A New Christian Identity

Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture

Amy B. Voorhees

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469662367
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In this study of Christian Science and the culture in which it arose, Amy B. Voorhees emphasizes Mary Baker Eddy's foundational religious text, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Assessing the experiences of everyday adherents after Science and Health 's appearance in 1875, Voorhees shows how Christian Science developed a dialogue with both mainstream and alternative Christian theologies. Viewing God's benevolent allness as able to heal human afflictions through prayer, Christian Science emerged as an anti-mesmeric, restorationist form of Christianity that interpreted the Bible and approached emerging modern medicine on its own terms. Voorhees traces a surprising story of religious origins, cultural conversations, and controversies. She contextualizes Christian Science within a wide swath of cultural and religious movements, showing how Eddy and her followers interacted regularly with Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Catholics, Jews, New Thought adherents, agnostics, and Theosophists. Influences flowed in both directions, but Voorhees argues that Christian Science was distinct not only organizationally, as scholars have long viewed it, but also theologically, a singular expression of Christianity engaging modernity with an innovative, healing rationale.

PART I

Origins

(1821–1866)

CHAPTER ONE

Youth

(1821–1844)

In which Eddy is a Congregationalist of decisive antislavery persuasion and a neuralgic having a regionally normative upbringing and a decent if irregular education

IT MAKES SENSE THAT Mark Baker would buy a stereotyped edition of the Bible. Introduced to America in 1812, stereotyping reduced costs and errors in printing, sure to appeal to his Yankee frugality, Calvinist bent toward scriptural exactitude, and yeoman’s affinity for pragmatic invention.¹ The 1828 tome now sits at a museum in dust-free, airless repose, but scuffs and page wear recall how Mark put it to work at the saltbox farmhouse in Bow, New Hampshire, he shared with Abigail Ambrose Baker and their six children. He used it in lengthy, sometimes interminable family worship and animated, stubborn debates with local divines.

Abigail and her husband’s mother, Mary Ann, used it for personal guidance and family education. Like most of their neighbors, the household’s children learned recitation and reading from this and earlier family Bibles. The youngest of them, Mary Morse Baker, would later become the religious leader known as Mary Baker Eddy.

The outlook of most antebellum New England farming families was straightforward yet complex, folksy yet literate, both provincial and global, with dry and subtly sarcastic humor. An 1837 issue of the popular Yankee Farmer (later New England Farmer) illustrates their culture. News about beet sugar preceded items from Niger, Liverpool, Ohio, Boston, Mexico, and Georgetown. A story set in Glasgow needed no introduction; readers knew Scotland’s geography and culture. Poetic verse was requisite and ample. Morality sketches meant to illustrate the ideal farmer and his wife (smart and attentive, respectively) coexisted with congressional voting reports, political analysis, and ads for feathers, spoons, mulberry bushes, and cast iron plows.

The clever humor came with a straight face and a wink: “A dog in Boston having been taught some lessons on the harp, was found alone one morning practicing by himself”—a rural dig at city folk and their presumed superiority. An especially popular joke ran, “A boy having been praised for his quickness of reply, a gentleman observed, ‘When children are so keen in their youth, they are generally stupid when they advance in years.’ ‘What a very sensible boy you must have been, sir,’ replied the child.” This type of politely irreverent humor would pop up in Mary Baker Eddy’s letters and memoirs for the rest of her life, speaking to the value system that shaped her.²

Like most families around them, the Bakers were intellectual but not erudite, comfortable but not wealthy, civically engaged as a matter of course. Mark filled a series of elected and appointed civic positions in addition to farming (such as selectman, school board member, town meeting moderator, town counsel, road surveyor, militia chaplain, almshouse agent, Sunday school superintendent, and church clerk—literally part of citizenry until 1819, when New Hampshire voted to end taxation funding Congregational churches).

Abigail kept the family’s preindustrial domestic life running. Artifacts from their home give a window into daily activities: Abigail’s spinning wheel, Mark’s ledger detailing over 500 business transactions (some savvy, some charitable, some neither), hair curlers Mary and her two sisters used, a shaving mirror for their father and three brothers, a candle mold, an oil lamp. Mary’s needlepoint sampler looked like hundreds of others from her era.³ The New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, of Jacksonian Democrat persuasion, often lay on the table. Most in their region read it avidly.

Notwithstanding the occasional “village atheists,” religious questions were the overriding concern in the Bakers’ community.⁴ Mark was a Calvinist of the most stalwart and inflexible variety then possible. He railed against universal salvation and loved his children with a fierce loyalty that included rigid correction for the good of their souls. In contrast, Abigail’s Calvinism brimmed with affection, sobered by requisite thoughts of creation’s fallen state.⁵

Her letters show her especially endeared to her youngest, Mary, whose religious tendencies aligned with her mother’s and sometimes clashed with her father’s. The Bakers moved to nearby Sanbornton Bridge (later Tilton) in 1836, and in 1838 Mary’s parents transferred their church membership to the Sanbornton Congregational Church (Trinitarian).

Records at the back of a church manual show that Mary joined by profession at the same time, meaning the minister and church examined her claim to salvation before admitting her.⁶ She would remain a member for thirty-seven years, until 1875, when she was approaching her midfifties. This was a lifetime in the nineteenth century. Understanding Mary’s long-term Congregational church experience, locally and denominationally, is key to understanding her developing religious sensibilities.

Mary’s first and most influential pastor, Enoch Corser, was known as a “Boanerges of the New Hampshire pulpit” and successful revivalist.⁷ He was considered blunt, sincere, and “firm in the Calvinistic view of doctrines of the Gospel,” though his strict successor deemed him not quite enough of a disciplinarian. Corser preached in the traditional New England manner from summary headings in an outline, beginning “to extemporize, rising, by degrees” to a state of “eloquence and deep pathos,” his audience listening “in breathless silence.”⁸

The room itself was rarely silent, though, as Corser possessed not only a thunderous voice but “tremendous muscle, which he often used on the desk and Bible in moments of intense fervor.”⁹ Orderly sermonizing delivered with deep feeling, considered neither too restrained nor extra emotional, was the standard. It captured hours of Mary’s attention. She later wrote that Corser and the church welcomed her along with her objection to the doctrine of predestination that would have doomed her siblings, none of whom had professed salvation.¹⁰ So many Protestants of her generation registered similar objections that this stance would become a defining marker of Protestant belief by midcentury.

Like many rural churches, the Sanbornton church was evangelical with a tradition of interdenominational exchange, mostly out of necessity. Baptists and Methodists shared the meeting space before the Congregationalists built a church of their own. So did the pacifist, dress-reforming, faith-healing Osgoodite sect from nearby Warner, a few years before the Bakers joined. The Reverend Liba Conant, who led meetings while the Bakers were making their membership decision, presided over revivals characterized by “prayer, earnest, ardent and agonizing” in their sincerity. His Sunday school pupils memorized “hundreds” of scripture verses, a common regional and denominational practice. Ministers were chronically undercompensated, and the families they served had constant pastoral needs. Conant found his duties “sufficient to crush an angel,” were it not for the sustaining prayers of the congregation.¹¹

Notably for Eddy’s later career, Conant’s ministry oversaw an important national shift toward the temperance movement. At his ordination ceremony, copious consumption of liquors had preceded marching “to the music of the fife and drum, to the place of examination, and back in the same order” to get “liquored up again, before supper.” Ministerial examining committees were considered remiss without this practice, which was repeated a few days in a row.¹²

In 1828, however, the year Mary turned seven, the temperance movement created a divisive stir in the region. Revelers taunted teetotalers with rum, declaring they would “sprinkle” it on them in baptismal fashion, and lit gunpowder at their feet. Increasing numbers nevertheless pledged to forgo “spirituous liquors,” and in 1833, the Sanbornton church’s officer of discipline published a resolution to exclude or censure any member who “traffics in, or manufactures ardent spirits.”¹³ The same year, a few states to the west, Joseph Smith codified temperance for Mormons in his Doctrine and Covenants. Mary Baker Eddy would later become the only other American religious founder to invoke this standard for adherents, though she would describe it in her church’s textbook rather than its rulebook.

Temperance was a messy, contested, hard-won moral stance as Mary Baker began to seriously weigh the state of her soul. When she joined the Sanbornton church, choosing the influence of the Holy Spirit over liquid spirits was not a formality but a raggedly new and vital act. Individual conviction, rather than rote rule-following, was key. A speech on temperance from the 1830s by Mary’s brother Albert can be taken as representative of the general regional and family position.

Albert argued that it would cheapen the cause to “strip it of its moral aspects wholly and make of it a mere political question by carrying [it] to the Ballot Box and to the Halls of Legislation, and identifying it with every possible enterprise and transaction.” Though a lawyer himself, he found law intrinsically powerless to give people “an abiding interest for a moral cause.”¹⁴ Legislating aspects of human behavior was sometimes an unavoidable practicality, he argued, but it ran serious risks: rote compliance, reversal, backlash. Better to first work with reason, religion, and conscience to win people over. This democratic stance, especially characteristic of New Hampshire, equated caution in legal regulation with the gradual and sure establishment of democracy through moral conscience.

Congregational churches in New Hampshire extended this logic to antislavery as well in the 1830s, when gradualist antislavery views trumped the immediacy of abolition. Increased radicalization took over from the 1840s onward. Congregationalist antislavery was not without robust conflict, which should not be minimized. It is not a neat or tidy story. Yet while reading through hundreds of issues of The Congregationalist from 1830 to 1860, as well as several issues of the dozens of lesser-known Congregationalist periodicals and archival letters among lay adherents, I found myself surprised at how thoroughly these sources expressed antislavery sentiment.

Biographers have debated the extent of Mary’s early antislavery views, often assuming her family’s democratic orientation precluded clear commitments in this direction. This debate is apropos of her postwar authorship, which engaged abolitionist tropes in treatises of spiritual freedom. The spiritual politics of her early church, however, provide essential context for understanding how Jacksonianism consistently and increasingly yielded to Congregationalism on this matter throughout the region, including within her own congregation.

It was “the imperative duty of Christians to make slavery a subject of prayer, inquiry and discussion,” New Hampshire Congregationalists voted in 1834, “with a view to its cessation at the earliest possible period.”¹⁵ Churches celebrated antislavery leaders, but the ideal at first was to end enslavement as prayerfully and quickly as possible without undermining progress through intemperate radicalism that (this view held) risked deepening national divisions.

Among the few early “radical agitators” in New Hampshire, one was reportedly thrown out of a church and at least one arrested. Jacksonians considered abolitionism a threat to the Union; Congregationalists simultaneously thought it divisive enough to weaken or delay the desired goal of antislavery legislation and, by extension, the sinless state of the coming millennium.¹⁶

From the 1830s to the 1850s, this latter line of reasoning predominated almost exclusively and without variation in Congregationalist periodicals circulating in Mary’s home state. Several carried items by her family’s pastors and acquaintances. These published fervently and increasingly persuasive antislavery features and lecture reports. A typical newspaper acknowledged in 1836 that dissolution of the Union was the most awful thing to contemplate for some, yet “the hosts of heaven are not indifferent” to slavery, and neither should be the church.¹⁷

A minister of Jesus in New Hampshire should not attempt to “throw the garments of an angel over and around such a monster as slavery.”¹⁸ Even those who struggled with the intellectual questions involved in the politics of freeing the enslaved, and who might note that at one time enslavement may have had a place in the Bible, must have a feeling that “slavery is a dreadful wrong—a withering and tormenting curse to the human family,” and the moral heart must condemn it.¹⁹

When a congregation in Keene, southwest of Concord, hosted an antislavery talk in 1837 featuring a formerly enslaved man named Girly (possibly a feminized name created by enslavers, a name he chose, or a surname akin to Gurlie or Gurley), a European American attendant filled a letter to his sister with Girly’s biblical rhetoric, finding it critically brilliant. The talk’s high drama was justified, he concluded, as “the evils of slavery could not be told” otherwise.²⁰ In 1841, New Hampshire Congregationalists renounced the Southern Presbyterian Church over its endorsement of slavery. An 1843 church gathering in Manchester declared the practice a “heinous sin,” while a minister declared it “intolerable” for slaveholders to “hold the image of God as a chattel.”²¹

During the 1850s, antislavery was no longer enough, and abolitionism became the norm as New Hampshire Congregationalists radicalized even more, leaving behind their earlier “moral suasion” stance. In 1854, a cadre of ministers exercised their heritage as “protest-ants” (as they put it) by signing an abolitionist petition. One explained tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• A Restoration Story and a New History
• Part I. Origins
• Part II. Text
• Part III. Revision
• Part IV. Pastor
• Christian Science Identity
• Appendix: Major Copyrighted Editions and Content Revisions of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index