Women of Science

BRIAN: In recent decades, one American-born religion has stirred up a lot of controversy for its rejection of modern medicine, that’s Christian Science. In 1990, followers David and Ginger Twitchell were convicted of involuntary manslaughter after their infant son died from an obstructed intestine. The parents had turned to prayer as treatment.

The ruling was later overturned, but the high profile case—as well as other children’s deaths—brought a lot of negative attention to the church. In recent years, Christian Science leaders have sought to modify church practices in the face of falling membership.

PETER: That’s the story today, but BackStory producer Nina Earnest wondered if this American religion’s early history might help explain its controversial teachings. Here’s Nina with the story.

NINA EARNEST: In 1866, Mary Baker Eddy slipped on the ice in Lynn, Massachusetts. A doctor told her that the injuries to her head and neck were life-threatening. Everyone around her feared the worst, but then Eddy—

DAVID HOLLAND: —called for the Bible and read an account of Jesus healing in the New Testament, and had an epiphany—

NINA EARNEST: This is religious scholar David Holland, who is working on a biography of Eddy.

DAVID HOLLAND: —that the power to heal was the power of truth and if she simply believed in truth, that this injury that she had encountered would not hold her down.

NINA EARNEST: And it didn’t. At that moment, Holland says, Eddy felt freed from her pain and suffering. She would later describe it this way.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The result was that I arose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed. That short experience included a glimpse of that great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely life in and of spirit—this life being the sole reality of existence.

NINA EARNEST: Mary Baker Eddy had struggled with sickness throughout her life, including digestive troubles, back pain, and respiratory infections. But following the fall at Lynn—as believers call it—Eddy made it her mission to spread her own gospel. Her new philosophy looked to the Bible to emphasize Jesus’s healing practices, and by 1879 she and her disciples had officially founded a new church and a new belief system, the Church of Christ, Scientist.

DAVID HOLLAND: Christian Science is essentially the belief that matter is not real, and everything that you can draw from that central fact is entailed in that central belief.

NINA EARNEST: If matter is not real, then the body is not real. If the body is not real, then terrible things that affect the body aren’t real either, such as death and disease.

DAVID HOLLAND: She offered the promise that through prayer and correct principles, people could be liberated from the tyranny of the physical body and find true, lasting, permanent health.

NINA EARNEST: And even though Mary Baker Eddy did allow her followers to receive some medical attention, the goal was to use less and less as their spirituality deepened.

DAVID HOLLAND: And I think within the culture of Christian Science, to have to appeal to medicine carries a certain stigma.

NINA EARNEST: In the late 19th century, Americans really took to Mary Baker Eddy’s ideas. There were more than 1,000 Christian Science congregations by the time Eddy died in 1910, though exact membership numbers are hard to come by. Titanic figures like William Randolph Hearst and Mark Twain weighed in on its popularity, Hearst to support Eddy and Twain to accuse her of being a for profit prophet.

Twain might’ve thought that supporting Eddy was irrational, but there are many reasons her teachings spoke to Americans. For one thing, 19th century physicians weren’t exactly models of professionalism. Doctors regularly administered mercury and morphine for vague illnesses like hysteria. Women in particular were targets of these treatments. Let’s just say that the medical profession was a field in transition.

DAVID HOLLAND: We might think of it as a moment in which a rising, scientific, professionalized medical community had begun to debunk previous folk practices, but had yet to really achieve a high level of respectability or the confidence of Americans generally. And in that vacancy, movements like Christian Science proved incredibly attractive.

NINA EARNEST: And on top of that, Christian Science put power back in the hands of its practitioners—in one group, in particular.

DAVID HOLLAND: Christian Science was particularly popular among middle class women.

NINA EARNEST: Mary Baker Eddy is one of few American women to found a religion, and that’s reflected in her theology. God was referred to as Mother Father God. If bodies didn’t exist, then gender didn’t matter. For many women, the fact that Christian Science—for the most part—shunned the growing medical profession may have been part of the appeal.

DAVID HOLLAND: With the professionalization of medicine, folk healing practices that had traditionally been the domain of women were increasingly moving into the hands of men to the exclusion of women. Christian Science returned a healing power to women, and so religious authority—which is based on the capacity to heal—is not gendered specifically, but in fact transcends gender.

NINA EARNEST: Christian Science membership began to drop in the second half of the 20th century. But in her time, Mary Baker Eddy offered American believers something empowering. We’re not saying it was granted, but she offered at least the promise of freedom from their own bodies.

BRIAN: Nina Earnest is one of our producers. David Holland helped tell that story. He’s a professor at Harvard Divinity School. He’s writing a comparative biography of Mary Baker Eddy, and Seventh Day Adventist leader Ellen White.

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