Polemic Literature and Responses

Due to the long-standing debate over Mary Baker Eddy’s use of morphine, the Mary Baker Eddy Library sought to resolve it in order to restore focus on Eddy’s larger record. Calvin Frye’s diaries had recorded several instances of Eddy’s use of morphine, but some claimed his diaries had been altered. A forensic analysis in 2021 concluded the diaries are reliable.

Reesman details many parallels between Mark Twain’s troubled later life and his one-dimensional literary portrayals of both Joan of Arc and Mary Baker Eddy. Both were visionaries. Joan’s voice in her trial record is consistent, but Eddy was delusional. Eddy uses her mentor, Quimby’s, words for her own profit. Both of Twain’s literary portrayals put his own personality on full display.

In response to the unrestrained muckraking attacks on Mary Baker Eddy, Yemma, a late 19th century journalist, decided to give serious consideration to the meaning of Mary Baker Eddy’s work and her contribution to human development. The 2016 Christian Science Journal brings Flower’s work to light today.

Squires sees the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library as an opportunity for literary scholars to give closer attention to the history, doctrines, and distinctions of Christian Science. Only then will there be an honest and accurate account for the literature that seeks to represent or critique them. 

This is the well-researched and definitive history of a major lawsuit (one of the biggest national news items in 1907) against Mary Baker Eddy. Ostensibly, this ‘Next Friends’ suit was to protect the interests of Mary Baker Eddy and her inheritance by way of arguing that Eddy was the helpless dupe of her male employees. Eddy eventually won the suit.

Squires’s research resolves the controversial claims to authorship of the 1907 polemic series in McClure’s, “The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.” Squires finds that Willa Cather never took ownership of it, but the multi-authorship makes the relationship among all contributors ambiguous. The work should be understood in the context of the raging public debates at the time.

The two paragraphs devoted to an explanation of Christian Science healing practices present a view solely from the perspective of medicine. The article argues that Christian Science practitioners cannot perform a number of ordinary medical procedures such as a diagnosis of illness. Butler expresses concern that those who are not healed might become depressed or conclude they are unworthy.

Greenhouse’s memoir is her sad story of her mother’s death from what might have been medically treatable cancer. Her parents practiced what might be called a ‘radical reliance’ form of Christian Science, the religion that Lucia admittedly never understood or adopted. Fearing “mental malpractice” (the teaching that negative thoughts of others can be harmful), her parents kept the illness a painful secret.

Christian Science is one of the eight religious communities examined because of their illustration of major sociological principles. Mary Baker Eddy is noted for having operated “outside the norms of what sociologists call expected gender role behavior.” The authors ask whether Eddy would rightly be considered charismatic and whether Christian Science would rightly be considered a ‘cult’ or ‘sect.’

Jenkins argues that the cult problem of today is the product of cultural and political work and that Christian Science, with associated mind-cure movements, has been the primary target of cult critics. He joins the attacks by asserting (falsely): “Most pernicious, Christian Science denied the Virgin Birth, the miracles of Christ, the Atonement, and the Resurrection.” (60)  

Fraser admits her delight in counting the Christian Science churches closing their doors. Her carefully researched and well-written story of her experience with Christian Science documents the reasons for her anger. She blames the Church for its promotion of a type of radical reliance on God’s power to heal that was impractical and caused unnecessary suffering.

Asser and Swan “evaluate deaths of children from families in which faith healing was practiced in lieu of medical care and to determine if such deaths were preventable.” They studied death records from 1975 through 1995, but dismissed published accounts of healed organic and functional diseases for children in Christian Science as “not [having] been confirmed by scientifically valid measures.”

Five years before the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library, Conkin noted that current literature on Christian Science was sharply divided in content and tone. His chapter attempted to bridge the gap. But the Christian Science Church presented more problems for historians of Christianity in America than any other denomination because its beliefs were elusive and its records were secret.

Tucker’s chapter on Christian Science is written in the context of a Protestant orthodox apologetic. Her resources include almost equal voices from Christian Science spokespersons and detractors, although her selection of topics is based on issues that matter most to her orthodox Christian perspective.

In Gottschalk’s interpretation of Mary Baker Eddy’s work, he claims that the question of evil can only be answered at the existential level of the demonstration of the sovereignty of God. He challenges both classical theodicy and process theology and argues that the status of evil as unchallengeable fact must again be brought into question.  

Johnsen’s 1980 overview of the multi-decade controversy over a forgery is a response to the enduring nature of the false accusations against Mary Baker Eddy as a plagiarist. Research leading to the discovery of forgery was not difficult, because handwriting experts quickly detected the astonishingly crude and obvious fraud that served as a basis for the accusations.

​​Forty years after publication, Silberger’s conclusions about Mary Baker Eddy appear to rest more on secondary polemical sources and his personal psychological theories than clinical justification. True, scholars had very little access to primary sources until the opening of the Mary Baker Eddy Library in 2002. Unfortunately for Silberger’s argument, the Church archives now discredit the validity of his sources.

Pickering, a professor of medicine for 30 years, looks at six eminent Victorians to explore the premise that their physical and psychological suffering helped generate their most productive and creative work. Relying on maily hostile sources, he reduces Eddy’s maladies to a diagnosis of hysteria and portrays Eddy as ruthless, selfish, and dishonest in never giving full credit for Christian Science to Phineas P. Quimby.

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.

For Martin, a cult is any group diverging from his interpretation of “the fundamental teachings of historical Christianity.” He classifies Christian Science as anti-Christian, justifying his stance by placing 26 orthodox fundamentalist doctrines side-by-side with quotations from Mary Baker Eddy’s writings which are often taken out of context.

Hoekema’s polemic sources for his study of Christian Science in the context of a cult exclude perspectives from the Christian Science Church. He compares Christian Science theology with his own Calvinist doctrines to prove the anti-Christian character of Christian Science. His claim that Mary Baker Eddy owes her ideas to Quimby is refuted in McNeil’s 2020 “A Story Untold.”

Barth is the only towering theologian who has engaged with Mary Baker Eddy’s theology, but his critique on Christian Science lacks depth. His sole reference to Christian Science is in a long footnote on his theological treatment of sickness. He claims Eddy did not understand Jesus’s death on the cross, whereas she emphasizes the efficacy and sacrifice of his actual crucifixion.

Nineteen years after the publication of Haushalter’s charges of Mary Baker Eddy’s plagiarism, Dr. Moehlman, a member of First Baptist Church of Rochester, NY, published this scholarly rebuttal to those charges. Moehlman, a professor of the history of Christianity, specialized in the study of literary forgeries and demonstrated how Haushalter’s employment of concordance cannot be substituted for scientific analysis of content.