Annotations Related to Middle Class

The objective of Armer’s study of Mary Baker Eddy’s establishment of her Massachusetts Metaphysical College is to highlight the achievements of women pioneers in higher education and entrepreneurial successes. Characteristics of Eddy’s business success included taking risk, managerial skills, knowledge of the product and the market, financial resources to produce capital, and enough success to produce profits.

Damaging newspaper accounts incentivized Mary Baker Eddy to found The Christian Science Monitor with the intent to be a more professional alternative sticking closely to facts and highlighting optimism rather than fear. Although this approach helped dampen the polemic around the church, critics found it lacking in illuminating systemic societal abuses of power.

​​Swensen, a social sciences bibliographer, researches whether the early appeal of Christian Science reached beyond American culture to attract recently arrived immigrants. Most of the immigrants were Europeans, especially British and German, and were of lower to middle working class. Despite language barriers, they found meaning in the church’s fellowship, restored health, and the promise of raising their station in life.

Examining 32 branch church membership records, plus 800 testimonies of healing, between 1890-1910, Swensen provides a demographic history of the occupations, classes, and motivations of Christian Scientists across the country. Compared to the 1910 census, Swensen found five times more professionals in the branches and almost four times the managers/proprietors, but only one fifth the number of unskilled workers and farmers.

Ivey’s history of Christian Science covers a broad range of topics including a brief history of Eddy’s personal preparation for the founding of the Church, the healing theology of Christian Science, the establishment of the Church, broader contexts of the appeal of Christian Science, the role of language for its expression, the maturing years in the early 20th century, and the challenges of adapting to a changing world in the late 20th century.

Four women— Emma and Abigail Dyer (daughter of Emma) Thompson, Janette Weller, and Annie M. Knott—were selected as representative of the pioneering work of early Christian Scientists due not to their gender, but to the available historical evidence, the range of their contributions to the history of Christian Science, and the relative familiarity of that person among today’s Christian Scientists.

Simon unpacks Mary Baker Eddy’s theological construct of the feminine divine and shows how Eddy mobilizes her conception of a benevolent maternal deity to challenge the gender ideology and conventions of her day. She finds in Eddy’s Genesis interpretation her ultimate goal: her feminized divine is an enabling belief that undoes Adam’s dream—the history of error, an assumed material selfhood.

This historically valuable documentary recounts the story of the earliest growth of Christian Science in the Midwestern US of the 1880s. The story includes many significant healings that turned patients into students of Christian Science. Despite severe persecution and ridicule, they also healed others. These pioneers represented all walks of life—farmers, businessmen, housewives, clerks, simple and sophisticated.

From his study of six Christian Science West Coast churches between 1880-1915, Swensen, a social sciences bibliographer, provides a detailed social profile of particular Christian Scientist leaders, the churches they established, and why they flourished after 1900. The Pacific Coast, with its influx of those seeking a better climate, along with its religious diversity, was fertile ground for Christian Science

Eddy’s Science and Health critiqued the contemporary ideology of invalidism. Male doctors had a vested interest in women’s weakness, making their own treatments necessary. Eddy, by contrast, validated the authority of the patient to bring about healing, thereby giving women more control over their bodies. Eddy’s message emphasized vitality and health for women and diminished biological differences between the sexes.

Roe recounts the history of Christian Science coming to Australia from 1890 to Mary Baker Eddy’s death in 1910, when there were 21 accredited practitioners and at least a thousand members. She notes that the earliest testifiers found healing and revelation through reading the Christian Science literature and Eddy’s textbook, Science and Health, but that later healing came through practitioners.

Mary Baker Eddy would transform her prophetic charisma into a set of bylaws (Manual of The Mother Church) which was meant to ensure institutional perpetuity, and act as a legal covenant for its members. Simmons highlights one British Church member, Annie Bill, who saw her own role as restoring charismatic leadership to the movement and creating an independent ‘Parent Church.’

The individuals interviewed for this book were active Christian Scientists whose life stories represent significant success in their widely diverse careers of the twentieth century, and they span the globe. Researchers will appreciate the detailed descriptions of the impact Christian Science made on these individuals during the building years of their careers. These sketches focus on the way Christian Science established their attitudes and worldviews.

Pioneers in Christian Science offers researchers of the developing years of early Christian Science a valuable resource. Published in 1972 as an unpaginated loose-leaf binder, it enabled the publisher to provide replacement sheets as needed. Each page includes a portrait and brief biographical sketch of one of the selected 125 early workers associated with Mary Baker Eddy between 1866 and 1910.

Pfautz examines what he calls the social psychological secularization process of the Christian Science Church from its beginnings in 1879 to the mid-20th century (Pfautz’s time of writing). By secularization, he means “the tendency of sectarian religious movements… to become both part of and like ‘the world.’”

England, an emeritus professor of sociology, studied 500 testimonies from The Christian Science Journal from 1929 to 1946 to evaluate characteristics of church adherents. Testimonies include a great deal of self-diagnosis and show indifference to the natural healing power of the human body. Most testimonies fell into four categories: physical health, financial concerns, intoxicants, and discord, depression or general unhappiness.

The significance of Simonsen’s 1928 publication today is its historical and theological contribution. His personal account provides an insight to the reception of the new American movement.  After ineffective medical help with his rapidly deteriorating health, he tried Christian Science and was healed after one visit with a Christian Science practitioner. He tackles deep personal and theological questions.

Longyear, the philanthropist who founded the Longyear Museum, wanted to give the world a correct knowledge of the character of Eddy’s chosen helper and husband, Asa Eddy. He gave unselfishly and untiringly during their brief six-year marriage and supported her during some of her greatest trials. His death—a terrible blow to her—had been the source of much speculation.

Gottschalk’s 1980s update on Christian Science admits to seeing controversy on three fronts: intensified opposition from conservative Christians, the arrested development of open exchange between Christian Scientists and mainline Protestants, and a lack of honest confrontation necessary to address the controversies and dissonance within the Church.