Annotations Related to Wealth

Hussey examines how Christian Science guided and sustained Nancy Astor as the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons in 1919. Her political career of 26 years focused on temperance and support of women and children. Astor found healing by reading Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook, and with her husband, founded Ninth Church of Christ, Scientist, London.

Siewers, of the Russian Orthodox faith and briefly, a National Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, observes there are no longer any prominent, mostly Republican, Christian Scientists in the U.S. Congress or White House, or visible in the arts and entertainment industry. He argues that the disappearance and decline of Christian Science is a precautionary tale for more traditional Christian communities.

Hutchinson defines New Thought as any American metaphysical religion affiliated with Phineas P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins. They expanded from their emphasis on healing to a focus on prosperity theology; and Hutchinson observes that since Eddy rejected materialism, the New Thought emphasis on prosperity—while popular in mainstream Christian America—differentiated it from Christian Science.

Although these contemporary authors never met, their mutual interest in sincere religion and the power of thought inevitably brought the two distinguished figures into a provocative relationship. The fact that he shifted his position on Christian Science several times indicates the conflict within his own worldview. It was no more insane than any other channel of human thought. Just more interesting.

​​Squires takes up the 1915 novel, “The Genius,” by Theodore Dreiser and compares the many semi-autobiographical parallels between the novel’s main character, Eugene, and Dreiser. Dreiser’s personal philandering and materialism are reflected in his portrayal of Eugene. After scandalous affairs with tragic consequences, both grapple with their own crisis of morality by conversing with Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings in Christian Science.

Dorothy von Moltke’s letters to her parents contain significant insight into Christian Science in Germany from 1902 until her death in 1935, with a focus on troubles within Germany after WWI. Dorothy and her husband, Count Helmuth, served on the 1912 committee translating Science and Health into German, and Helmuth was the church’s designated liaison with the German government during early phases of Nazi control.

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.

Bibliographer Swensen provides a social profile of the membership, internal operations and founding leadership (Augusta Stetson and Laura Lathrop) of the two largest Christian Science churches in the eastern U.S.—First and Second Church, New York City. Accessing the church records and the extensive correspondence between Mary Baker Eddy and New York church members, Swensen sees his study as a window into the rocket-rise of this vibrant new movement as a whole.

Although the book is a study on Cather and the relationship between her life and her writing, Porter finds in Cather’s writing insistent reminders of Mary Baker Eddy which bubble up as if from an obsessive subconscious, shaping characters and themes so that they recall Eddy even as they resist her (Eddy’s) influence. Porter’s psychoanalysis concludes Cather saw herself in Eddy.

Umansky studies the history of Jewish Science—a movement that arose to counter the estimated tens of thousands of Jews (a majority women) attracted to Christian Science in the late 19th and early 20th century. These Jews had been attracted to Christian Science’s promise of health and healing. Umansky also examines the Christian Science theology that resonated with Jewish beliefs.

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

Michell examines the influences, and theological connections and differences, between the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins, the 19th-century Woman’s movement, and the New Thought and New Age movements. Hopkins, unlike Eddy, would see Truth in all religions, not limited to Christianity, and focused more on a prosperity gospel.

Ivey outlines the rising popularity of the classical style for the rapidly growing Christian Science church in the late 19th-century Midwest by highlighting Solon Spencer Beman, a well-known Chicago architect. Beman advocated classical architecture because it “put an authoritative public face” on the new movement and also linked spiritual ideals to the built environment.

Both Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement and the New Thought Movement flourished in the late 19th-and early 20th-centuries. They agreed that one’s mental fears foster illness and distress. Yet unlike the New Thought Movement—believing in the human mind’s ability to control the world—Eddy thought a reliance on the mortal mind’s power distracted from one’s reliance on God.

Cunningham’s specialty lies with 19th-century American religious history focusing on women, institutions, money and power—perfect preparation for her PhD dissertation research on the fraught relationship of two charismatic women who rose from poverty to power and wealth: Augusta Stetson, a founding member and leader of the first Christian Science church in New York City, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement.

Ivey documents the growing secularization and diminishing Protestant authority and influence of late 19th-century cities. In the midst of this cultural and architectural transition, the new, rapidly growing Christian Science denomination was establishing itself in Chicago and integrating its “theological sensibilities” and metaphysical theology into the “rational” authority reflected in the city’s more secular Greek classical architecture of government buildings.

Gartrell-Mills’s Part II continues her study of Christian Science in 20th century Britain, examining the initial negative reaction of the public, medical establishment, and Anglican Church. But then she finds ways in which Christian Science eventually contributed to more favorable medical attitudes toward spiritual considerations, and the Anglican Church’s opening up to spiritual forms of healing. 

Weatherbe’s book focuses on Stetson’s relationship to Mary Baker Eddy, and Stetson’s accomplishments with her own healing practice and leadership in Christian Science. Stetson’s crowning achievement was the building and development of her Christian Science Church in New York. The biography includes a brief account of Stetson’s pre-Christian Science years and a large section of backup documents.

Gottschalk objects to religious historians designating Christian Science as harmonialism. He argues that the emphasis on the Bible and Christ in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings precludes the focus on ‘using’ methods for the primary purpose of comfort, health and wealth, control and power, that are exercised in the service of gaining and keeping harmony in one’s own life.

Meyer’s purpose was to assess religion as therapy: as a cult of reassurance, as psychology of peace and positive thinking. After a brief biography of Mary Baker Eddy’s life, Meyer positions Christian Science as a kind of psychotherapy dressed in religious attire —mind cure’s tightly organized, exclusive denomination. However, his perception is based on very few and dated resources.

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.

In this short chapter, Wardwell, a professor of sociology, reviewed the theology, practice, and structure of Christian Science relying on secondary sources and a review of numerous testimonies from the Christian Science publications. He includes observations on the nature of healing, middle class values, the focus on individual practice (vs. communal problems), and church services. 

Parker includes Mary Baker Eddy among ‘curists’ (healing oneself through right thinking) who struggled to gain more manlike worldly mastery and embraced their sexuality for domestic and spiritual uses. Her psychoanalytical conclusion (made before the Mary Baker Eddy Library archives were available) describes Eddy’s desire for mastery as of a Machiavellian sort and was purely about ambition, exploitation, and greed.

Parker’s psychoanalytical approach to understanding Mary Baker Eddy brings Twain’s ambition analysis and Fiedler’s sanctity of 19th-century female spirituality into tension. Parker sees Eddy’s desire to sublimate her willful personality through submission to the purity and safety of the feminine, while exploiting the culture of womanhood to fulfill her drive for success in leading a religious movement and hiding her ambition.

Cunningham depicted the complaints written and preached by clergy openly opposed to Mary Baker Eddy. Their offense was based on the juxtaposition of waning interest in old orthodoxies with the growth of Christian Science. Four main criticisms include 1) Eddy’s dubious relation to historic Christianity; 2) her teaching on evil; 3) her scheme of getting money; and 4) her hygienic risks.