Mary Baker Eddy, Sentimental Christianity, and Women’s Rhetorical Authority in the Christian Science Church

ABSTRACT

Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was one of the most famous religious figures of the late nineteenth century, eliciting harsh criticism even as she gained thousands of followers. The influence of sentimental Christianity has largely been ignored in work on her rhetoric, excluding her from the long tradition of female preaching in the nineteenth century. Rather than an outlier to this tradition, Eddy institutionalized sentimental Christianity in her new church with significant implications for women’s rhetorical authority. This paper ultimately argues that Eddy reconstituted the institutions that had defined the order of discourse of mid-century sentimental Christianity—building on them but likewise transforming them to suit her belief that matter was not real. It was this rejection of the pulpit and the masculine body that inhabited it that drew women from the churches of their childhood and validated their roles as advocates and leaders in the new denomination.

Notes

1. For Scientists, healing is not a miracle bestowed by God through a gifted medium as in Pentecostal tradition; instead, health is the true natural and spiritual order of the universe. See Gottschalk (1973, 27-34) for a fuller discussion of Eddy’s concept of revelation as discovery. For a broader discussion faith healing in the late nineteenth century outside of the Christian Science denomination, see Curtis (2007). For a more complete history of the variety of healing practices throughout the entire Christian tradition, see Porterfield (2005).

2. The biographical work on Eddy is substantial. Believer Robert Peel’s three volume Mary Baker Eddy remains the standard, but a handful of major biographies have been published recently. For biographies by Christian Scientists, see Nenneman (1997) and Gottschalk (2006). Biographies by non-believers are by Gill (1998) and Thomas (1994). For interesting, popular work on Eddy by her contemporaries, see Willa Cather and Georgine Milmine’s ((1909) 1993) The Life of Mary G. Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science and the four-volume series of recollections, We Knew Mary Baker Eddy (1943-1972), published by the Christian Science Publishing Society.

3. There are several useful articles and chapters that view Eddy’s work through the lens of sentimentalism since Parker’s early effort. Cynthia Schrager (1998), in her study on the concept of transpersonal subjectivity in Eddy and Twain’s writing, contends that she “constructs a generic liberal subject, gendered feminine, whose sentimental authority and autonomy she continually figures as at risk from a demonized, masculine other” (31). In her work on female embodiment in public spaces, Alison Piepmeier (2004) suggests that Eddy dismissed sickness and corporeality in accordance with “nineteenth-century directives that women be moral, spiritual beings” (61). More interested in her literary work than theology, Claudia Stokes (2014) argues that Eddy failed rhetorically because she adopted sentimental literary tropes that had become outdated and derided by the late nineteenth century.

4. Mountford is contributing to the extensive discussion of masculinity, religion, and moral values in the nineteenth century. Increasingly, churches emphasized character traits like manliness, rigor, discipline, patriotic duty, and physical vigor, a reflection of the anxiety stemming from rapid social changes including industrialization, colonialism, and calls for gender and racial equality. Proponents of masculine Christianity assumed that women’s participation in public roles, including the ministry, would detract from these qualities and further deteriorate American society. For further work on masculinity and social values during the period, see Bederman (1995); Rotundo (1993); Putney (2001); and Murphy (2008).

5. Assessing the demographics of the Christian Science movement is difficult because the Board of Directors abides by a policy of non-disclosure of membership records, which appears in a 1908 bylaw of the Manual of the Mother Church (Ivey 1999, 22). Some Christian Scientists in the opening decades of the twentieth century suggested a worldwide membership of approximately one million, primarily in the United States and Britain (McCrackan 1901, 244; Ivey 1999, 19). According to the federal religious census, 85,717 Americans called themselves Christian Scientists in 1906; 202,098 in 1926; 268,915 in 1936 (Ahlstrom 2004, 1025). While the numbers offered by observers in the early twentieth century are likely inflated, they suggest that the census numbers may not fully reflect the number of Americans who participated in Christian Science practice, even if they did not formally identify themselves as church members.

6. The following descriptions of the Christian Science sermon are taken from a series of five articles published in the Christian Science Sentinel in March 1899 (“The Christian Science Sermon” I-IV and “The Lesson Sermons” 1899). These educational articles were written by an unnamed member of the Bible Lesson Committee of the Christian Science church. Eddy herself never drafted so complete and thorough a primer on the Christian Science sermon. Nevertheless, the articles can be taken as an accurate representation of Eddy’s views, as she would not have let any article appear in a sanctioned denominational periodical if she did not believe it was in entire accordance with Science.