Review: A New Christian Identity: Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture, by Amy B. Voorhees

Abstract

As an archivist who focuses on the history of the Christian Science religion and its founder, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), I am always delighted to see new books on these frequently misunderstood subjects. Award-winning scholar Amy Voorhees has produced a fine discussion of both in A New Christian Identity.I recommend the book, with a few caveats, to anyone interested in learning about Eddy and how she and her church evolved in the United States of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a fairly short book, not intended as either a full-length biography or history. It is crammed with information about Eddy and her accomplishments. While this results in passages where the prose is a bit dense (and intense), Voorhees lightens up as the work proceeds, resulting in a pretty good read.The author is focused on Eddy’s major work, her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Voorhees explains that her goal is to provide “historical context for aspects of [Science and Health’s] development as her religion coalesced around it and the Bible in North America” (xi). Indeed, Voorhees is selective in covering particular aspects of Eddy, her book, and her church. While I do not agree with all her choices, her motivation does not strike me as rooted in partiality. The general approach is sympathetic, but it is not biased.Does Voorhees give the promised “historical context”? A study of a few hundred pages does not allow for a lot of detail on the many and varied Christian (and non-Christian) activities in the Boston (and New England) of Eddy’s day. There, Congregationalists, Baptists, Unitarians, Episcopalians, Catholics, Theosophists, Spiritualists, and others held sway, building and growing lively congregations. What a remarkable place for Christian Science to be born, and to thrive! The vast historical context presents the author with a dilemma. While one cannot ignore the New England influences on Eddy, by the mid-1880s Christian Science was expanding rapidly throughout the United States, and within another decade would begin to grow in Europe.Voorhees has chosen not to focus on one of the most interesting aspects of Eddy’s career as a religious leader: her work as pastor/preacher of her church during its early days (late 1870s to 1880s). Eddy at this time was mainly living in Boston, regularly preaching at services, and definitely interacting with both friendly and hostile pastors in the area. As a woman and as the founder of a church that many viewed as unchristian and blasphemous, she became a local, and national, celebrity. Voorhees’ focus, rather, is on the culture from which Christian Science and its followers emerged.My primary caution with this book is that in the need to summarize and condense a mass of information, some omissions and factual errors have occurred. For example, Voorhees’ brief reference to “the prolific Israel Pickens” (180) appears to assume that he was a convert to Christian Science from Judaism, but he was not. Pickens, a Christian Science practitioner and teacher in Mobile, Alabama, was a Southerner and a former Episcopalian. He may, in fact, be a better example of upper-class whites who were attracted to Christian Science in the first decades of the twentieth century.The book concludes with a brief essay titled “Christian Science Identity.” It is a lively and fascinating summary of the book, bringing in tantalizing mentions of various notables and scholars who have written about Eddy and Christian Science. It is a stirring conclusion and I recommend reading it as both an introduction and conclusion.One engaging feature of this book is the very Victorian-sounding abstracts that head every chapter. They are both witty and informative. For Chapter Twelve, “Holy and Unholy Challenges: Divine Healing and Theosophy (1886–1890),” we read:In which divine healers and Christian Scientists share some views and also elbow one another over actual or perceived differences; in which Eddy’s Christian commitments and the esoteric convictions of Theosophists mutually repel one another; in which emergent New Thought accommodates the theosophically inflected eclectic healing views neither Christian Science nor divine healing can absorb; and in which the leading public perception of Christian Science as an unorthodox Christianity continues to morph into multiple conflicting definitions by decade’s end (139).Happily, it seems clear that the author plans to pursue further investigations into the cultural influences on Christian Science and the clashes that Eddy, her book, and her followers had with Victorian America. I look forward to reading them.A New Christian Identity will captivate, surprise, and inform anyone interested in American religious history, women in religion, and New Thought.