Why Christian Science is Making a Comeback
Sapped by doomscrolling and dating apps, more Gen Z are discovering the spiritual healing Jesus taught to everyday people
The Accidental Christian Scientist
In 1930, Christian Science was the fastest growing religion in America, with 300,000 global members.
Sixty-four years earlier, it enrolled its first member… by accident.
On a frigid February day in Lynn, MA in 1866, a 45-year-old woman named Mary, on a stroll with friends, slipped on some ice and was knocked unconscious.1
Whisked into a kitchen onto a cot near a warm stove in critical condition, a visiting doctor gave his diagnosis: fractured spine and “serious internal injuries.” He doubted she’d ever recover.
On a third day of no improvement, turning to her Bible, Mary became deeply inspired by a healing in Matthew 9 when Jesus commands a paralytic to rise from his bed and go home. In a moment of profound spiritual insight, she suddenly found herself able to stand and walk across the room unaided.
Over the next three years, with Scripture as her sole teacher, she worked to put on paper what she knew with “scientific certainty” after her accident and recovery: That “Whatsoever God doeth, shall be for ever.”
There was clearly a law or science of healing based on Scripture and Eddy was convinced it could be practiced by anyone. She tested it by healing others and soon began teaching it.
A Christian to her core, Eddy fully expected the Christian church to adopt the lost element of healing as an integral part of its activity, but they rejected her, calling it blasphemy. So she gave it to the world herself, becoming the first person to make the healing established in Scripture both understandable and applicable for the modern believer.
Bearing the weight of an entire movement on her shoulders, Mary Baker Eddy wasn’t perfect, but one thing would always hold perfection: God’s healing laws for all mankind she discovered and named Christian Science.
Now, nearly 160 years later, in a far gone world seemingly sinking in a malaise of materialism and chaos, “honest seekers for truth” are being called again to restore The Science of Christ.
A Long Misunderstood Movement
In 1907, Human Life Magazine declared 86-year-old Eddy “the most famous, interesting, and powerful woman in America, if not the world.” She could barely go on an evening stroll without a reporter popping up trying to extract another detail they might use against her.
She was so unbothered and even amused by the media that she once healed an obnoxious reporter over the phone of throat cancer.2
Though routinely beaten down by the press — “they say what I’m not, and hide what I am” — she was uplifted by the cultural influencers of the day: people like Einstein, Twain, and American Red Cross founder Clara Barton understood her mission and held her in high regard.
Even so, after membership reached its zenith in 1930 two decades after Eddy’s passing, it began a gradual decline. There were two main reasons:
Generations of powerful men (threatened by a powerful woman telling the truth) working to slander her out of public record.
Mankind’s increasing reliance on drugs and materialism.
Though Eddy’s detractors in the media raked her through the coals personally, most stopped short of denying the efficacy of her groundbreaking discoveries. The Science of Christ worked, evidenced by the thousands of documented healings pouring in from around the world, not to mention her own successful practice that healed everything from depression, to broken limbs, to cancer.
Many turned to Science as a last resort when no other medical method worked. And after being healed, noting their affliction never returned and that they were exalted morally in the process, initial skeptics became instant converts.
You know something is true when they try to erase it from ever existing.
The growing number of sufferers choosing Science over traditional medicine was a threat to the establishment, who banded together to try and snuff out the movement. All they could do was slow it.
Christian Science In Its Heyday
At its height of favorability, Christian Science was not only practiced in average homes but across a motley mix of art and pop culture in America.
Not only admired by humanitarians like Clara Barton — “I look upon Christian Science as the most ideally beautiful yet the most practical and comforting of beliefs” — it was embraced by movie stars like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Robert Duvall.
Its unlikely support from Twain and Einstein gave it added gravitas with an inquisitive public.
Ever the showman, Twain delighted in hurling risible insults at Eddy in front of the press, but in his private quarters he couldn’t hide his sentimental side: “She is the benefactor of the age,” he once wrote, and: “It is thirteen-hundred years since the world has produced anyone who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy’s waist belt.” In his book Christian Science he conceded her discovery was divine revelation — a shocking admission from earth’s most famous cynic.
Einstein was so awed by Eddy’s discoveries that he told his friend Mary Spaulding: “To think, a woman knew this 80 years ago.” He said, “Christian Science is beyond this generation’s understanding,” and “It is a science that can be proven.”
You also had literary heavyweights like JD Salinger, Horton Foote, and Ernest Hemingway — whose mother practiced it — along with Muppets creator Jim Henson, first American in space Alan Shepard, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, film director Zack Snyder, and chief designer at Tesla, Franz von Holzhausen.
The mother of comedian Robin Williams was a Christian Scientist, who Robin often referred to as a “Christian Dior Scientist.”
Both Twain’s daughter Clara and Einstein’s son Hans became Christian Scientists, influenced by their fathers’ considerable immersion in Eddy’s book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
There was also a fascinating Black Christian Science movement led by Marietta T. Webb at the turn of the 20th-century, drawing in many prominent jazz artists of the day. Actor Alfre Woodard has practiced it for years.
The Science of Christ was never a fad because it worked — it only needed a capable modern communicator to make it understandable to the public.
The world was full of fundamentalists interpreting the Bible materially: what was needed was someone to interpret it spiritually. The latter was the only way to teach the average seeker how to heal like Jesus did.
Eddy understood the proof was everything. Science without demonstration was worthless. “Demonstration is the whole of Christian Science,” she once wrote to a friend. “Nothing else will save it.”
The Cheat Code
Mental health of young people today is in a more tenuous state than it was for me growing up in the 80s — at least when I feel submerged in a world of materialism and diminishing human connection I can invoke the two glorious decades I was alive before the internet did a page-one rewrite on humanity.
This nostalgic escape is my cheat code when I need it.
At least humanly speaking, Gen Z has no cheat code — their memories exist within the confines of an already flung open Pandora’s Box. They can watch videos and their parents can try and describe it, but they can never know what it feels like to wake up in a world with no impulse to grab a device.
Spiritually speaking, though — the only real path to discovering true identity — every age has access to the secret magical master cheat code: the awareness we are governed not by minds, but by MIND.
The Good News
It feels like two things are in the works right now, at least in this country: belief in God on the rise, and family values returning to mainstream culture.
A few other promising signs setting the stage:
Many young people are tired of dating apps3 and many are turning online for spiritual guidance.4
Doctors/former doctors are stepping into the limelight to argue the efficacy of Christianity and spiritual healing: former eye surgeon Ming Wang5, Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor6, and Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander7, to name three.
Korean millennial YoungHoon Kim, considered the “smartest person in the world” with a 276 IQ8, is a Christian. “My intelligence is not for me,” he said in a video. “It is a sign from God; a gift to testify to His Truth.” Kim speaks about how our thoughts alter our physical reality, a truth Jesus demonstrated in the 1st-century and Eddy restored in the 19th.
More math scholars are asking this question: If the rules and concepts of math weren’t invented by humans — in other words, they had to be discovered — then in whose mind do they exist? Many have concluded there’s no other explanation than an immaterial Mind, aka God.910
Virtually every major NFL quarterback is a proud and public believer.
It’s all helping spark a spiritual revolution with younger generations seeking deeper purpose in the unseen.
Science On The Precipice
You know society has regressed spiritually when a way of life that restores health and purifies consciousness is forced to make its comeback.
But there’s a reason the religion with the most extensive public record of healing is resurfacing: people want to see healing without drugs or materia medica, that is to say, they want to heal like Jesus did, because, unlike material methods, spiritual healing is permanent, because it follows the Laws of God.
The mental health crisis in this country would steadily dissolve if more embraced Christ Science, because the closer you get to Christ, that is to say, the more you understand you already have the Mind of Christ (“Before Abraham was, I AM”), the more you understand that the truth of your origin — your Christ identity — PRECEDED your personal problems.
The Allness Of God
“God is everywhere,” Mrs. Eddy writes, “and nothing apart from Him is present or has power. Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through Christian Science, and attributes all power to God.”
The Science of Christianity brings to man the awareness of the Allness of God, meaning, God governs all living things, all right thinking, all right action, and everything good and true in the world, rendering all else — all error, matter, and evil — illusions with no basis or power. The simple awareness of these spiritual facts lifts us above doldrums, quiets chaos, and elevates Christ-consciousness.
If the promise in Scripture that God created us in his image and likeness is rooted in spiritual fact, then we aren’t defined by our brains, our blood, our bones, our emotions, our personalities, or our human achievements; our true identities are divine ideas (“names written in heaven”) that can never be destroyed by any other seeming power.
Whether society progresses or regresses rests not with “general human effort” but with each person’s intrepid readiness to confront and correct their own mortal minds to reflect the One, Unchangeable Divine Mind — all this is only achieved through dedicated study of Christian Science.
When aware even for a single moment that our very consciousness is GOD, and that in the Science of Jesus one trusts in good more than one fears evil — and in working in consistent pursuit of this state of being — we are each doing our part to nudge humanity in the right direction.
“Some people yield slowly to the touch of Truth. Few yield without a struggle, and many are reluctant to acknowledge that they have yielded; but unless this admission is made, evil will boast itself above good. The Christian Scientist has enlisted to lessen evil, disease, and death; and he will overcome them by understanding their nothingness and the allness of God, or good.” Mary Baker Eddy
https://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/project/fervent-hearts-willing-hands/
https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Years-Mary-Baker-Twentieth-Century/dp/0875103111 — page 64
https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-app-fatigue/
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/11/gen-z-is-turning-online-for-spiritual-guidance/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/may/28/dr-ming-wang-went-from-chinese-atheist-to-christia/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Egnor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_Heaven
https://vocal.media/history/dr-young-hoon-kim-wikipedia-highest-iq-276-record-holder