Christian Science Church Founded

In 1879, Mary Baker Eddy and a small group of followers received a charter in Massachusetts for the Church of Christ, Scientist, an institution devoted to what she called "primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing." The church grew into one of the most distinctive religious movements to emerge in nineteenth-century America. It also became a notable influence on public debates about faith, medicine, and the press.

Eddy was born in New Hampshire in 1821 and spent much of her early life in poor health. She lived in an era when medicine was often ineffective and sometimes harmful, and when Americans were exploring many new spiritual and healing movements, including Spiritualism, mesmerism, and the mind-cure ideas associated with Phineas Quimby, whom Eddy consulted. In 1866, after a serious fall, she reported a sudden recovery while reading an account of Jesus healing. She later described this as the moment she discovered the principles of Christian Science. Historians continue to debate how much she drew on contemporaries and how much was original, though she always insisted her insights came from the Bible.

Eddy set out her teachings in Science and Health in 1875, which later became Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. It argues that God is wholly good and that reality is fundamentally spiritual, so that sickness, sin, and death are errors of mortal belief that can be corrected through prayer and spiritual understanding. This view sets Christian Science apart from most Christian denominations, and from faith healing in the usual sense, since it presents healing as the result of understanding rather than a miracle or an appeal for divine intervention.

The church was chartered in Massachusetts in 1879 and established in Boston, and in 1892 it was reorganized as the First Church of Christ, Scientist, with the Mother Church there at its center. Eddy created a structure in which no individual sermons were preached. Instead, services relied on readings from the Bible and her book, and local congregations were led by elected Readers. In 1908 she founded the newspaper The Christian Science Monitor, which gained a reputation for serious international reporting and won several Pulitzer Prizes.

Christian Science grew rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, building churches and reading rooms across the United States and abroad. Its membership has declined substantially since its mid-twentieth-century peak, though exact current figures are not published by the church. Its legacy is also tied to controversy. Cases in which children died after being denied medical care led to legal disputes over religious exemptions and the limits of parental rights. Eddy died in 1910, but her church remains a significant example of American religious innovation.