Myrtle Fillmore was tubercular and expected to die when she attended a lecture in Kansas City in 1886 and took away a sentence she repeated to herself for two years: that she was a child of God and therefore did not inherit sickness. She recovered, began teaching what she had done, and her sceptical husband Charles investigated the whole field of mental healing before concluding she was right. From 1889 they published a magazine, and the movement they built became Unity.
Its teaching belongs to New Thought: God is understood as principle rather than person, humanity as divine in nature, and the conditions of a life as shaped by the thoughts held about it. Illness is approached through prayer and affirmation. Unlike most religious bodies, Unity long declined to describe itself as a denomination at all, presenting itself as an educational movement anyone of any faith could use, and its influence has consequently spread far beyond its membership through popular literature about positive thinking.
Its most distinctive institution is Silent Unity, a prayer ministry that has received requests continuously since the 1890s by letter, then telephone, then online, staffed around the clock and answering every one. The daily devotional booklet the movement publishes has one of the largest circulations of any religious periodical in the world. The headquarters campus outside the city, a Mediterranean styled complex with gardens and a tower, has been the movement's centre since the 1920s.