Resources Discussing Church Manual, Governance and/or Leadership

The Mary Baker Eddy Library examines Eddy’s correspondence and documents related to the 1881 chartering, development and fruition of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The College, an institution meant to teach Eddy’s metaphysical healing method, accepted both sexes regardless of age or gender. Eddy intended her students to practice what they learned back in their own communities.

Christian Scientists from Chicago would convince a skeptical Mary Baker Eddy to participate in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions with its message of unity among all religions. Although the address was enthusiastically received, its overall negative impact was the association of Christian Science with theosophy and Vedanta, and the crystalizing of opposition from the more traditional Christian Churches.

Voorhees offers new scholarship on a broad array of topics related to Christian Science identity focusing on reception history. With attention to fully resourced details and modern scholarship, Voorhees outlines the reception history of Christian Science in fields of religion, women studies, American history, politics, medicine, and metaphysics. She probes Mary Baker Eddy’s relationships with contemporary scholars, religion leaders, and students.

Swensen documents how, in the fifteen years after the passing of Mary Baker Eddy (1910-1925), the Christian Science Board of Directors consolidated and centralized their authority both at Church headquarters and over local branch churches. Mirroring a corporate business model, church organization, administration, and standardization were merged with obedience and loyalty. 

Eddy’s first published reference to the subject of vaccination was in an 1880 sermon. In 1900, Eddy was consulted by some Christian Science parents, including her son, who wanted to keep their children from school due to their opposition to vaccination laws. But Eddy recommended compliance with the law and affirmed that one could also submit to the providence of God. 

Eder finds in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as an ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman) but 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.”

This report examines the history of Black Americans’ interactions with the Chrisian Science church beginning with the 1919 formation of the Committee on General Welfare, and then focusing on the racial unrest of the 1960s. This coverage included the demands made by Black community activists during the church’s 1969 Annual Meeting and the Board of Directors’ written response.

…and its ineradicable link to her personality” (123), a concept that presaged her later appointing Science and Health (along with the Bible) as Pastor of the Christian Science Church. Responses…

Swensen examines the initial flock and organization of the Church Mary Baker Eddy founded and then disbanded ten years later. The early 1880s brought new members and stability, spurring Eddy to organize. But this embattled precursor of today’s Mother Church would be irredeemably challenged by a volatile membership, unreliable preaching by invited clergy, and confusion over competing metaphysical groups.

Kramer’s well-researched critique on Christian Science makes her arguments easier to understand than most critics. She grasps the fundamental teachings and history of the religion well, but she left it for doctrinal reasons. Most of Perfect Peril describes her emotional and intellectual struggles with doctrinal issues. Following a crisis of faith, she concluded that Christian Science is a dangerous mind control. 

This essay on Christian Science is one of many descriptive introductions of various religions and their relation to evangelical Christianity. Simmons notes that the ‘Christian’ element in Christian Science involves a radical reinterpretation of Jesus and his role in the New Testament. Mary Baker Eddy stressed the practical nature of her ‘science’ in human challenges, thus highlighting the focus on healing. 

This report attempts to explain why Christian Science has failed to grow as its founder predicted. It claims that a faulty Church organization has been improperly governing since the death of Mary Baker Eddy, primarily because of the assumption of complete authority by the self-perpetuating Board of Directors, their interpretation of the Church Manual, and the presumed need for a church organization at all.

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.

Choi’s and Huff’s chapters explore how two 19th-century Christian women, Lucy Rider Meyer and Mary Baker Eddy respectively, interpreted Pauline and deuteron-Pauline texts to validate women’s empowerment in the Church. Hogan then details striking similarities between Meyer’s and Eddy’s approaches to these texts, and that of many recent feminist and womanist scholars.

Swensen, Rolf. “‘You are Brave but You are a Woman in the Eyes of Men’: Augusta E. Stetson’s Rise and Fall in the Church of Christ, Scientist.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion  24, no. 1 (2008): 75–89. Augusta Stetson was the controversial founder and leader of the largest Christian Science church in the world—completed in 1903, a magnificent 1.2-million-dollar sanctuary located in New York City. She was one of many women at the turn.

Cunningham provides a thorough introduction to the life of Mary Baker Eddy, theological distinctions of Christian Science, the Church founding, evolution of the Church Manual, more recent developments such as recent legal and financial struggles, the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library, and whether Eddy and her followers were feminists.

Rolf Swensen, a social sciences bibliographer, describes the troubled early stages of the Christian Science movement in Portland under the leadership of two influential women, Blanche Hogue and Amorette Aldrich, and the churches they established. The source of contention appears to have been due to Hogue’s affiliation with and support from Augusta Stetson, a prominent Christian Science practitioner and teacher in New York City.

Swensen documents the long-term effect of Alfred Farlow’s early crusade to protect the growing Christian Science Church from outside attacks, and muzzle an unrestrained and over-zealous faithful. He sees this protective stance as casting a long shadow over the content of future church periodicals, and the reason why members have since shown a deep reticence for personal outreach.

Johnson contextualizes theologians Ruether and Eddy within feminist history showing how each “changed the boundaries of the Church’s theological thinking on the rights of women,” freeing them up to be seen and heard. Johnson finds feminist principles at work in Eddy’s writings on marriage laws, use of language, theology (especially her Father-Mother God), and church structure empowering women in roles as local leaders and healers.

This book is Mary Baker Eddy’s response to the vicious accusations by Frederick Peabody, a lawyer who represented a client in litigation against Eddy. Eddy’s advisors recommended she not publish her book because of the possibility of further public agitation. But it was published by the Christian Science Publishing Society for the first time in 2002. 

This well-researched biography of Emma Curtis Hopkins, little-known founder of the 19th-century New Thought movement, includes Hopkins’s early-stage affiliation with Mary Baker Eddy—her tutelage by Eddy and editorship of The Christian Science Journal for 13 months before being suddenly discharged. Harley draws on a range of scholarship to contextualize the complexity of this knotty developmental stage of Christian Science.

Swanson’s paper applies a social science lens to the social and power structure of the Christian Science Church, seeing the existing organizational structure as not succeeding in 1) generating member trust and solidarity; 2) communicating its beliefs; 3) negotiating power through its rules; and 4) legitimizing a Church belief system so antithetical to the traditional worldview. His conclusions uncover Church weaknesses but miss out on the blessings of membership.

Singelenberg, a social anthropologist, argued that Rodney Stark’s then-recent analysis of the ‘rise and fall’ of Christian Science overlooked two important issues that may have had a bearing on his conclusions: the Knapp Controversy, and rapid loss of financial stability due to an ambitious attempt to build a media empire.

Historian Benowitz’s encyclopedia profile of Augusta Stetson is a chronology of her life from devout Methodist upbringing, to public orator, to Eddy’s request for her to establish Christian Science in New York City, to her increasingly problematic leadership and eventual excommunication from Eddy’s Church.

…the Bible, to the status of Pastor, codification of policy in the Church Manual, and establishment of the Christian Science Publishing Society. “…Eddy best displayed her genius through a subtle…