History & overview · every faith gets one
Matter is not what is real, so sickness is not what it appears to be.
Founded by Mary Baker Eddy on the claim that she had rediscovered the method by which Jesus healed, and that it is a demonstrable science rather than faith. The church has no ordained clergy — two Readers read aloud from the Bible and from Science and Health at every service, in the same lesson worldwide. Its practitioners treat by prayer for a fee and advertise in a directory. It built the Christian Science Monitor in 1908, and it has declined by roughly four-fifths since 1970.
Christian Science practice of relying on spiritual treatment instead of medicine has produced a documented record of child deaths and litigation in the United States. Robyn Twitchell, aged two, died of a bowel obstruction in Boston on 8 April 1986; his parents were convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1990, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed the convictions in 1993 in Commonwealth v. Twitchell, holding that an opinion of the state Attorney General had made the law misleading as to criminal liability. Ian Lundman, aged eleven, died of untreated juvenile diabetes in Minnesota on 9 May 1989; in a wrongful death action a jury found the practitioner, the nurse and the boy's mother and stepfather negligent, and in 1995 the Minnesota Court of Appeals in Lundman v. McKown affirmed compensatory damages against the individuals, reversed judgment against The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and struck down the 9 million dollar punitive award against the church as unconstitutional; the United States Supreme Court declined review in January 1996. Amy Hermanson, aged seven, died of untreated diabetes in Florida in 1986; her parents were convicted in 1989 and the Florida Supreme Court quashed the convictions in 1992 on due process grounds arising from the state's own religious exemption statute. The church's position is that members are free to choose medical care and that it does not direct treatment decisions.
Why it is filed this way
Christian Science is usually classed with the nineteenth-century American metaphysical movements — New Thought, Divine Science, Unity — rather than with the Protestant denominations, and Eddy sued and disowned the New Thought teachers who had learned from her. It uses Protestant furniture, reads the Bible at every service, and holds a doctrine of God, Christ, matter and death that no Protestant confession would recognise.
The founding
In February 1866 Mary Baker Eddy fell on ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, and was, on her own account, gravely injured; three days later, reading Matthew 9 on the healing of the palsied man, she rose from bed healed and dated her discovery of Christian Science to that moment. The attending physician later disputed the severity of the injury. She spent nine years working out the system, published Science and Health in 1875, and chartered the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston on 23 August 1879 with twenty-six members, dissolving and reorganising it in 1892 into the form it still has.
Its founding is bound to Mary Baker Eddy — 1879 CE.
What it holds
Reality. God is All, and God is Mind; matter, sickness, sin and death are errors of mortal belief with no reality behind them.
The divine. God is defined in Science and Health by seven synonyms — Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love — and is understood as Father-Mother. Jesus is the Way-shower, and Christ is the divine idea he demonstrated rather than a second person of a Trinity; Eddy rejected the Trinity as a suggestion of more than one God..
Death and after. There is no death to pass through — what is called dying is a false belief to be overcome, and progress continues after it.