There Is No Original Sin and No Substitutionary Atonement

The New Thought movement traces its origin to the American mesmerist and healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, who taught in the mid nineteenth century that illness is fundamentally a mental rather than a bodily condition and could be addressed by correcting a person's thinking. The bodies that grew from this current, including Unity, Religious Science and Divine Science, extended the underlying premise from physical healing into a full account of human nature. Where much of historic Christian teaching holds that human beings inherit a corrupted or fallen nature requiring rescue from outside themselves, New Thought bodies hold that a person's essential nature is already good, and that what stands between a person and the good life is incorrect thinking rather than an inherited moral debt. Sin, disease and disorder are read within this framework as consequences of mistaken thought patterns rather than as guilt incurred through a first transgression passed down through the human line, and correcting the thought is understood to be sufficient in itself. Unity, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in 1889, the Home College of Divine Science, founded by Malinda Cramer in 1888, and the Institute of Religious Science, founded by Ernest Holmes in 1927, each organised the same underlying premise into a separate denomination decades after Quimby's own work.

Because human nature is already good on the New Thought account, the work religion does changes shape considerably from its more familiar Christian form. Rather than securing rescue from an inherited guilt through a substitutionary sacrifice made on a believer's behalf, the task becomes recognising a goodness already present, so that neither original sin nor substitutionary atonement functions as a live category within New Thought teaching at all. This is not a formally defined, centrally adjudicated doctrine binding on every affiliated congregation the way a creed might bind a confessional church; it is closer to a shared premise running consistently across the movement's separately organised bodies, expressed independently by Unity, Religious Science and Divine Science without a single governing council standing over all three. The International New Thought Alliance, formed in 1914 to give the wider movement some organisational coherence, reflects this same premise in asserting that sin and illness stem from incorrect thinking rather than from an inherited fallen condition, treating the rejection of original sin as characteristic of the movement as a whole rather than the position of any one of its constituent churches alone.