One Method, Three Denominations

The metaphysical reading of scripture New Thought bodies share today traces back to a single figure who never founded a church of his own. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a nineteenth century mental healer working in Portland, Maine, taught that sickness and error alike were products of wrong belief rather than physical fact, and that scripture, read correctly, taught the same lesson about the power of mind over matter he was demonstrating in his own healing practice. Quimby left no organized institution behind him at his death in 1866, but his students and their own students went on to found the movement's separate branches, each institutionalizing his method independently: Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded Unity in Kansas City in 1889; Ernest Holmes founded Religious Science, now known as the Centers for Spiritual Living, in Los Angeles in 1927; and Divine Science organized somewhat earlier still, in the 1880s, under Malinda Cramer and the Brooks sisters in Denver and San Francisco. The three bodies never merged and today maintain separate headquarters, publications and ministerial training, but all three continued Quimby's basic move of reading the Bible as an account of inward, mental states, which is why a doctrine first worked out by a single healer with no seminary training became, within two generations, the shared scriptural method of an entire family of American denominations.