Christian Science - Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy's life was neatly halved by the Civil War. Nondescript and aimless before 1866, her life became purposeful and powerful thereafter. Doubtlessly, the American cultural environment had a shaping influence on Eddy, but the founder of the Christian Science movement needed no particular milieu to solve what had become, by her middle age, an identity crisis of personal rather than national dimension. Very much like the founders of major Western faiths, her actions were not always consistent, her commitments not originally universal and the facts of her life far less intriguing than her perceived aura. It all adds up to a two-tiered existence.

It seemed a man's world where an insubstantial woman was dramatically overpowered by the decisive male. Mary Baker Eddy was impressed but not overwhelmed by this truth. She admired her father, she was thrice married and relied on male leadership within the Christian Science hierarchy, but she did make a subtle change in male-dominated faith during the creative phase of her spiritual life. If not precisely "mother," womanhood prevailed in Christian Science doctrine since the belief was founded on what was known as a maternal rather than a paternal principle.

Led by Congregationalist minister Washington Gladden of Columbus, Ohio, those in the middle were known as advocates of the Social Gospel. Like most clerics of the day, they were interested in individual movements -temperance, alcoholism, prostitution - but their rhetoric furthered the cause of general societal reform. In denying survival of the fittest and reinterpreting original sin to mean bad environment rather than bad genes, they leaned toward positions favoring labor unions, welfare legislation and government action. If this was an urban phenomenon, a middle-class revolt of the early twentieth century whose purpose was to relieve the tension of being squeezed by big business, big labor and immigrants, what was the position of Christian Science, whose vital years ( 1850-1910), were shaped by the Mary Baker Eddy vision?

Eddy's attitude toward these men and their philosophies was impersonal. What seemed to enthrall her were heroism, honor and the battle for an ideal. She spoke favorably of America's war with Mexico in 1846, not for the carnage but for the glory of triumph against an evil foe; she viewed the Civil War as a moral rather than a political struggle, pitting the force of darkness (the Confederacy) against the force of light (the Union). As a matriarch of Christian Science during the progressive period, war was still honorable, and she supported, at least verbally, the Caribbean and Latin American "Big Stick" policy of Theodore Roosevelt. Though she protested against the trinity of "imperialism, monopoly and a lax system of religion," she was a defender of William McKinley's foreign policy and the general policy of military preparedness.

Eddy's contribution to American reform must be understood in a different context. Indeed, historians would like to understand that the roots of this indigenous American Christian denomination somehow reflect the country's heritage and commitment. In some respects, they do, but only tenuously. Christian Scientists and Eddy biographer Robert Peel claim that the germ of Eddy's idea was transcendental, a natural outgrowth of that philosophy and 1830s religious revivals in New England villages. According to Raymond J. Cunningham, it is also possible to link Christian Science to pragmatism, since its credo heralded an age of optimism by defending individual worth against an entrenched order. Actually it is also possible that Christian Science is not antithetical to a pair of seemingly disparate movements, Social Darwinism and Progressivism; nor is it uncomfortable with post-Napoleonic Romanticism, first- and second-century Platonism or modern feminism. How can this be? Simply because Christian Science is the product not of social need, although it may have filled such a need in its maturity. As is the case with religions of Western civilization, personal quest preceded social fulfillment by at least a generation.