Thinking Made It So, for a While

A former Christian Scientist gives an account of the rise and fall of a peculiarly American religion.

The New York Times/August 22, 1999
By Philip Zaleski

If the dead interest themselves in the affairs of the living, one suspects that Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), the formidable founder of Christian Science, must be happier than most that the 20th century is drawing to a close. In 1900, her newborn religion was flourishing. ''Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures,'' the central Christian Science text, enjoyed a permanent berth on the best-seller list; converts poured into Boston's ''Mother Church'' and satellite chapels throughout America, and those ubiquitous reading rooms, with their ''All Are Welcome'' signs, dowdy Victorian furniture and scrubbed shelves heaped with Eddy's writings, had just begun to pepper the urban landscape. Yet a century later, Christian Science is in precipitous decline. Membership has tumbled; the church's newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, has lost subscribers and influence, and a head count of Christian Science healers, 11,000 strong at mid-century in the United States alone, threatens to dip below 2,000 worldwide. A persistent rumor has it that Eddy's tomb in Cambridge, Mass., is equipped with a telephone in case she rises from the dead; if so, one also suspects that the phone has been disconnected to avoid a plague of calls from outraged scientists, disaffected disciples, rapacious lawyers and bereaved parents.

In ''God's Perfect Child,'' Caroline Fraser, formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, does a splendid job of explaining the reasons for Christian Science's rise and fall. Nineteenth-century medicine was a hotbed of unorthodox healing techniques, including herbalism, mesmerism and the laying on of hands. The time was ripe for Eddy, who radicalized the widespread belief that disease has a spiritual component into the severe doctrine that all illness, and even matter itself, is no more than a mental will-o'-the-wisp. There is, she declared, ''no Life, substance or intelligence in matter; all is Mind.'' To accept this was to enter a new world where sickness vanishes and ''divine Mind'' reigns.

Prayer, the sole means of entry into this world, thus became the only cure for every ailment, from warts to cancer.

The notion that our medical destiny is subject to our thoughts is inherently appealing, perhaps especially so for a generation buffeted by the revelations of Darwin and Marx and the consequent death of theological certainty. Eddy's brilliance was to crown this desire for self-control by turning it into a creed. She plowed her way through a mountain of obstacles -- a wayward husband, nervous ailments, the opprobrium of mainstream science -- to proclaim her gospel of spiritual therapeutics; along the way, as Fraser points out, she became one of the few women in history to found an important religious movement. Eddy started late in her chosen career -- the turning point came in February 1866, at the age of 44, when she slipped on ice in Lynn, Mass., and was cured of her severe injuries through ''the divine Spirit . . . in perfect scientific accord with divine law.'' Once she walked onto the packed religious stage of post-Civil War America, Eddy grabbed the limelight. Soon enough, she had secured state charters to open the Church of Christ, Scientist, and the Massachusetts Metaphysical College (at which she taught a class in ''metaphysical obstetrics'') and -- the sure imprimatur of social success -- Henry James had parodied her as Verena Tarrant in ''The Bostonians.'' Mrs. Eddy had become a sensation.

Unfortunately, Eddy's forceful personality sometimes turned downright bizarre. She lied freely about her education, her age, her marriages, her role in the emancipation of slaves. She believed that she could control the weather (''I have heard our Leader describe in a number of instances how she has dissipated a thundercloud by simply looking upon it,'' one employee reported). She spoke to followers in what Fraser calls ''oracular biblical patois,'' channeling messages from the Almighty that confirmed her holy mission: ''Oh, blessed daughter of Zion, I am with thee. . . . Thou art my chosen, to bear my Truth to the nations.'' A host of fears and hatreds -- of sex, weakness a d death, of Catholics and Jews -- consumed her, apotheosized in her terror of ''malicious animal magnetism,'' an invisible, poisonous force that befouled her food, impaired her health and, in the form of ''mesmeric magnetism,'' was used by her enemies to murder her third husband. Scandals plagued her and her followers; to this day, as Fraser painstakingly details, Christian Science has been rife with dissent and now teeters on the brink of ''a massive institutional nervous breakdown.''

What of the intellectual integrity of Eddy's teaching? Fraser argues, with some success, that Christian Science is neither Christian nor scientific. Eddy gave Christian doctrine several novel twists: Jesus is not the second person of the Trinity, but rather ''the most scientific man that ever trod the globe''; the ''Comforter'' that Jesus promised to send after his death is not the Holy Spirit, but rather Christian Science itself. According to official church literature, Eddy believed herself to be the ''God-anointed'' messenger of the age; she even rewrote the Lord's Prayer in a Christian Science idiom.

More controversial, however, has been Eddy's claim of elevating spiritual healing to the level of a science. The dreadful result, Fraser w ites, has been the needless death of hundreds of patients -- many of them children -- while under the care of Christian Scientists. Herein lies the principal source of the negative media image of Christian Science and the consequent downturn in its fortunes. The story is all too familiar: a child falls sick; the parents spurn conventional medical treatment and instead turn to prayer; the child dies. Behind this obstinate rejection of orthodox medicine lies Eddy's doctrine of ''radical reliance,'' the belief that only ''divine Mind'' can cure. ''It is impossible,'' Eddy writes, ''to gain control of the body in any other way. On this fundamental point, timid conservatism is absolutely inadmissible.'' Recently government has struck back, and Christian Scientists have been brought to trial on charges of manslaughter or third-degree murder.

Fraser admits her animosity toward Christian Science, in which she was raised. As a child, she was filled with self-loathing for failing to live according to ''divine Mind.'' When she was a teen-ager, a boy in a neighboring Christian Science household died without medical treatment from a ruptured appendix. For Fraser, the church is a ''sect'' or a ''cult.'' Her bitterness gives this book its bite; it also makes for edgy reading, as one awaits the next razor cut against Christian Science or its founder. Few darker portraits of Eddy have emerged since the days when Mark Twain called her ''a brass god with clay legs.'' One ends up wondering how Eddy, with all her sharp edges, managed to captivate so many for so long; it would be instructive to hear, from a devout and knowledgeable Christian Scientist, the other side of the story.

Fraser's hot indictment loses steam only near the end, when she issues an ill-conceived broadside against alternative medicine. She ridicules studies that indicate, however tentatively, the medicinal value of prayer, and she blasts celebrity doctors -- Andrew Weil, Larry Dossey, Herbert Benson, Bernie Siegel -- for touting nontraditional healing. Fraser claims that ''Christian Science offers an excellent test case of the consequences of relying on faith,'' but is this really so? Faith healing -- including numerous reports of startling cures -- can be found in every culture, and divine intervention to effect miraculous healing remains an integral part of orthodox Christian belief. The Christian Science archives contain over 50,000 testimonials of spiritual cures; horrific tales of child deaths cannot explain away these apparent successes. One wants a cooler appraisal of the situation, like the one offered by William James, who wrote of Christian Science in a letter to The Boston Evening Transcript (March 24, 1894) that ''I assuredly hold no brief for any of these healers. . . . But their facts are patent and startling; and anything that interferes with the multiplication of such facts, and with our freest opportunity of observing and studying them, will, I believe, be a public calamity.'' Happily, Fraser's book, despite its intemperateness, serves in the end to advance this study.

Philip Zaleski teaches religion at Smith College. His forthcoming books include ''The Best Spiritual Writing 1999'' and an anthology of writing about heaven.