Mental and Spiritual Healing

New Thought traces much of its organized form to Emma Curtis Hopkins, who ran a Christian Science offshoot seminary in Chicago in the 1880s after breaking with Mary Baker Eddy, and whose students went on to found several of the movement's separate institutional households. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, both former Hopkins students, founded Unity in Kansas City in 1889 after Myrtle's recovery from tuberculosis, which she attributed to the repeated affirmation that she was a child of God and therefore not subject to inherited disease; Unity calls its system Practical Christianity and has remained closely tied to Christian scripture and vocabulary even as it reads both metaphysically.

Nona Brooks, another Hopkins student, founded Divine Science in Denver in the 1880s and 1890s alongside her sisters and Fannie Brooks James, building an independent denomination on the same core claim, that a change of thought changes the thinker's experience of God, health and circumstance. Ernest Holmes, working somewhat later and drawing on Hopkins's teaching among other sources, systematized the movement's philosophy in his 1926 book The Science of Mind and founded what became Religious Science, now organized as the Centers for Spiritual Living.

Outside the American lineage, Masaharu Taniguchi founded Seicho-No-Ie in Japan in 1930, adapting New Thought's metaphysical framework, that thought and consciousness shape material reality, into a distinct Japanese religious movement with its own scripture and its own institutional life largely independent of the American New Thought bodies it draws on.

The distinctive New Thought practice, usually called treatment or affirmative prayer, is not petition in the ordinary sense, asking God for an outcome, but a disciplined redirection of the practitioner's own thought toward the truth the tradition holds already to be the case: that the person treated is, in Unity's phrasing, already whole, complete and perfect as an expression of the one Mind, whatever their symptoms currently suggest. A practitioner or minister trained in this method holds a specific mental and spoken affirmation for a set period, on the premise that thought operating in line with divine Mind produces a corresponding change in physical or material condition.

The claim that thought and prayer can resolve physical illness has drawn sustained theological and medical criticism, the latter from clinicians concerned that reliance on affirmation in place of treatment can delay necessary care. New Thought bodies have responded differently: Unity, Religious Science and Divine Science all now generally present treatment as a complement to medical care rather than a substitute for it, a shift from the movement's earlier decades when Christian Science's harder line against medicine cast a shadow over New Thought's own, generally milder, position.

The teaching's wider cultural reach outran its founding denominations. Popular self-help and prosperity literature from the twentieth century onward, including material with no denominational tie at all, draws directly on the New Thought claim that consciousness determines circumstance, making the doctrine one of the few pieces of specifically American religious metaphysics to pass into secular self-improvement culture largely intact.