It was 1976 when I found out about Christian Science, a religion I soon adopted and practiced for over thirty years. I did much, much more than "sign up," I studied it deeply, thought about it deeply and jumped on the escalator of prestige within the CS community: I became a "practitioner" of its healing method, a public lecturer on the subject, and an authorized teacher of its doctrine, method and metaphysics. I eventually wound up at the headquarters of the movement, in Boston at the "Mother Church." I was brought on as one of the developers of a new website, spirituality.com, and became its Senior Editor for the last five years of my identity as a Christian Scientist. For over 25 years, the Church's various publications published around 150 articles of mine that explained and defended the religion. Prior to moving to Boston I was a defendant in one of the more notorious and protracted legal cases in the Church's 100-year history, concerning the death of an eleven-year old boy whom I had been hired to heal with CS.
The above should blunt the usual charges against critics, that they’re lightweight, inexperienced and misinformed. I also have no animosity toward the Church, and, with few exceptions, still have a high regard for the sincerity, humility and good intentions of the Christian Scientists with whom I have associated for over thirty years. As a deep and thorough student of the literature – including the Bible, several biographies of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of the religion) and historical accounts – and as an experienced defender of criticism of the religion, I know exactly what I eventually rejected, and why. I have been more or less silent about my experiences the past couple of years, preferring to establish myself in a new life while lying low against attacks on me personally as some kind of traitor, and free from the tyranny of the absurd worldview I had adopted, practiced and promoted.
One of the claims that could be made against me is that I had not grown up as a Christian Scientist, having come into it in my mid-thirties, and therefore had not witnessed its power and practicality while an impressionable youth. This is true, and I have found that among most of the people with whom I became friends, the "lifers" were the ones most unable to forgo its teachings, even when life experiences posed serious challenges to the sanity of their convictions. (To me this is one of the most persuasive arguments against religious training and upbringing of children. I agree with
Daniel Dennett that children should be taught about the varieties of religious theories that abound in the world, but not identified with and indoctrinated into the religion of their parents.) The effect on these holdouts is to create a form of schizophrenia, where they live one life but proclaim another, with rationales for the ensuing cognitive dissonance.
Which brings me to the reason for this post, a kind of "outing," of myself as an apostate. The Washington Post's
"On Faith" website has published several accounts by Christian Scientists explaining and defending their adherence to the faith. As is common in online articles there is the option to add comments to articles. A recent comment struck me as the most eloquent and correct refutation of Christian Science I had ever seen. It made me exclaim: I wish I'd written that! It is so well done that I include the full text of it here, along with a
link to it for as long as it will be available. The writer is identified only as "Mike." Mike is a 'lifer," having been raised as a Christian Scientist, and is living proof that even deeply indoctrinated persons can break free of its spell and not go crazy in the process. More power to him and to others, particularly boomers, who are concerned that their good luck behind the wall of denial is running out.
As someone who was raised in Christian Science, and survived, I want people to know exactly what kind of religion it is.
While Christian Scientists are genuinely kind and well-intentioned, the worldview they choose to embrace can and does do great harm.
That worldview is this: that what we think of as reality simply isn't real. Because in this reality, people get sick, have problems, and so on. If God is all good and all powerful, they say, how could he permit disease to exist?
The answer is that he cannot and does not. Instead, the only reason such bad things exist in the world is because we humans mistakenly *believe* they exist. Once we eliminate this belief in ourselves (called "error" or "mortal mind" in Christian Science), the appearance of disease or discord simply disappears. This is the method of Christian Science "healing" in a nutshell.
For example, I never had a cold as a child. Not once. I had the *belief* of a cold many times, sometimes even the "claim" of a cold, but becuase there's no sickness in God's kingdom, I never had a real, actual cold, because colds simply aren't real.
This way of thinking is so simplistic that it raises hopes of healing, and when healing doesn't happen, you have practitioners like the person profiled here saying, "Well, Christian Science is very complex." Yet if you read the church's publications, you'd think that "knowing the Truth," as Christian Scientists put it, is as easy as falling off a log, and as reliable as a Japanese car.
And what the Christian Scientists call "healings" -- when they do happen -- can almost always be attributed to the body's ability to heal itself. Think of it -- we haven't had modern medicine for very long, maybe just around 100 years, and before then doctors were pretty much quacks. This is why Christian Science proved so popular at first when it debuted shortly after the Civil War.
So if you don't have competent medical treatment, you basically suffer through things until they pass (or *you* pass!). And a lot of the so-called healings I've read about or been told that I experienced are nothing more than that.
Christian Scientists will point to the testimonies of healing in their publications, but the church's guidelines for publishing them do not demand any sort of verification. Other Christian Scientists who have witnessed the "healing" (and who are predisposed to believe the religion's worldview anyway) are certainly accepted as witnesses, but in the absence of those, a person who can vouch for the testifier's character suffices as "verification" of the "healing." Hardly rigorous or objective, certainly not enough to merit the word "testimony."
Christian Scientists will also point out that they are not *required* to rely on Christian Science for healing, and that is technically true according to the church Manual (kind of like the church's constitution).
However, the real-life social pressures to reject medicine is so strong as to be nearly irresistible. Contempt for medical science runs through every aspect of Christian Science teaching. Just open to any random page of Science and Health, the Christian Scientists' companion text to the Bible, to see Mary Baker Eddy's attacks on medicine as false and ineffective.
So the social pressure is great indeed. If, for example, Mr. Davis from this article chose to rely on medicine to treat an illness, his status as a practitioner (a prestigious status in the church) might be jeopardized. And if he were a church officer in his local branch church, he would almost certainly be asked to step down from his position (though his basic church membership would not be affected).
I could obviously go on forever about this. As someone raised in the religion by a very devout family, I know how well-meaning and how wrong Christian Scientists can be. I'm glad I survived the experience. But I reject their insistence that the world we perceive isn't real, that there's something better. The world *is* real, with all its imperfections and problems. Christian Scientists don't like imperfections or problems, and simply try to pray them away, convinced they're not real. I embrace the imperfections and the problems, because they *are* real. But so am I. So are we all. And our power lies not in our ability to deny them, but to fix them, one by one, together.
