“Manhood and Mary Baker Eddy: Muscular Christianity and Christian Science”

Eder, Jonathon, “Manhood and Mary Baker Eddy: Muscular Christianity and Christian Science,” Church History, 89:4 (December 2020) 875-896.

Mary Baker Eddy’s 1909 generous donation to a new YMCA Building in Boston, Eder contends, was evidence of her support for ‘muscular Christianity,’ a Protestant, primarily men’s, movement asserting that masculine virtues were essential to Christianity in contrast with the nineteenth-century shift to a more private, feminine “weak pietism” (878). Eder finds in Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as a contemplative or ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman). Rather than the stereotypical portrayal of Christian Science as an otherworldly spirituality ill at ease with the body, Eder shows how Eddy’s spiritual vision worked to liberate and fortify mind and body. Her writings also reflect “a discernible and repeated thrust to extend the reach of Christian Science thought and practice beyond the sheltered sphere of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity into the proving grounds of the public realm” (877). The Christian Science Monitor is cited as evidence that Eddy’s religion, like muscular Christianity, would take a pragmatic, caring and reformative attitude toward the temporal world’s civic and social concerns, rather than deny their significance; and that this public outward stance was “inherent to Christian spiritual practice and progress” (896).

ISSN: 1755-2613
Print ISSN: 0009-6407

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640720001390