Church of Christ, Scientist

CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST

CHURCH OF CHRIST, SCIENTIST, is a religious system that emerged in nineteenth-century New England as the region and the nation were transformed by urbanization, industrialization, religious revivalism, and the rising authority of science.

Christian Science was founded by Mary Baker Eddy, born in 1821 in Bow, New Hampshire, and raised as a Congregationalist there. She was also exposed to mesmerism, Spiritualism, and other popular spiritual and healing movements developing in the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, and was particularly influenced by healing practitioner Phineas P. Quimby, who considered mental error the source of all disease. In 1866, while living in Lynn, Massachusetts, the invalid Eddy experienced a sudden physical healing and religious conversion. Newly empowered, she spent the next several years living in poverty, practicing healing, and developing her religious ideas

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among the socially dislocated in the industrial cities of New England.

Eddy taught that a universal divine principle was the only reality; that matter, evil, disease, and death were illusory; that Christ's healing method involved a "scientific" application of these truths; and that redemption and healing were available to anyone who became properly attuned with the divine. In 1875, Eddy published Science and Health with Key to Scriptures, which outlined her system and a method for discerning the Bible's inner "spiritual sense." Revised by Eddy several times, it became and remains the authoritative text for Christian Science. Eddy's message, emphasizing personal growth and well-being, appealed to Americans—particularly women—experiencing disempowerment and spiritual alienation amid the industrial and urban growth of the late nineteenth century and dissatisfaction with conventional Christianity.

In 1875, Eddy and her followers held their first public service at Eddy's Christian Scientists' Home in Lynn, and four years later, established the Church of Christ (Scientist). In 1881, Eddy moved the church to Boston and founded the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. College trainees, mostly women, spread across the Northeast and Midwest, making Christian Science into a national movement whose members were of increasing wealth and status. In 1886, Eddy established the National Christian Science Association (NCSA). Internal schism, outside clerical criticism, and the emergence of rival movements soon led Eddy to centralize and bureaucratize her church. She dissolved the college in 1889, and in 1892 dismantled the NCSA and established the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston. She appealed to followers nationwide to affiliate their congregations with this "mother church," and appointed a self-perpetuating board of directors to govern it.

Christian Science grew rapidly, especially during its early decades. In 1906 there were 636 congregations with 85,717 members, and by 1936 there were 1,970 congregations with 268,915 members. The church stopped releasing membership statistics, but there were an estimated 475,000 members in the United States by the late 1970s. The church also established a publishing empire, best represented since 1908 by the Christian Science Monitor, and continues to spread its message through "reading rooms" nationwide.

Christian Science remains primarily urban and upper middle class in constituency and women continue to predominate its membership. It remains relatively small, beset throughout the twentieth century by legal controversies over members' refusal of conventional medical treatment. But the success of its religion of personal healing sparked the emergence and growth of the New Thought movement and a broader emphasis on healing, counseling, and spiritual wellness in modern American Christianity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gottschalk, Stephen. The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Knee, Stuart E. Christian Science in the Age of Mary Baker Eddy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1994.

Thomas, Robert David. "With Bleeding Footsteps": Mary Baker Eddy's Path to Religious Leadership. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Bret E. Carroll

See also Christianity ; Science and Religion, Relations of ; Spiritualism ; Women in Churches .