Resources by or about Independent Christian Scientists

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 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.

The focus of this article is an explanation of Christian Science within the religious context of its American origin and development. Melton claims that Mesmerism, Spiritualism, Swedenborgianism, and Transcendentalism prepared the way for two important religious movements of the 19th- century: Christian Science and New Thought. The author also gives relative importance to the role of independent Christian Scientists.

Petersen has made a paraphrase revision of Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century textbook, Science and Health, with the purpose of elucidating divine Science for the 21st century. In her Preface she avows her great efforts to keep Eddy’s original meaning of divine Science intact, while using more current (and inclusive) language and illustrations, and quoting from modern Bible versions.

Horowitz assigns Christian Science a prominent place in the development of American affirmative-thinking (his term) philosophical systems. Although he acknowledges Mary Baker Eddy’s interest in Quimby (a 19th-century mesmerist) and her debt to him during a prolonged time of illness, Horowitz believes that Quimby was not the founder of Christian Science. Instead, Eddy herself created a brigade of spiritual freethinkers.

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.

Sweet’s firsthand account of the lives and work of Bruce and his son John Klingbeil describes their organization, Spindrift, and their deep involvement with Christian Science. Spindrift’s scientific experiments with prayer for plants, attempted to prove that prayer works, but their struggles with public rejection and excommunication from the Church until their double suicide in 1993 plagued them until the end.

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.

Simmons explores the reasons for the parting of ways between Mary Baker Eddy and one of her followers, Emma Curtis Hopkins. He speculates that the Hopkins-Eddy relationship embodied the second and third stages in the process of spiritual transformation where Hopkins moved through Christian Science and “graduated” to a higher spiritual level.

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.

Grekel’s stated goal for her trilogy on Mary Baker Eddy is to learn her holy history. She opens the first biography with the Matthew and Luke Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth, demonstrating parallels between Jesus and young Mary Baker. Thoreau plays the role of John the Baptist. Examples of comparisons with Jesus are intended as evidence of Eddy’s holiness.

Alan Young, a successful 20th century actor in television and movies, was invited to bring his skill to help the Mother Church. But he became disillusioned with his direct experience working with the Boards of Directors in the late 1960s and early 1970s and tells his personal story, because he thinks his story exemplifies what happened to other skilled professionals.

​​Keyston claims that no one since Christ Jesus has accomplished a fragment of what Mary Baker Eddy did. He identifies Eddy’s healing work with biblical references, indicating his belief in her fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Keyston draws a direct parallel between Jesus and Eddy, establishing her as the human appearing of the Scriptural prophecies concerning the Daughter of Zion.

Simmons’s chapter on Christian Science in the context of America’s 20th-century religious culture begins with an acknowledgment of Mary Baker Eddy’s “insight into a primary religious impulse of her time”–a time of social upheaval and challenge to the biblically oriented self-understanding of America’s destiny.

Because Emma Curtis Hopkins identified herself as an independent Christian Scientist, her successful establishment of her own religious following provides a valuable comparison with Eddy’s Christian Science.  Although Hopkins’s theological teaching was quite similar to Mary Baker Eddy’s, Hopkins emphasized some aspects of it—such as her larger implications of God’s identity as Mother—while still operating within ecclesiastical Christianity.

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.

Wright speaks against the Christian Science Board of Directors who tried to preserve the copyright control of Science and Health after the copyright expiration. By failing to terminate the five-member Christian Science Board of Directors (as she interprets the estoppel clauses from the Church Manual), the Board has stifled the freedom of Christian Scientists to be instructed by Science.

In the book’s part one, Brown argues that after Eddy’s death, the “Boston hierarchy [failed] to comply with the Church Manual’s divinely inspired estoppel clauses.” Part two  is a response to the “need to evaluate … the position of Mary Baker Eddy and her great lifework in both Biblical prophecy and world history.” This part also includes histories of the “emerging remnants” excommunicated from the Church.

Welz, Carl J. The Caring Church: Call for a Humane Christianity. Santa Rosa, CA: Meadow Brook Company, 1985. Welz, a former Christian Science teacher and editor of Church periodicals, asks why his Church has not experienced much progress or many healings in the past fifty years. He finds the answer in his own journey from an intellectual abstract approach to Mary Baker Eddy’s writings to a realigned focus on the humanity and good deeds found.

This book collects the writings and addresses of de Lange, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher active in the movement from 1911 to 1955 when he was removed from office. The collection is mainly inspirational, but also includes his “State of the Christian Science Movement” where he excoriates the Christian Science Board of Directors as too powerful, hierarchical and interfering in local branch church self-government.

Wright, a former Christian Science practitioner, compiled notes from her weekly seminars over a period of twenty years. Like other independent Christian Scientists who love Christian Science, she conceives it differently from the sanctioned teachings of the Church. Wright challenged contemporary Christian Scientists to reevaluate Christian Science based on her higher understanding of Mary Baker Eddy in biblical prophecy.

Beals writes, “This book is a factual account of my experiences with the Kerry Letters from 1975 through 1977 when I was in Boston helping his one-man crusade to revive the Christian Science Church.” Kerry’s primary concerns were the state of the Church finances, its authoritarian style of government, and immorality (usually identified as homosexuality).

Smith and Wilson, the authors of the ‘Paul Revere’ publications, circulated their materials in the second quarter of the 20th century. Contrary to harsh opposition from those not of the faith who sought to destroy the Church, Paul Revere’s strong critique sought to save the Church from its own undoing. Smith and Wilson were dropped from Church membership in 1950.

Laird outlines her shifting relationship to Christian Science, beginning with her mother’s healing, through to her role as an authorized teacher of Christian Science, to leaving the Church and ‘re-exploring’ the Science of Christian Science. This journey led her beyond the Bible and Christian theology to take the path of Science alone.

Moore had been a registered Christian Science healing practitioner for many years, but she strove to place herself on a ‘bridge’—or a kind of peaceful integration with matter and mind, a position inconsistent with Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings. Her personal wrestling culminates in this book, which resulted in her excommunication from The Mother Church and her local branch church.