Affirmative Prayer as a Distinct Genre

This entry records that New Thought, a loosely organized American religious and philosophical movement developing from the nineteenth century onward through figures including Phineas Quimby and later institutionalized in denominations such as Unity, Religious Science and the Church of Divine Science, developed a distinctive style of affirmative prayer, treating prayer less as petition addressed to an external deity and more as a disciplined practice of aligning one's own thought and consciousness with an already present divine reality or law, without reproducing specific New Thought prayer texts here. This affirmative approach, encapsulated in the common New Thought phrase that thoughts are things and consciousness shapes experience, distinguishes New Thought prayer practice structurally from the petitionary prayer found in most other traditions catalogued in this atlas, and it has influenced considerably wider popular American religious and self-help culture well beyond the specific denominations that formally organize around New Thought theology.

Ernest Holmes's Religious Science in particular drew explicitly on both Quimby's original mental healing ideas and on comparative study of world religions, presenting affirmative prayer as a universal spiritual principle he believed could be found, in some form, across many different religious traditions rather than as a uniquely Christian innovation.