Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) “discovered” Christian Science in 1866, when she spontaneously recovered from a severe injury after embracing the beliefs that reality is completely spiritual and that evil—especially sickness and death—is only an illusion. Eddy's understanding of the mind‐body relationship and her healing techniques owed much to the principles of homeopathy and the practice of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a New England mentalist (mind reader) and magnetic healer. However, the power of Eddy's personality, her authoritative textbook Science and Health (1875; to which she added Key to the Scriptures in 1883), and her effective organization of the Church of Christ, Scientist, turned Christian Science into a successful worldwide movement.

Joined by a handful of followers, Eddy founded the first Church of Christ, Scientist, in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1879. Strife hounded the movement's early years as such influential former students as Emma Curtis Hopkins, Luther M. Marston, and Ursula N. Gestefeld challenged Eddy's originality and prophetic authority, withdrew from the movement, and dispensed their own brand of Christian Science. To protect Christian Scientists from heterodoxy, Eddy established in 1883 the monthly Journal of Christian Science (renamed the Christian Science Journal in 1885) and encouraged the formation of a National Christian Scientist Association in 1886.

In the 1890s, Eddy centralized her new religion, establishing Boston's Mother Church (1892), an official board of directors, and the Christian Science Publishing Society (1898). Through these organizational structures and a newfound evangelistic zeal, membership grew rapidly—from 8,724 in 1890 to about 55,000 (72 percent of whom were women) by 1906—and the movement spread to Europe and Asia. The Christian Science Monitor, a national newspaper sponsored by the church, was founded in 1908. The 1936 federal census reported 268,915 Christian Scientist adherents. By the mid‐1990s churches numbered about three thousand worldwide, although the vast majority of members were in the United States and membership had been declining steadily for decades.

Christian Science attracted converts primarily because it promised to heal their bodies and souls. Although dramatic physical cures attracted the most public attention, healing often simply involved a process of growth and enlightenment that slowly transformed a person into the spiritual image of God's ideal. All Christian Scientists practiced healing by “demonstrating” over (that is, curing) “false claims” (sickness, sin, and death), but some devoted themselves professionally to full‐time service as practitioners. To expand the healing mission of practitioners, Eddy chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in 1881, formalized the curriculum, and established institutes of healing and instruction across the United States. Through lectures and class instruction, such key nineteenth‐and early twentieth‐century leaders as Augusta Stetson, Edward Kimball, Carol Norton, and Bicknell Young influenced Christian Science practice and the interpretation of Eddy's writings.

Turn‐of‐the‐century legal and legislative struggles among clergy, physicians, and Christian Scientists over the practice of religious healing reflected a larger contest for religious and medical authority in the United States. With an uneasy truce in this conflict, Christian Scientists came to represent for many Americans the most urbane and sedate examples of the often marginalized yet perennial practice of religious healing.
See also Medicine: Alternative Medicine; Religion.

Bibliography

Stephen Gottschalk , The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, 1973.
Rennie B. Schoepflin , Lives on Trial: Christian Science Healers in Progressive America, 2001.

Rennie B. Schoepflin

Christian Science

Sources

Spiritualism. The religious imagination of Americans had never been contained fully by inherited or orthodox religious organizations and dogmas. Throughout the nineteenth century many popular religious movements crystallized around new leaders and ideas. Spiritualism, for example, appealed powerfully throughout the nineteenth century to many Americans, even though it was widely condemned by established Christian denominations. Spiritualism maintained that the spirit was the prime element of reality and that spirits of the dead could communicate with the living, usually through a medium. It cut across denominational and religious lines, in part because it offered relief for many people yearning for contact with dead relations, often either children or other relatives killed in the Civil War.

Eddy. Interest in Spiritualism was often particularly strong among women. One of the most famous female religious thinkers was Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. Eddy, a native of New Hampshire, experienced the intense sense of loss felt by many New Englanders as Calvinism declined as the central force that gave the region’s dominant culture its meaning and direction. Throughout her early life, like many middle-class Victorian women, Eddy suffered chronic, debilitating, and unexplained ailments and turned to religion for comfort. In 1862 she experienced a dramatic “mind cure” at the hands of an itinerant healer and mesmerist. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby strongly influenced Eddy, suggesting that all disease and suffering originated in mental phenomena and could be resolved without medicine. He also used a vocabulary that included the phrases “Christian science” and “science of health.” Soon after Quimby died in 1866, Eddy underwent a powerful spiritual experience. After a wrenching fall on ice, Eddy cured her injured back by mobilizing her spirit and the mind. Over the next several years she worked to reinterpret Quimby’s teachings in terms of Christian language and correlated them with biblical teachings. She developed a distinctive religious argument, which she believed was both an act of human discovery and a divine revelation. She taught that God constituted all reality, and that all reality was ultimately spiritual. Human regeneration came from recognizing that the empirical evidence of the material world was an illusion and by subsequently allowing God through Christ to transform one’s being. This recognition of the illusory character of the material world also led to physical health without resorting to doctors or conventional medicine. Eddy held her first public religious service in her home in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1875. She published the first edition of Science and Health the same year (later she would add the subtitle With a Key to the Scriptures). Eddy incorporated the Christian Scientists’ Association in 1876 and the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. Over the next several decades, Eddy led the church from a small band into a sophisticated international organization that claimed one hundred thousand members at the time of her death in 1910.

Sources

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

Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (New York: Holt, Rinehart 6c Winston, 1996);

Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971).

Christian Science. The Church of Christ (Scientist) was founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910). She had been a semi-invalid who, in 1862, began to learn from Phineas Quimby the possibility of cures without medicine. In 1866 (the year in which Quimby died), she claimed a cure from a severe injury (after a fall on ice) without the intervention of medicine. She devoted herself to the recovery of the healing emphasis in early Christianity, and in 1875 she completed the 1st edn. of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. In 1879, the Church of Christ (Scientist) was incorporated with the purpose of ‘commemorating the word and works of our Master’. She became chief pastor of the Mother Church, and wrote The Manual of the Mother Church to govern its affairs.

Christian Science (officially Church of Christ Scientist) Religious sect founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, and based on her book Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures. Its followers believe that physical illness and moral problems can only be cured by spiritual and mental activity. They refuse medical treatment. Divine Mind is used as a synonym for God. Each human being is regarded as a complete and flawless manifestation of God.

Chris·tian Sci·ence • n. the beliefs and practices of the Church of Christ Scientist, a Christian sect founded by Mary Baker Eddy in 1879. Members hold that only God and the mind have ultimate reality, and that sin and illness are illusions that can be overcome by prayer and faith. DERIVATIVES: Chris·tian Sci·en·tist n.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. SeeChurch of Christ, Scientist .