Religious Science (Centers for Spiritual Living)

Ernest Holmes published The Science of Mind in 1926 after more than a decade studying and lecturing on mental healing, New Thought teaching and comparative religious philosophy, and founded the Institute of Religious Science the following year to teach the system the book laid out. Its central practice, spiritual mind treatment, is an affirmative form of prayer that Holmes distinguished sharply from petition: rather than asking an external deity to intervene, the practitioner is trained to declare and affirm a desired condition as already spiritually true, on the premise that a universal creative Mind responds to and manifests directed thought.

Holmes drew openly on Ralph Waldo Emerson, on earlier New Thought writers including Phineas Quimby's intellectual descendants, and on Hindu and other Indian philosophical sources, and he consistently presented Religious Science as a philosophy anyone could study and apply rather than as a creed requiring formal subscription or exclusive belief, a framing that shaped how loosely organized the movement remained for decades. Holmes had earlier worked as a public lecturer and had studied under and been influenced by Christian Science practitioners and other New Thought teachers active in early twentieth century Southern California, a milieu that shaped the eclectic, synthesizing character of the system he eventually published rather than one drawn from a single earlier source.

Religious Science organized into two separate principal bodies during the twentieth century, a divide that reflected differences in governance and emphasis rather than doctrine, and both bodies operated in parallel for decades training practitioners and licensing ministers under substantially the same teaching drawn from Holmes's original text. The two organizations merged in 2011 to form Centers for Spiritual Living, ending the institutional split and consolidating training, credentialing and publishing under one administrative structure while retaining Holmes's core teaching essentially unchanged.

Religious Science congregations today typically describe themselves as a spiritual philosophy compatible with continued participation in another faith tradition rather than as a substitute for one, a self-description consistent with Holmes's own insistence that the system was a set of practical spiritual principles rather than a creed demanding exclusive allegiance, and this openness has made Religious Science one of the more porous boundaries within organized American religious life. Centers for Spiritual Living today trains and credentials practitioners and ministers through its own accredited programs, maintaining Holmes's original distinction between spiritual mind treatment as a skilled practice requiring training and ordinary personal prayer, which the organization continues to treat as a related but separate activity open to anyone without formal preparation.