The Unreality of Matter, Sin and Disease

Christian Science is usually encountered as a position about medicine, and the position about medicine is a consequence of something prior. The prior claim is about what exists. Mary Baker Eddy held that God is Spirit, wholly good, and the only genuine cause, from which she drew the conclusion that whatever is real must be spiritual and good. Matter, on that reasoning, cannot be a second kind of stuff that God also made, and evil, disease and death cannot be things God caused; since nothing exists apart from God, they are not things at all, but errors of belief held by what she called mortal mind. The claim is deductive rather than evidential, and Eddy presented it that way, as a science in the older sense of a demonstrable body of knowledge rather than as a set of pious hopes.

Healing follows as the demonstration. If a diseased body is a false belief rather than a damaged mechanism, then it yields to correction of the belief, which is what Christian Science prayer sets out to do, not by asking God to intervene in matter but by understanding more clearly the spiritual facts that were always the case.

Eddy set the whole out in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, published in 1875 and revised by her repeatedly for the rest of her life, and she paired the book with the Bible as the church's authority. She was insistent that the teaching had been revealed to her rather than derived from any teacher, a point on which she had reason to be emphatic, since her early association with the mental healer Phineas Quimby was used against her for decades.

The church built an institutional structure around the practice of healing. Christian Science practitioners are members who have completed the church's course of instruction and who list themselves publicly as available to be engaged for treatment, which is prayer rather than counselling or manipulation, and who charge for their time. Nurses trained by the church staff its care facilities.

The Christian Science Journal and the weekly Sentinel have published members' accounts of healings continuously for well over a century, and the church has at various points required corroboration for those it prints. On recourse to physicians the church's formal position is narrower than its reputation: it does not excommunicate members who consult a doctor, it has always accepted the setting of broken bones and obstetric care, and it describes the decision as the individual member's. The teaching nonetheless gives that decision a strong direction, and the gap between a doctrine of unreality and a rule permitting choice is where the church's public difficulties have accumulated.

In the United States that meant litigation, chiefly in cases where a child died of a treatable illness under spiritual treatment alone. Several American states adopted religious exemptions to child neglect statutes during the 1970s, and prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s tested how far those exemptions reached. Rennie Schoepflin's study traces the whole arc, from a nineteenth century American setting in which orthodox medicine had far less to offer than it later did, to a twentieth century one in which the same refusal carried a very different weight.