Christian Science is a nontrinitarian Christian religion whose adherents are members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Church members are 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 outlines 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. Eddy continued editing this text across the following 35 years until her death in 1910. The book became Christian Science's central textbook, 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.For the charter, Eddy, Mary Baker (1908) . Manual of the Mother Church, 89th edition. Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist. pp. 17–18. 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".Eddy, Manual of the Mother Church, p. 17. Adherents subscribe to a radical form of philosophical idealism, believing that sin, sickness and death are not produced by God and are therefore illusory.; Rescher, Nicholas (2009) . "Idealism", in Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa (eds.). A Companion to Metaphysics. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. p. 318 . 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 or surgical 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.Schoepflin, Rennie B. (2003). Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 192–193. Trammell, Mary M., chair, Christian Science board of directors (March 26, 2010). "Letter; What the Christian Science Church Teaches" . The New York Times.Regarding vaccines specifically, see: Christine Pae (September 1, 2021). "Here's who qualifies for a religious exemption to Washington's COVID-19 vaccine mandate". . KING 5. Samantha Maiden (April 18, 2015). "No Jab, No Pay reforms: Religious exemptions for vaccination dumped". . Daily Telegraph (Australia). Eddy did not require that her students avoid the study of medicine. The reliance on prayer and avoidance of medical treatment has been blamed for the deaths of adherents and their children. Between the 1880s and 1990s, several parents and others were prosecuted for, and in a few cases convicted of, manslaughter or neglect.Schoepflin 2003, pp. 212–216 Peters, Shawn Francis (2007). When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 91, 109–130. .Massachusetts Citizens for Children (MassKids), 2023, “Cases of Childhood Deaths Due to Parental Religious Objection to Necessary Medical Care”.
Overview Metaphysical family
Several periods of Protestant Christian revival nurtured a proliferation of new religious movements in the United States.William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 10–11, 16–17. Roy M. Anker, "Revivalism, Religious Experience and the Birth of Mental Healing", Self-help and Popular Religion in Early American Culture: An Interpretive Guide, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1999(a), (pp. 11–100), pp. 8, 176ff. 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.John S. Haller, The History of New Thought: From Mental Healing to Positive Thinking and the Prosperity Gospel, West Chester, Pennsylvania: Swedenborg Foundation Press, 2012, pp. 10–11. Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1919, pp. 152–153. For early uses of New Thought, William Henry Holcombe, Condensed Thoughts about Christian Science (pamphlet), Chicago: Purdy Publishing Company, 1887; Horatio W. Dresser, "The Metaphysical Movement" (from a statement issued by the Metaphysical Club, Boston, 1901), The Spirit of the New Thought, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1917, p. 215.
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. William James and others intuited an association with elements of Plato, Hinduism, Berkeley, Hegel, Swedenborg, and transcendentalism.Dell De Chant, "The American New Thought Movement", in Eugene Gallagher and Michael Ashcraft (eds.), Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Company, 2007, pp. 81–82.William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh), New York: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1902, pp. 75–76; "New Thought" , Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.
The metaphysical groups became known as the mind-cure movement because of their strong focus on healing.de Chant 2007, p. 73. 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.; de Chant 2007, p. 67. 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."Wilson 1961, p. 135 ; Braden 1963, p. 62 (for "the truth is the cure"); McGuire 1988, p. 79 . Also see "Religion: New Thought" , Time magazine, 7 November 1938; "Phineas Parkhurst Quimby" , Encyclopædia Britannica, September 9, 2013. 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.Simmons 1995, p. 64 ; Fuller 2013, pp. 212–213 , n. 16.
New Thought and Christian Science differed in that Eddy saw her views as a unique and final revelation.Wilson 1961, p. 156 ; Braden 1963, pp. 14, 16; Simmons 1995, p. 61 . 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.Wilson 1961, pp. 126–127 ; Braden 1963, pp. 18–19.Gottschalk, Stephen (1973). The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 128, 148–149. Moore, Laurence R. (1986). Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 112–113. Simmons 1995, p. 62 ; Whorton, James C. (2004). Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 128–129 . 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.Craig R. Prentiss, "Sickness, Death and Illusion in Christian Science", in Colleen McDannell (ed.), Religions of the United States in Practice, Vol. 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 322 . Claudia Stokes, The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014, p. 181 .
Christian Science theology
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.Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 284. 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."Wilson 1961, p. 121; Eddy, Manual of the Mother Church, pp. 15–16. 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.David L. Weddle, "The Christian Science Textbook: An Analysis of the Religious Authority of Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy", , The Harvard Theological Review, 84(3), 1991, p. 281; Gottschalk 1973, p. xxi. In 1895, in the Manual of the Mother Church, she ordained the Bible and Science and Health as "Pastor over the Mother Church".Eddy, Manual of the Mother Church, p. 58; Weddle 1991 , p. 273.