“Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the History of Christian Science”

Anker, Roy M. “Romanticism, the Gilded Age, and the History of Christian Science.” chapter in Self-Help and Popular Religion in Modern American Culture: An Interpretive Guide. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1999: pgs. 11-100. 

Anker examines the distinctive and often controversial features of the “self-help religious movements” associated with Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and Robert Schuller. Anker’s extensive, well-documented chapter on Eddy opens by describing the seismic economic, cultural, and religious shifts of nineteenth-century America: industrialization, massive immigration, widening economic disparity, Darwinian theory, biblical criticism, women’s suffrage, theodicy produced by the trauma of the Civil War, and Protestantism’s inability to address these challenges. Anker then shows how this rapidly changing milieu shaped Eddy’s career and theology, while also shaping interpretive judgments about her and Christian Science through what he calls the “implicit rhetorical bias within traditional accounts of American religious history” (14). He surveys a wide range of scholarly analyses of Eddy’s theology and the influence of Phineas Quimby, demonstrating how their healing practices drew increasing attention to the relationship between religion and psychological and physical health. The remainder of the chapter examines Eddy’s organization of her church and its early exponential growth, her struggle against “animal magnetism,” internal dissent, controversies within and beyond the church after Eddy’s death, and Anker’s concluding review of scholars’ explanations for the early appeal of Eddy and Christian Science and why the movement is struggling today.

ISBN 13: 0313222495
ISBN 10: 01936859