Christian Science

Christian Science

logo The Christian Science seal, consisting of the Cross and Crown with words from Matthew 10:8
Founder	Mary Baker Eddy
Name of church	The First Church of Christ, Scientist, founded 1879
Headquarters	Christian Science Plaza, Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts
Scriptures	Bible Science and Health (1875)
Members	under 100,000
Number of churches	United States: 1,100 elsewhere: 600
Website
christianscience.com

Christian Science is a system of religious thought and practice developed in the United States in the 19th century by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910). The ideas behind Christian Science derive from Eddy's personal experience and interpretation of the Bible, and are laid out in her book Science and Health (1875). This is one of the central texts of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, which Eddy founded in 1879 in Lynn, Massachusetts. In 1936 a census counted nearly 270,000 Christian Scientists in the United States; as of 2010 there were believed to be under 100,000 worldwide.

The ideas of Christian Science have been compared to philosophical idealism. Christian Scientists believe that spiritual reality is the only reality and that the material world – including sickness and death – is an illusion. They do not have an anthropomorphic conception of God, or believe in conventional notions of heaven and hell. They define Christ as the divine ideal of man and see Jesus not as a deity, but as Christ's highest human manifestation.

The Christian Science position that sickness is an illusion includes the view that the sick should be healed through prayer, rather than by conventional medical care. The deaths of a number of adherents and their children from the late 19th century until the 1990s were attributed to an avoidance of medical treatment or vaccination; several parents were prosecuted for manslaughter and in a few cases convicted. A church spokesman said in 2010 that the church of today would not allow such deaths to occur. Although Eddy's Science and Health does not allow medical care to be mixed with Christian Science healing, the church has sought since 2009 to present Christian Science healing as a supplement to conventional medicine, rather than as a replacement for it.

The Christian Science Publishing Society publishes a number of periodicals, including The Christian Science Monitor, which between 1950 and 2002 won seven Pulitzer Prizes.

Beliefs and practices

Theology

Science and Health

Further information: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

The theology of Christian Science is set out in Eddy's book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. She wrote it as the 456-page Science and Health between 1866 and 1875, added Key to the Scriptures in 1883, and continued to revise it until her death in 1910, issuing 432 editions. By 1999 it had sold nine million copies in 16 languages. Eddy wrote that Christian Science came to her as the result of a "revelation" – after an incident Christian Scientists know as the "Fall in Lynn" – not as a communication from a deity, but as what she called "human and divine coincidence."

Mary Baker Eddy, April 9, 1886

There are various accounts, from Eddy and others, as to how the revelation was received. Eddy had experienced protracted ill health since childhood; Harold Bloom described her as "a kind of anthology of nineteenth-century nervous ailments," which Christian Scientists insist is a sexist myth. In 1862 she began to receive treatment from a mentalist and magnetic healer, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), who in her view cured her and whom she came to see as a mentor and father figure. In February 1866, two weeks after Quimby died − and three months after her father died − she slipped on some ice while out walking in Lynn, injuring her spine and knocking herself unconscious. Two women who were looking after her regarded the injury as serious, and declared that she was paralyzed.

On the third day after the fall, Eddy read a Bible passage that described one of Jesus's healings, and was able to rise from her bed, apparently well, in what her neighbors saw as a miracle. Her recovery is regarded by Christian Scientists as an example of Christian Science healing. Both the extent of her injury and the degree to which she considered herself healed at the time are disputed. Gillian Gill writes that, possibly under financial pressure from her husband, Eddy asked the city for damages months after the fall "for serious personal injuries from which [she had] little prospect of recovering," and a homeopathic doctor who treated her apparently had no record or recollection – when asked many years later – of the injury being a serious one. According to Gill, the doctor recalled that Eddy had responded to highly diluted doses of the homeopathic remedy he gave her.

Eddy wrote that, after the fall and her recovery, she withdrew from society for three years "to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind, that should 'take the things of God' and show them to the creature, and reveal the great curative Principle, God." She called her ideas the "Science of Divine Metaphysical Healing," later Christian Science.

Nature of reality, God, death

Stephen J. Stein writes that the basis of Eddy's scriptural reinterpretation was that the Bible had been misunderstood because the nature of reality had been misunderstood. She regarded the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis as allegorical, containing two interwoven narratives, one spiritual, the other material. It was the spiritual narrative that she accepted as authoritative. She argued that spiritual reality is the only reality, and that evil and matter, including sickness and death, are illusions. Nicholas Rescher likens this extreme idealism to the subjective idealism of the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) or to ancient Oriental panpsychism. Eddy wrote:

What you call matter was originally primitive error in solution, the unformed mortal mind – likened, by Milton, to "chaos and old night." One theory about this mortal mind is, that its sensations form blood, flesh, and bones. The Science of Being – wherein all is Mind, or God and His thoughts – would still be clear, but for the belief that Mind can result in matter, or that Mind can enter its own embodied thought, and bind itself with its own beliefs, calling its bonds material.

There is no anthropomorphic conception of God in Christian Science. Eddy wrote that "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love." God is not a giver of life, but is Life itself, and Life is Mind, "the everlasting I AM." Christian Science differs from conventional Abrahamic theology by referring to God as both Father and Mother – Eddy referred to God as "Mother" and "Father-Mother God." There is also no final judgment in Christian Science, and no heaven or hell, except as states of mind. Christian Science teaches that death is an illusion that can be conquered through the conquest of sin. A person who seems to die simply adjusts to another level of consciousness, inaccessible to the living. Eddy was scathing about conventional religious views of the hereafter and the social consequences of those views:

If changeableness that repenteth itself; partiality that elects some to be saved and others to be lost, or that answers the prayers of one and not of another; if incompetency that cannot heal the sick, or lack of love that will not; if unmercifulness, that for the sins of a few tired years punishes man eternally, – are our conceptions of Deity, we shall bring out these qualities of character in our own lives and extend their influence to others.

Beliefs about Jesus

Christian Scientists regard Jesus as a savior and "wayshower": through him people may enjoy a share of the sonship of God, and salvation from sin, sickness and death. Whereas in mainstream Christianity, Jesus's miracles are seen as supernatural, followers of Christian Science do not regard them as miraculous, but as exemplifications of the healing power that stems from the correction of mental error. Eddy wrote that Jesus was a "natural and divine Scientist."

Christian Science holds that Jesus did not die on the cross, but was conscious in his tomb, healing himself. The Christian Science view of Jesus's atonement differs from that of mainstream Christianity. Christian Science teaches that the atonement of Jesus was not a propitiatory sacrifice, pardoning or canceling sin, or providing only a moral influence on mankind. Instead Christian Scientists see the atonement as proof to humanity of the unbreakable relationship between God and humanity, and of the possibility that sin, disease and death can be overcome. They see Jesus as having suffered crucifixion to provide proof, in his resurrection and ascension, of humanity's "at-one-ment" or unity with God.

Eddy regarded her book, Science and Health, as the second coming of Jesus, writing in her autobiography that "the second appearing of Jesus is, unquestionably, the spiritual advent of the advancing idea of God, as in Christian Science." David Weddle writes that she saw her work as the first complete written exposition of divine knowledge, and Jesus as its "highest human corporeal concept."

Christian Science healing

Philosophy

Eddy wrote that anybody asking a doctor to treat them "invites defeat," though she allowed exceptions for going to the dentist, fixing broken limbs, and basic surgical procedures. She argued that "if we trust matter, we distrust spirit":

We weep because others weep, we yawn because they yawn, and we have small-pox because others have it; but mortal mind, not matter, contains and carries the infection. ... Palsy is a belief that attacks mortals through fear, and paralyzes the body ... Destroy the fear, show mortal mind that no muscular power can be lost – for Mind is supreme – and you will cure the palsy.

Eddy's methods are seen as having derived from the ideas of Phineas Quimby and homeopathy.

Rennie Schoepflin writes that Eddy's understanding of the mind–body relationship and her methods of healing owed much to homeopathy and Phineas Quimby. From 1863 at the latest Quimby referred to his theories as the "Science of Health and Happiness," "Science of Christ," and "Science," and in his unpublished "Aristocracy and Democracy" referred to it as "Christian Science." For several years Eddy defended him publicly, regularly talked with him, and worked to perform healings based on his methods, but in 1872 she drew a distinction between her methods and his, calling her own Christian Science. She later said Quimby had not been a major influence.

Christian Science aims to reinstate primitive Christianity, two aspects of which are healing and teaching by allegory. Adherents follow the biblical exhortation to pray in private. Prayer in Christian Science is a process of learning about God's spiritual reality – "awakening mortal thought," by degrees, to spiritual truth. Christian Scientists believe that the effect of this spiritualization of thought is shown in healing – moral, physical, and emotional. Healing is based on a simple act of dominion, that of standing porter at the door of one's thoughts. It is attempted through a specific form of prayer intended to spiritualize thought, and does not focus on what is wrong with the body, but on re-adjusting the apparent misalignment with Mind. This is known as "addressing the thought" of the patient.

A 1910 article in the British Medical Journal described how the practitioner could act from a distance, thinking whatever would be said were the practitioner present at the bedside, assuring the patient that the disease was imaginary and that God would not permit sickness. A church spokesman wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books in 2001 that Christian Science healing had seen people "cured of cancer, diabetes, asthma [and] HIV."

Malicious animal magnetism

Further information: Animal magnetism and Salem witchcraft trial (1878)

The converse of mental healing was the use of mental powers to destroy people's health – what Eddy called "malicious animal magnetism" (known within Christian Science as M.A.M.). Fraser writes that Eddy became increasingly obsessed with this idea, believing it to be a colorless, odorless substance that was found everywhere in the world: in food, clothing, in the air and in the weather. It caused problems with people, caused objects to become lost, and, Fraser writes, ruined the printing of books. One Christian Scientist, Marion Stephens, killed herself in April 1910, apparently out of fear of M.A.M.

Eddy organized 24-hour "Watches" for her household employees to look out for M.A.M, and would be unable to sleep if she felt they were not being conducted properly. She said that if she died it would be from M.A.M. rather than natural causes. She was concerned that practitioners could harm patients through unenlightened use of their mental powers, and that unscrupulous individuals could use such powers as a weapon. Fraser writes that the children of Christian Scientists call this "malping", short for malpractice, and see it as some form of hex.

In May 1878 a lawsuit was brought by Lucretia Brown in Salem, Massachusetts, against a former Christian Science practitioner, Daniel Spofford – an ex-Christian Scientist who had quarrelled with Eddy – for practicing mesmerism on her. Eddy had a power of attorney to appear in court on Brown's behalf, but the court declined to hear the case. Afterwards several newspapers wrote that Eddy had tried, before the case, to persuade them to publish attacks on Spofford, and in October 1878 Eddy's husband and another man were arrested for having conspired to murder Spofford, after a barman said they had offered him $500 to carry out the killing. Fraser writes that the prosecutors dropped the charges amid suspicions that the barman had perjured himself. Shortly after this incident, Eddy and others in the Christian Science Association voted to form a church in Boston, Massachusetts. The charter was granted in August 1879, and by December that year the new Church of Christ, Scientist, had 26 members.

Christian Science practitioners, nursing homes

Further information: Christian Science practitioner

Christian Scientists can take classes to become Christian Science practitioners, who devote their time to healing. Around 1,400 practitioners were registered with the church as of 2010, according to The New York Times. Practitioners normally charge for their services, but may not usually take legal action for non-payment of fees, and are instructed to make concessions in the case of indigent patients. They are obliged to keep their patients' confidences. There is no physical manipulation or laying on of hands in a Christian Science healing treatment.

Christian Scientists may take an intensive two-week, 12-session "primary" class from an authorized Christian Science teacher. When they have a proven record of healing, they may submit their names for publication in the directory of practitioners in the Christian Science Journal. A practitioner who has been listed for at least three years may apply for "normal" class instruction, given just once every three years. Those who receive a certificate are authorized to teach. The primary class focuses on the chapter "Recapitulation" in Science and Health, which contains the "Scientific Statement of Being," while the normal class focuses on the chapter "Platform of Christian Science."

Christian Science nursing homes have been run independently of the church since 1993, accredited by the Commission for Accreditation of Christian Science Nursing Organizations/Facilities. The nurses are Christian Scientists who have completed a course of religious study, and training in basic skills – such as feeding and bathing – in a Christian Science training center. No medical or nursing qualifications are required, and the homes offer no medical services. Several of them are Medicare or Medicaid providers.

Relationship with conventional medicine

Christian Scientists avoid using conventional medicine and Christian Science healing simultaneously in the belief that the two tend to counteract one other. Christian Scientists believe that material medicine and Christian Science treatment proceed from diametrically opposite assumptions: medicine asserts that something is physically broken and needs to be fixed, while Christian Science asserts that the spiritual reality is harmonious and perfect, and that any belief to the contrary needs to be corrected.

There has been criticism of Christian Scientists who impose these ideas on their children. Caroline Fraser writes that children with medical conditions such as diabetes, or who are in pain, have been told by their Christian Science parents, teachers and nurses that there is nothing wrong with them, or that there is no such thing as pain. Fraser argues that this is not only a medically dangerous practice, but that it also serves to undermine the children's self-confidence and their trust in their own perceptions, and can make children feel guilty that their own "incorrect" thinking has made them ill or disabled.

It can also paradoxically cause hypochondria, and an intense focus on physicality, by making children obsessed with their bodies the more they try to control their thoughts about them. Fraser writes that the brother of the actor and writer Spalding Gray (1941–2004) – Gray and his brother were both raised as Christian Scientists – worried at the age of eight that he would have a heart attack, because he had been taught to believe that thinking about it could make it happen. There have also been several cases (see below) where children have died after medical treatment was withheld.

There is no requirement for Christian Scientists to use Christian Science healing or to eschew medical means; rather they choose conventional or Christian Science healing depending on the context and their ability to demonstrate healing. According to The New York Times, the Christian Science church has always said publicly that its members are free to choose conventional medical care, although some members have said that seeking outside help risks them being ostracized. Since 2009 the church has emphasized that members can seek orthodox treatment if they wish.

Christian Science churches

History, structure and services

Further information: The First Church of Christ, Scientist and First Church of Christ, Scientist (disambiguation)

The First Church of Christ, Scientist (the Mother Church), Boston, Massachusetts, in 2004

Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879 in Boston, Massachusetts. The first church building was erected in 1886 in Oconto, Wisconsin, and still stands at the corner of Main Street and Chicago Street. The original edifice of The First Church of Christ, Scientist (known as the Mother Church) was completed some years later on Saturday, December 29, 1894 – in time for the first service held there the following day – on Huntington Avenue in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. An annex larger than the original structure was added in 1906. The site now covers 14 acres.

The organization is presided over by a Christian Science Board of Directors, a five-person executive entity created by Eddy, the function of which is defined by the Manual of The Mother Church, the set of by-laws written by Eddy. The Manual explains the responsibilities of members, officers, practitioners, teachers and nurses, and establishes rules for discipline and other aspects of church business. The church has at times been accused of attempting to silence dissenters by delisting them as practitioners in the Christian Science Journal, or by excommunicating them.

In 2005 the Boston Globe reported that the church was considering consolidating its Boston operations into fewer buildings, and leasing out space in buildings it owned. The church posted an $8 million financial loss in 2003, and in 2004 cut 125 jobs – a quarter of the staff – at the Christian Science Monitor, though a spokesman said that the church was not facing financial problems.

The church has no clergy, sermons or rituals; it does not perform baptisms, marriages or burials. There are Sunday morning services, in which excerpts from Science and Health and the Bible are read aloud, and meetings on Wednesday evenings, where members are invited to give testimonies of healing. According to Fraser, there are no "ecstatic expressions of religious fervor"; on the contrary, she writes, "if the emotional range of the experience were plotted on a chart, it would be represented by a straight line." At the communion service, held twice a year, those in attendance kneel for silent prayer, then repeat out loud the Lord's Prayer.

Members

Further information: List of Christian Scientists (religious denomination) and Reader (Christian Science Church)

Christian Scientists have tended to be white, well-educated, middle-class, and comfortable financially. Caroline Fraser writes that 42 percent have a college education, over 16 percent of Christian Scientist households earned more than $50,000 in 1990, and most Christian Science practitioners are women. The areas in which the religion is most prevalent, outside the United States, are Australia, Canada, Germany, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom.

Notable Christian Scientists have included former Directors of Central Intelligence William H. Webster and Admiral Stansfield M. Turner, Richard Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Nixon's White House Counsel John Ehrlichman, Judge Thomas P. Griesa, composer Sergei Prokofiev, film directors Cecil B. DeMille and King Vidor, actors/actresses Jean Stapleton, Doris Day, Joan Crawford, Ginger Rogers, Mary Pickford, Mickey Rooney, Robert Duvall and Val Kilmer, artists Winifred Nicholson and Joseph Cornell, scientist Laurance Doyle, NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, playwright Horton Foote, the British viscountess Nancy Astor, and Charles Lightoller, the highest-ranking officer to survive the 1912 sinking of the Titanic.

Those raised by Christian Science parents include comedian Robin Williams, actresses Elizabeth Taylor and Jean Harlow, the writer and actor Spalding Gray, Metallica lead singer James Hetfield, gymnast Shannon Miller, the poet Hart Crane, and the actress Anne Archer and her son Tommy Davis, who both went on to became prominent in the Church of Scientology.

Membership is often passed on within families; the church recruits comparatively few new followers from other sources, though Christian Scientists are not always or necessarily members of the church. In the early decades of the 20th century, churches sprang up in communities around the world, though in the last several decades of that century there was a marked decline in membership, except in Africa, where there was growth. In 2009, for the first time in church history, more new members came from Africa than from the United States. The New York Times reported in 2010 that membership had dropped to under 100,000, with around 1,100 churches in the United States and 600 overseas.

Publications

Further information: The Christian Science Monitor, Christian Science Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, The Herald of Christian Science, and Christian Science Publishing Society

Entrance to the Christian Science Monitor offices in Boston, Massachusetts

The Christian Science Publishing Society publishes a number of periodicals, including The Christian Science Monitor, a respected newspaper run from the headquarters of the First Church of Christ, Scientist. The winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes and 427 other awards, it was founded by Eddy in 1908 under the slogan: "To injure no man, but to bless all mankind." At its height in 1970, it had a circulation of 220,000, but by 2008 this had contracted to 52,000. The magazine moved in April 2009 to a largely online presence, with a weekly, instead of daily, print run.

The church also publishes the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly periodical; the Christian Science Journal, a monthly publication; and The Herald of Christian Science, a non-English publication available in several languages. A project was underway as of 2012, with JSH-Online, to make all back issues of the Christian Science publications (the Journal, Sentinel and Herald) available on-line.

The Christian Science Journal and Christian Science Sentinel include comments from individuals who say they were healed through Christian Science prayer. The verification process requires the contact information for three people (one a member of the Mother Church) who know the testifier, and who either witnessed the healing or can vouch for it based on their knowledge of the testifer.

Reception

Early criticism

Further information: Christian Science (book)

Mark Twain was an early critic of Christian Science.

During Christian Science's early years of rapid growth, its teachings were frequently attacked from the pulpit and in the press. Pamela Klassen writes that mainstream Protestants thought of it as a "heresy thought up by a disturbed woman." In 1905 the Bishop of London Arthur Winnington-Ingram called it a "gigantic heresy," and some clergymen who regarded Ralph Waldo Emerson as a heretic held the same view of Eddy.

The writer Mark Twain (1835–1910) was an early critic. In 1907 he collected several critical articles he had written and published them as a book, Christian Science. Twain believed that mind could influence matter to some degree, but nevertheless took strong exception to the writings of Eddy, calling them "incomprehensible and uninterpretable". He was particularly incensed by the thought that Eddy was using Christian Science to accrue wealth and power for herself, and quipped: "from end to end of the Christian Science literature not a single (material) thing in the world is conceded to be real, except the Dollar." Twain's fear that Eddy could gain great power as a religious figurehead was later the basis of his unfinished satirical work, The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire.

Christian Science was often attacked as a cult in its early years. Philip Jenkins writes that Eddy's version of the Lord's Prayer became a favorite with cult-exposing organizations, who would frequently quote it, seeing it as unthinkable that the Lord's Prayer would be tampered with. In 1992 Christian Science was still listed as a cult in Walter Ralston Martin's religious reference book, The Kingdom of the Cults, but for the most part the criticism diminished after Eddy's death in 1910, and the movement became more mainstream. The Nation wrote in 1923 that Christian Science was "popular, powerful and almost conservative now."

Attitudes toward Eddy

The last home of Mary Baker Eddy, Newton, Massachusetts

Several women writing in the 1970s interpreted Eddy's creation of Christian Science as a response to the male-dominated society of 19th-century America. For them Christian Science was a protest movement founded by a woman who conformed to the male-constructed "hysterical" profile of the time, and who had a need for power, status and prestige. Gail Parker wrote in 1970 that by founding Christian Science Eddy had created a "job opportunity" for herself, which satisfied her urge to dominate. Eddy came under sexist attack from men who deployed what Jean McDonald called "biological rhetoric": the claim, for example, that she suffered from "one of that familiar group of mental diseases coming on just after middle life" or that, as a woman, she was hampered by the intellectual inferiority of her sex.

In 1907, during a court case in which representatives of Eddy's heirs were attempting to prove her insane – which would have removed her control of her fortune and the church – four psychiatrists were sent to interview her in her home over the course of a month. Eddy was 86 at the time. The psychiatrists (then referred to as "alienists") determined that she was sane and able to manage her financial affairs. One of them, Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton (1848–1919), told The New York Times that, although he disagreed with her teachings, the attacks on Eddy were the result of "a spirit of religious persecution that has at last quite overreached itself," and that "there seems to be a manifest injustice in taxing so excellent and capable an old lady as Mrs. Eddy with any form of insanity."

Sexuality

Further information: Emergence International

Amy Black Voorhees writes that Eddy saw sexuality as principally serving the need to procreate; as a result the church has treated homosexuality, sex outside marriage, excessive sexuality within marriage, and masturbation as practices to be discouraged. A lesbian reporter was fired in 1982 from the Christian Science Monitor after rumors circulated that she was gay; in 1985 the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld the church's right to fire her on religious grounds. That year a group of LGBTQ Christian Science students formed Emergence International (EMI), a coalition within the church advocating change, and according to an EMI member writing in 2004, the church now treats sexual minorities with a degree of acceptance. Voorhees writes that gay students have found the Mother Church and other Christian Science churches in Boston to be welcoming, but others have been excommunicated from local churches.

Medical criticism

Religious exemption

Further information: Freedom of religion in the United States

In the United States, the constitutional guarantee of protection of religious practice from intrusion by government has been used by Christian Scientists and other religious groups to seek exemption from legal requirements regarding medical treatment of children.

The physician and philosopher William James opposed legislation that would allow only physicians to treat the sick, which would have threatened Christian Science healing.

Caroline Fraser writes that from the 1880s the American Medical Association launched campaigns against Christian Scientists and groups with similar ideas about healing, in an effort to legislate them out of existence. The Christian Scientists survived the campaigns in part because they acquired powerful supporters, including a somewhat reluctant William James (1842–1910). A physician and philosopher, James opposed legislation that would allow only physicians to treat the sick, on the grounds that medical practice "changes unexpectedly from one generation to another in consequence of widening experience," and spoke from that perspective in support of religious exemptions.

In Canada and the United Kingdom, Christian Scientists are obliged to allow their children access to medical care. In the United States, the Christian Science church has lobbied extensively to persuade states to pass religious-exemption laws. In 1974, in response to the conviction for manslaughter of a Christian Scientist who failed to provide medical care for her daughter, Lisa Sheridan (see below), the church successfully lobbied the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for the following words in the Code of Federal Regulations:

A parent or guardian legitimately practicing his religious beliefs who thereby does not provide specified medical treatment for a child, for that reason alone shall not be considered a negligent parent or guardian; however, such an exception shall not preclude a court from ordering that medical services be provided to the child, where his health requires it.

Fraser writes that the Department of Health and Human Services eliminated the regulation in 1983, but as of 2013, according to the lobby group Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty (CHILD), 38 states and the District of Columbia still had religious-exemption statutes based on the old regulation, because while it was in force, states were required to pass it to get funding for child protection work. Fraser writes that some of the statutes stipulate that in life-threatening situations the children must be given access to medical care, but without medical care in the first place the life-threatening nature of the illnesses may not be recognized.

Child deaths

Further information: Commonwealth v. Twitchell

In over 50 cases between 1888 and the early 1990s, prosecutors charged Christian Scientists with manslaughter or murder after both adults and children died of treatable illnesses without medical attention. In a study of 172 child deaths between 1975 and 1995 where parents had withheld medical care for religious reasons, 28 (or 16 percent) were from a Christian Science background.

Fraser writes that what Christian Scientists call the "child cases" began in 1967 in Massachusetts, when five-year-old Lisa Sheridan died of pneumonia without medical care, as a result of which her mother was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to probation. In July 1977 16-month-old Matthew Swan died of bacterial meningitis after his parents were persuaded by two Christian Science practitioners not to take him to a physician; they did eventually take him to hospital, but the infection had spread too far. The parents responded by founding Children's Healthcare is a Legal Duty in 1983, a non-profit group that lobbies against religious-exemption laws. The mother of another child who died of bacterial meningitis in California in 1984 was convicted of manslaughter; the conviction was overturned in 1990 on the grounds that the wording of the religious-exemption statute at the time had led her to believe she could not be prosecuted. In June 1988 in Arizona, a child died in a Christian Science nursing home after having lived for months with a tumor on her leg the size of a watermelon, according to the prosecutor who handled the case against her parents; they pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment.

One prominent case was that of the Twitchells in Massachusetts in 1990. David and Ginger Twitchell were convicted of involuntary manslaughter after failing to seek medical help for their two-year-old son who died in April 1986 of peritonitis caused by a bowel obstruction. The conviction was overturned in 1993 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the couple had "reasonably believed," based on a church publication they had read, that they could rely on Christian healing without being prosecuted, an argument that had not been presented to the jury.

Several children died as a result of undiagnosed juvenile-onset diabetes. The first time the church itself was held liable in a wrongful death suit was after such a case, when in August 1993 a jury in Minnesota ordered it to pay punitive damages of $9 million to the father of 11-year-old Ian Lundman, who died as a consequence of diabetes in May 1989. When his mother first saw that her son was ill, she asked a Christian Science practitioner to pray, then sought advice from a Christian Science nursing home and the church's Committee on Publication; the home advised her to give her son fluids, then two days later sent a nurse to sit with the boy. The nurse's notes were entered into evidence; the first entry at 9 pm noted that the boy's breathing was labored and he seemed barely responsive. The nurse rubbed his lips with Vaseline and tried to give him water as he lay in a diabetic coma. Over five hours after she had arrived, and sixteen minutes before he stopped breathing, the nurse wrote "passing possible." According to Fraser, doctors testified that he could have been saved by an insulin injection up to two hours before his death. Ian's father successfully sued the boy's mother (his former wife), the nurse, the practitioner and the church. The Minnesota State Court of Appeals overturned the award against the church in 1995, finding that a judgment that forced it to "abandon teaching its central tenet" was unconstitutional.

Since 2009 the church has reportedly adopted a less rigid position toward adherents who seek medical care. In June that year a church spokesman said in The Christian Science Journal that parents should "do what you have to do for your kids' health."

Avoidance of vaccination

Fraser notes that "many Scientists decline to have their children vaccinated." Christian Scientists are less likely to self-report illness to physicians, so infection may remain undetected. In 1972 128 students at a Christian Science school in Greenwich, Connecticut, contracted polio and four were left partially paralyzed. In 1982 a nine-year-old girl died of diptheria after attending a Christian Science camp in Colorado. In 1985 128 people were infected with measles at Principia College, a Christian Science school in Elsah, Illinois, and three died. The death-to-case ratio was 2.3 percent; the usual rate in the United States is 0.1 percent or lower. In 1994 150 people in six states were affected by with measles spread by a child from a Christian Science family in Elsah, after she was exposed to it on a skiing holiday in Colorado.

See also

• Bone pointing / Voodoo death
• Efficacy of prayer
• Faith healing
• Iatrogenesis
• Jewish Science
• Medical malpractice
• New Thought
• Nosocomial
• Placebo effect
• Prince v. Massachusetts
• Psychosomatic medicine

References

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• Associated Press. "Court Overturns Conviction of Christian Science Couple", August 12, 1993.
• Beasley, Norman. The Cross and the Crown, the History of Christian Science. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1952.
• British Medical Journal. "Mark Twain on Christian Science", 2(2025), October 21, 1899.
• Bloom, Harold. The American Religion. Simon & Schuster, 1992.
• British Medical Journal. "The Bishop Of London On Christian Science", 2(2342), November 12, 1905, p. 1357.
• Bryant, Christa Case. "Africa contributes biggest share of new members to Christian Science church" Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 2009.
• Cather, Willa and Milmine, Georgine. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science. University of Nebraska Press, 1993, first published 1909.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Epidemiologic Notes and Reports Multiple Measles Outbreaks on College Campuses – Ohio, Massachusetts, Illinois", March 15, 1985.
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Outbreak of Measles Among Christian Science Students – Missouri and Illinois, 1994", July 1, 1994.
• Chiat, Marilyn Joyce Segal. America's Religious Architecture: Sacred Places for Every Community. John Wiley, 1997.
• Clifford, Stephanie. "Christian Science Paper to End Daily Print Edition", The New York Times, October 28, 2008.
• Cook, David. "Monitor shifts from print to Web-based strategy", The Christian Science Monitor, October 29, 2008.
• Cunningham, Raymond J. "The Impact of Christian Science on the American Churches, 1880–1910", The American Historical Review, 72(3), 1967.
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Science and Health. The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1934, first published 1875; full view on Google Books.
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Rudimental Divine Science. The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1925, first published 1883.
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Manual of the Mother Church, 89th edition, The Christian Science Board of Directors, first published 1895.
• Evans, Peter. "Germs and Mrs Eddy", New Scientist, 89(1242), 1981.
• Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Mark Twain. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Fox, Margery. "Protest in Piety: Christian Science Revisited," International Journal of Women's Studies, 1(401), July/August 1978.
• Fraser, Caroline. "Suffering Children and the Christian Science Church", The Atlantic, April 1995.
• Fraser, Caroline. God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church. Henry Holt and Company, 1999.
• Fraser, Caroline. "Christian Science", in Gary Laderman and Luis D. León (eds.). Religion and American Cultures: An Encyclopedia of Traditions, Diversity, and Popular Expressions. ABC-CLIO, 2003.
• Fuller, Linda K. The Christian Science Monitor: An Evolving Experiment in Journalism. ABC-CLIO, 2011.
• Gallagher, Eugene V. and Ashcraft, Michael. Introduction to New and Alternative Religions in America. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006.
• Gardner, Martin. "Mind over Matter", Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1999.
• Gardner, Martin. The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy. Prometheus Books, 1993.
• Gill, Gillian. Mary Baker Eddy. Da Capo Press, 1999.
• Gottschalk, Stephen. The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life. University of California Press, 1973.
• Gottschalk, Stephen. Rolling away the stone: Mary Baker Eddy's challenge to materialism. Indiana University Press, 2006.
• Henderson, Greig E. and Williams, David Cratis. Unending Conversations: New Writings by and About Kenneth Burke. Southern Illinois University Press, 2001.
• Horn, Jason Gary. Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Self. University of Missouri Press, 1996.
• Hughes, Richard A. "The Death of Children by Faith-Based Medical Neglect", Journal of Law and Religion, 20(1), 2004.
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• Kimball, Edward. "Facts and Fictions about Christian Science", lecture delivered April 8, 1898, from Lectures and Articles on Christian Science, Kessinger Publishing, 2005, first published 1921.
• Kimball, Edward. Christian Science and Legislation: The Endeavor to Handicap Truth. HardPress, 2012, first published 1909.
• Klein, Janice. "Ann Lee and Mary Baker Eddy: The Parenting of New Religions," Journal of Psychohistory, 6 (3), 1979.
• Margolick, David. "In Child Deaths, a Test for Christian Science", The New York Times, August 6, 1990.
• May, Larry. "Challenging Medical Authority", in Peggy DesAutels, Margaret P. Battin, and Larry May (eds.). Praying for a Cure: When Medical and Religious Practices Conflict. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
• McDonald, Jean A. "Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth-Century 'Public' Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal", Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 2(1), 1986.
• McKim, Randolph Harrison. "Christianity and Christian Science", The North American Review, 199(700), March 1914.
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• The New York Times. "Dr. Alan McLane Hamilton Tells About His Visit to Mrs. Eddy", August 25, 1907.
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Further reading

External links

• Official Christian Science website
• Christian Science publications (Journal, Herald and Sentinel)
• Eddy, Mary Baker. Manual of the Mother Church, 89th edition.
• Doyle, Laurance. Lecture on science and spirituality, Stanford University, May 6, 2008.
• Commonwealth vs. David R. Twitchell, report of the 1993 case.
• Mary Baker Eddy Library
• Mary Baker Eddy Institute
• Resource for lectures on Christian Science
• Emergence International, LGBT advocacy within Christian Science.
• Longyear Museum, devoted to the life and work of Mary Baker Eddy.
• Christian Way, former Christian Scientists for Jesus.
• The Bookmark, independent source of literature on Christian Science.

Books and articles

• Bellwald, A.M. Christian Science and the Catholic Faith. Kessinger Publishing, 2005.
• Chisholm, Hugh (ed). "Christian Science", Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, 1911.
• Hickey, K.S. and Lyckholm, L. "Child welfare versus parental autonomy: medical ethics, the law, and faith-based healing", Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 25(4), 2004, pp. 265–276.
• Manca, T. "Medicine and Spiritual Healing Within a Region of Canada: Preliminary Findings Concerning Christian Scientists' Healthcare Practices", Journal of Religion and Health, June 17, 2011.
• Milmine, Georgine. "Mary Baker G. Eddy", McClure's Magazine, 31(2), May 1907, pp. 97–118.
• Nudelman, A. E. "Christian Scientists' Beliefs About the Role of Suggestion in Illness and Healing", Psychological Reports, 47(2), 1980.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery. The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority. The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1966.
• Peel, Robert. Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial. The Christian Science Publishing Society, 1991.
• Peel, Robert. Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age. Harper and Row, 1987.
• Ruetenik T. "The First Church of Christ, Pragmatist: Christian Science and Responsible Optimism", Journal of Religion and Health, 51(4), December 2012 Dec, pp. 1397–1405.
• Twain, Mark. Christian Science, 1907.
• Zindler, Frank R. "Mary 'Faker' Eddy and the Cult of Christian Science", American Atheists, September 1987.