New Thought

views updated

New Thought

The merger of the philosophical idealism popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson converged with the interest in alternative healing methods in late-nineteenthcentury America to give rise to Christian Science, a healing movement that emphasized the "Allness" of God and the unreality of sickness and evil. Its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, created a tight organization that left little room for disagreement or divergence, and soon after the founding of the Church of Christ Scientist, dissenting students began to form independent organizations. Among these organizations was the Christian Science Theological Seminary founded in 1886 by Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925). Before retiring to private practice in 1895, Hopkins trained leaders from around the United States who would become the founders of the major organizations that would later constitute the New Thought movement (a name that came into common use during the 1890s).

While retaining Eddy's basic belief in God as the only reality and an emphasis upon spiritual healing, Hopkins's students felt free to diverge from Christian Science on numerous points. For example, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, founders of the Unity School of Christianity, incorporated insights from Hinduism; and Melinda Cramer (1844–1906), founder of Divine Science, de-emphasized the exclusively Christian presentation in her teaching. In the 1920s, Religious Science was founded by Ernest S. Holmes (1887–1960), one of Hopkins's last students.

By 1914, when the ecumenical International New Thought Alliance was formed, the movement had spread to Europe, and numerous new organizations had appeared across North America. It had also found popular expression in several best-selling books such as Ralph Waldo Trine's In Tune with the Infinite (1897). New Thought affirms the belief in God as universal, wisdom, truth, peace, power, beauty, and joy, and that human well-being results from a mystical alignment with the divine. The universe is seen as a body of God and human beings as spirits inhabiting a body.

Just as coming into conscious oneness with God, in whom there is no illness, produces health, so New Thought also teaches that oneness with God, in whom there is no poverty, also produces abundance. New Thought teachers affirmed that a conscious atunement with the divine and focus upon one's future could bring all of the rewards that the material world could offer. In its teachings on prosperity, New Thought most clearly demonstrates its absorption of the late nineteenth century's optimism and belief in the continued upward progress of the human race.

New Thought grew steadily through the first half of the twentieth century, and its perspective spread far beyond its representative organizations. In the 1950s, it found an unexpected ally in Norman Vincent Peale, a Reformed Church minister who had been inspired by New Thought ideas that he repackaged as "positive thinking," the subject of a series of bestselling books. Though giving little acknowledgment to his New Thought roots, Peale championed a positive approach to life and religion for several decades, and his work has been continued by another Reformed minister, televangelist Robert Schuller.