The Canon · No. 089
Christian Science
Church of Christ, Scientist
1879 CE – present · Abrahamic · Living · US, UK, Germany
VII. THE MODERN AGE — 1800 – 1945
How many
Not published by the church as a matter of policy; independent estimates suggest fewer than 100,000 and a steep long-term decline from a peak of perhaps 270,000 in the 1930s.
Who began it
Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who after a serious fall in 1866 reported healing while reading a gospel account, and spent the following decade working out the system.
What it is for
To recover what Eddy held to be the lost element of primitive Christianity — healing — by understanding its underlying principle.
What it worships
God, understood as Principle, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Life, Truth and Love. Jesus is the Way-shower; the Christ is the divine idea, distinguished from the man Jesus.
What it holds
God is All, and God is Spirit; therefore matter is unreal. Sickness, sin and death are errors of mortal mind — not illusions to be ignored but false beliefs to be corrected by knowing the truth of being. Healing follows from that correction. Man is the perfect spiritual reflection of God and never fell. This is a thoroughgoing metaphysical idealism applied as a practice.
What it does
Study of the weekly Bible Lesson, made of passages from the Bible and from Science and Health, read in every branch church worldwide from the same schedule; there are no sermons and no clergy, only two lay Readers. Wednesday testimony meetings where members recount healings. Practitioners, listed in the church directory, are paid to pray for others. Reading Rooms. Historic avoidance of medicine, though the church now says members are free to choose and does not discipline those who use it.
After death
Death is regarded as an illusion of mortal sense rather than a real transition, and Eddy taught that individual existence continues and progresses beyond it. There is no traditional heaven or hell: both are states of consciousness, not places. Eddy defined heaven as harmony and hell as self-imposed anguish and error.
Its texts
The Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875), which together are declared the church's dual and permanent pastor. Also the Manual of The Mother Church, whose bylaws Eddy wrote to make future structural change nearly impossible.
Its branches
The Mother Church and its branches. Related but separate: the wider New Thought movement — Unity, Religious Science, Divine Science — which grew from the same Quimby-influenced root and became far larger, and whose optimism about mind and prosperity shaped a great deal of modern self-help.
Of note
Eddy is the only woman to found a major American religion, and she built an institution designed to run without her — successfully in structure, and at the cost of an inability to adapt.
Its timeline
- 1866 CE Eddy's healing after a fall in Lynn, Massachusetts.
- 1875 CE Science and Health published.
- 1879 CE The Church of Christ, Scientist organised in Boston.
- 1881 CE Massachusetts Metaphysical College founded; Eddy teaches personally.
- 1892 CE The church reorganised into its permanent form.
- <strong>1908 CE</strong> At 87, Eddy founds The Christian Science Monitor, in response to the yellow journalism of the era. It has since won seven Pulitzer Prizes and is respected far outside the church.
- 1910 CE Eddy dies aged 89.
- 1930s CE Peak membership.
- 1980s–90s CE Prosecutions of parents whose children died of treatable illness while receiving only Christian Science treatment; several convictions, and a long legislative fight over religious exemptions in child neglect statutes.
- 2010s–present Continued decline; branch churches close and consolidate.
Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.