895, in the Manual of the Mother Church, she ordained the Bible and Science and Health as "Pastor over the Mother Church".
Christian Science theology differs in several respects from that of traditional Christianity. Eddy's Science and Health reinterprets key Christian concepts, including the Trinity, divinity of Jesus, atonement, and resurrection; beginning with the 1883 edition, she added "with a Key to the Scriptures" to the title and included a glossary that redefined the Christian vocabulary. At the core of Eddy's theology is the view that the spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good, and that the material world, with its evil, sickness and death, is an illusion. Eddy saw humanity as an "idea of Mind" that is "perfect, eternal, unlimited, and reflects the divine", according to Bryan Wilson; what she called "mortal man" is simply humanity's distorted view of itself. Despite her view of the non-existence of evil, an important element of Christian Science theology is that evil thought, in the form of malicious animal magnetism, can cause harm, even if the harm is only apparent.
Eddy viewed God not as a person but as "All-in-all". Although she often described God in the language of personhood—she used the term "Father–Mother God" (as did Ann Lee, the founder of Shakerism), and, in the third edition of Science and Health, she referred to God as "she"—God is mostly represented in Christian Science by the synonyms "Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love". The Holy Ghost is Christian Science, and heaven and hell are states of mind. There is no supplication in Christian Science prayer. The process involves the Scientist engaging in a silent argument to affirm to herself the unreality of matter, something Christian Science practitioners will do for a fee, including in absentia, to address ill health or other problems. Wilson writes that Christian Science healing is "not curative ... on its own premises, but rather preventative of ill health, accident and misfortune, since it claims to lead to a state of consciousness where these things do not exist. What heals is the realization that there is nothing really to heal." It is a closed system of thought, viewed as infallible if performed correctly; healing confirms the power of Truth, but its absence derives from the failure, specifically the bad thoughts, of individuals.
Eddy accepted as true the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis up to chapter 2, verse 6—that God created man in his image and likeness—but she rejected the rest "as the story of the false and the material", according to Wilson. Her theology is nontrinitarian: she viewed the Trinity as suggestive of polytheism. She saw Jesus as a Christian Scientist, a "Way-shower" between humanity and God, and she distinguished between Jesus the man and the concept of Christ, the latter a synonym for Truth and Jesus the first person fully to manifest it. The crucifixion was not a divine sacrifice for the sins of humanity, the atonement (the forgiveness of sin through Jesus's suffering) "not the bribing of God by offerings", writes Wilson, but an "at-one-ment" with God. Her views on life after death were vague and, according to Wilson, "there is no doctrine of the soul" in Christian Science: "[A]fter death, the individual continues his probationary state until he has worked out his own salvation by proving the truths of Christian Science." Eddy did not believe that the dead and living could communicate.
To the more conservative of the Protestant clergy, Eddy's view of Science and Health as divinely inspired was a challenge to the Bible's authority. "Eddyism" was viewed as a cult; one of the first uses of the modern sense of the word was in A. H. Barrington's Anti-Christian Cults (1898), a book about Spiritualism, Theosophy and Christian Science. In a few cases Christian Scientists were expelled from Christian congregations, but ministers also worried that their parishioners were choosing to leave. In May 1885 the London Times' Boston correspondent wrote about the "Boston mind-cure craze": "Scores of the most valued Church members are joining the Christian Scientist branch of the metaphysical organization, and it has thus far been impossible to check the defection." In 1907 Mark Twain described the appeal of the new religion to its adherents:
Mary Baker Eddy was born Mary Morse Baker on a farm in Bow, New Hampshire, the youngest of six children in a religious family of Protestant Congregationalists. In common with most women at the time, Eddy was given little formal education, but read widely at home and was privately tutored. From childhood, she lived with protracted ill health. Eddy's first husband died six months after their marriage and three months before their son was born, leaving her penniless; and as a result of her poor health she lost custody of the boy when he was four. She married again, and her new husband promised to become the child's legal guardian, but after their marriage he refused to sign the needed papers and the boy was taken to Minnesota and told his mother had died. Eddy, then known as Mary Patterson, and her husband moved to rural New Hampshire, where Eddy continued to suffer from health problems which often kept her bedridden. Eddy tried various cures for her health problems, including conventional medicine as well as many forms of alternative medicine such as Grahamism, electrotherapy, homeopathy, hydropathy, and finally mesmerism under Phineas Quimby. She was later accused by critics, beginning with Julius Dresser, of borrowing ideas from Quimby in what biographer Gillian Gill would call the "single most controversial issue" of her life.
In February 1866, Eddy fell on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts. Evidence suggests she had severe injuries, but a few days later she apparently asked for her Bible, opened it to an account of one of Jesus' miracles, and left her bed telling her friends that she was healed through prayer alone. The moment has since been controversial, but she considered this moment one of the "falling apples" that helped her to understand Christian Science, although she said she did not fully understand it at the time.
In 1866, after her fall on the ice, Eddy began teaching her first student and began writing her ideas which she eventually published in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, considered her most important work. Her students voted to form a church called the Church of Christ (Scientist) in 1879, later reorganized as The First Church of Christ, Scientist, also known as The Mother Church, in 1892. She founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881 to continue teaching students, Eddy started a number of periodicals: The Christian Science Journal in 1883, the Christian Science Sentinel in 1898, The Herald of Christian Science in 1903, and The Christian Science Monitor in 1908, the latter being a secular newspaper. The Monitor has gone on to win seven Pulitzer prizes as of 2011. She also wrote numerous books and articles in addition to Science and Health, including the Manual of The Mother Church which contained by-laws for church government and member activity, and founded the Christian Science Publishing Society in 1898 in order to distribute Christian Science literature. Although the movement started in Boston, the first purpose-built Christian Science church building was erected in 1886 in Oconto, Wisconsin. During Eddy's lifetime, Christian Science spread throughout the United States and to other parts of the world including Canada, Great Britain, Germany, South Africa, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Australia, and elsewhere.
Eddy encountered significant opposition after she began teaching and writing on Christian Science, which only increased towards the end of her life. One of the most prominent examples was Mark Twain, who wrote a number of articles on Eddy and Christian Science which were first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1899 and were later published as a book. Another extended criticism, which again was first serialized in a magazine and then published in book form, was Georgine Milmine and Willa Cather's The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science which first appeared in McClure's magazine in January 1907. Also in 1907, several of Eddy's relatives filed an unsuccessful lawsuit instigated by the New York World, known in the press as the "Next Friends Suit", against members of Eddy's household, alleging that she was mentally unable to manage her own affairs. The suit fell apart after Eddy was interviewed in her home in August 1907 by the judge and two court-appointed masters (one a psychiatrist) who concluded that she was mentally competent. Separately, she was seen by two psychiatrists, including Allan McLane Hamilton, who came to the same conclusion. The McClure's and New York World stories are considered to at least partially be the reason Eddy asked the church in July 1908 to found the Christian Science Monitor as a platform for responsible journalism.
Eddy died two years later, on the evening of Saturday, December 3, 1910, aged 89. The Mother Church announced at the end of the Sunday morning service that Eddy had "passed from our sight". The church stated that "the time will come when there will be no more death," but that Christian Scientists "do not look for [Eddy's] return in this world." Her estate was valued at $1.5 million, most of which she left to the church.
In the aftermath of Eddy's death, some newspapers speculated that the church would fall apart, while others expected it to continue just as it had before. As it was, the movement continued to grow in the first few decades after 1910. The Manual of the Mother Church prohibits the church from publishing membership figures, and it is not clear exactly when the height of the movement was. A 1936 census counted c. 268,915 Christian Scientists in the United States (2,098 per million), and Rodney Stark believes this to be close to the height. However, the number of Christian Science churches continued to increase until around 1960, at which point there was a reversal and, since then, many churches have closed their doors. The number of Christian Science practitioners in the United States began to decline in the 1940s according to Stark. According to J. Gordon Melton, in 1972 there were 3,237 congregations worldwide, of which roughly 2,400 were in the United States; and, in the following ten years, about 200 congregations were closed.
During the years after Eddy's death, the church has gone through a number of hardships and controversies. This included attempts to make practicing Christian Science illegal in the United States and elsewhere; a period known as the Great Litigation which involved two intertwined lawsuits regarding church governance; persecution under the Nazi and Communist regimes in Germany and the Imperial regime in Japan; a series of lawsuits involving the deaths of members of the church, most notably some children; and a controversial decision to publish a book by Bliss Knapp. In conjunction with the Knapp book controversy, there was controversy within the church involving The Monitor Channel, part of The Christian Science Monitor which had been losing money, and which eventually led to the channel shutting down. Acknowledging their earlier mistake, of accepting a multi-million dollar publishing incentive to offset broadcasting losses, The Christian Science Board Of Directors, with the concurrence of the Trustees Of The Christian Science Publishing Society, withdrew Destiny Of The Mother Church from publication in September 2023. In addition, it has since its beginning been branded as a cult by more fundamentalist strains of Christianity, and attracted significant opposition as a result. A number of independent teachers and alternative movements of Christian Science have emerged since its founding, but none of these individuals or groups have achieved the prominence of the Christian Science church.
Despite the hardships and controversies, many Christian Science churches and Reading Rooms remain in existence around the world, and, in recent years, there have been reports of the religion growing in Africa, though it remains significantly behind other evangelical groups. The Christian Science Monitor also remains a well-respected non-religious paper which is especially noted for its international reporting and lack of partisanship.
Christian Scientists avoid almost all medical treatment, relying instead on Christian Science prayer. This consists of silently arguing with oneself; there are no appeals to a personal god, and no set words. Caroline Fraser wrote in 1999 that the practitioner might repeat: "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." She might deny other religions, the existence of evil, mesmerism, astrology, numerology, and the symptoms of whatever the illness is. She concludes, Fraser writes, by asserting that disease is a lie, that this is the word of God, and that it has the power to heal.
Christian Science practitioners are certified by the Church of Christ, Scientist, to charge a fee for Christian Science prayer. There were 1,249 practitioners worldwide in 2015; in the United States in 2010 they charged $25–$50 for an e-mail, telephone or face-to-face consultation. Their training is a two-week, 12-lesson course called "primary class", based on the Recapitulation chapter of Science and Health. Practitioners wanting to teach primary class take a six-day "normal class", held in Boston once every three years, and become Christian Science teachers. There are also Christian Science nursing homes. They offer no medical services; the nurses are Christian Scientists who have completed a course of religious study and training in basic skills, such as feeding and bathing.
The Christian Science Journal and Christian Science Sentinel publish anecdotal healing testimonials (they published 53,900 between 1900 and April 1989), which must be accompanied by statements from three verifiers: "people who know [the testifier] well and have either witnessed the healing or can vouch for [the testifier's] integrity in sharing it". Philosopher Margaret P. Battin wrote in 1999 that the seriousness with which these testimonials are treated by Christian Scientists ignores factors such as false positives caused by self-limiting conditions. Because no negative accounts are published, the testimonials strengthen people's tendency to rely on anecdotes. A church study published in 1989 examined 10,000 published testimonials, 2,337 of which the church said involved conditions that had been medically diagnosed, and 623 of which were "medically confirmed by follow-up examinations". The report offered no evidence of the medical follow-up. The Massachusetts Committee for Children and Youth listed among the report's flaws that it had failed to compare the rates of successful and unsuccessful Christian Science treatment.
Nathan Talbot, a church spokesperson, told the New England Journal of Medicine in 1983 that church members were free to choose medical care, but according to former Christian Scientists those who do may be ostracized. In 2010 the New York Times reported church leaders as saying that, for over a year, they had been "encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary", and that they were repositioning Christian Science prayer as a supplement to medical care, rather than a substitute. The church has lobbied to have the work of Christian Science practitioners covered by insurance.
As of 2015, it was reported that Christian Scientists in Australia were not advising anyone against vaccines, and the religious exception was deemed "no longer current or necessary". In 2021, a church Committee on Publication reiterated that although vaccination was an individual choice, that the church did not dictate against it, and those who were not vaccinated did not do so because of any "church dogma".
In the hierarchy of the Church of Christ, Scientist, only the Mother Church in Boston, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, uses the definite article in its name. Otherwise the first Christian Science church in any city is called First Church of Christ, Scientist, then Second Church of Christ, Scientist, and so on, followed by the name of the city (for example, Third Church of Christ, Scientist, London). When a church closes, the others in that city are not renamed.
Founded in April 1879, the Church of Christ, Scientist is led by a president and five-person board of directors. There is a public-relations department, known as the Committee on Publication, with representatives around the world; this was set up by Eddy in 1898 to protect her own and the church's reputation. The church was accused in the 1990s of silencing internal criticism by firing staff, delisting practitioners and excommunicating members.
The church's administration is headquartered on Christian Science Center on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Huntington Avenue, located on several acres in the Back Bay section of Boston. The 14.5-acre site includes the Mother Church (1894), Mother Church Extension (1906), the Christian Science Publishing Society building (1934)—which houses the Mary Baker Eddy Library and the church's administrative staff—the Sunday School building (1971), and the Church Colonnade building (1972). It also includes the 26-story Administration Building (1972), designed by Araldo Cossutta of I. M. Pei & Associates, which until 2008 housed the administrative staff from the church's 15 departments. There is also a children's fountain and a 690 ft × 100 ft (210 m × 30 m) reflecting pool.
Eddy's Manual of The Mother Church (first published 1895) lists the church's by-laws. Requirements for members include daily prayer and daily study of the Bible and Science and Health. Members must 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 engaging in mental malpractice; visiting a store that sells "obnoxious" books; joining other churches; publishing articles that are uncharitable toward religion, medicine, the courts or the law; and publishing the number of church members. The manual also prohibits engaging in public debate about Christian Science without board approval, and learning hypnotism. It includes "The Golden Rule": "A member of The Mother Church shall not haunt Mrs. Eddy's drive when she goes out, continually stroll by her house, or make a summer resort near her for such a purpose."
The Church of Christ, Scientist is a lay church which has no ordained clergy or rituals, and performs no baptisms; with clergy of other faiths often performing marriage or funeral services since they have no clergy of their own. Its main religious texts are the Bible and Science and Health. Each church has two Readers, who read aloud a "Bible lesson" or "lesson sermon" made up of selections from those texts during the Sunday service, and a shorter set of readings to open Wednesday evening testimony meetings. In addition to readings, members offer testimonials during the main portion of the Wednesday meetings, including recovery from ill health attributed to prayer. There are also hymns, time for silent prayer, and repeating together the Lord's Prayer at each service.
Notable adherents of Christian Science have included Directors of Central Intelligence William H. Webster and Admiral Stansfield M. Turner; and Richard Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman and Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman. The viscountess Nancy Astor was a Christian Scientist, as was naval officer Charles Lightoller, who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
Christian Science has been well represented in the film industry, including Carol Channing and Jean Stapleton; Colleen Dewhurst; Joan Crawford, Doris Day, George Hamilton, Mary Pickford, Ginger Rogers, Mickey Rooney; Horton Foote; King Vidor; Robert Duvall, and Val Kilmer. Those raised by Christian Scientists include jurist Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg; Ellen DeGeneres, Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn; James Hetfield, Marilyn Monroe, Robin Williams, and Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor's godfather, the British politician Victor Cazalet, was also a member of the church. Actor Anne Archer was raised within Christian Science; she left the church when her son, Tommy Davis, was a child, and both became prominent in the Church of Scientology. Influenced by Marietta T. Webb, who became one of the first African Americans listed in The Christian Science Journal as a practitioner in 1911, four prominent African American entertainers have been associated with Christian Science: singer Pearl Bailey, jazz percussionist Lionel Hampton, conductor Everett Lee, and actor Alfre Woodard.
A conspicuous event was the death in June 1937 of actress Jean Harlow, who died of kidney failure at age 26. Her mother, known as Mama Jean, was a recent convert to Christian Science and did on at least two occasions attempt to block conventional medical treatment for her daughter. Fellow actors and studio executives intervened, and Harlow received medical treatment, although in 1937, nothing could be done for kidney failure and she perished.
Though never identifying as a Christian Scientist, Albert Einstein studied Science and Health, supported many of its conclusions, and admired Eddy. Biographer Robert Peel called Einstein's interest in the religion "slight but recurrent." There are several first-hand accounts of Einstein visiting Christian Science churches and reading rooms in New York City and New Jersey in the 1950s. In his biography of Einstein, Walter Isaacson notes that Hans Albert, Einstein's son, became a Christian Scientist.
The Christian Science Publishing Society publishes several periodicals, including the Christian Science Monitor, winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002. This had a daily circulation in 1970 of 220,000, which by 2008 had contracted to 52,000. In 2009 it moved to a largely online presence with a weekly print run. In the 1980s the church produced its own television programs, and in 1991 it founded a 24-hour news channel, which closed with heavy losses after 13 months.
The church also publishes the weekly Christian Science Sentinel, the monthly Christian Science Journal, and the Herald of Christian Science, a non-English publication. In April 2012 JSH-Online made back issues of the Journal, Sentinel and Herald available online to subscribers.
Church histories
Books by former Christian Scientists