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Like Jonestown in slow motion
Caroline Fraser, author of "God's Perfect Child," talks about the casualties of Christian Science's belief in the power of prayer and the media's soft spot for the church.
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Also Today Like Jonestown in slow motion Caroline Fraser, author of "God's Perfect Child," talks about the casualties of the power of prayer and the media's soft spot for the Christian Science Church.

So, in the 1970s, when the church faced dire challenges in the form of "the child cases" (a series of civil suits seeking to hold it responsible for the deaths of children from whom medical care had been withheld), it found itself well protected. The Nixon administration contained a remarkable number of Christian Scientists, including H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, who helped push through legislation designed to prevent the copyright for Eddy's "Science and Health" from entering the public domain. (The bill was later declared unconstitutional.) And this was only one of what Fraser calls "an extraordinary array of special rights and privileges" bestowed upon the church by local, state and federal governments. Since the mid-century peak of its membership and influence, the church had collected several trophies that testified to its legitimacy, all tied, according to Fraser, to the decision by insurance companies to cover the fees of Christian Science practitioners. Since Christian Science treatment is cheap (because medically negligible), the insurance companies loved it. And, Fraser writes, "The Church parlayed the insurance coverage into a semblance of the scientific evidence -- which it has never had -- of the efficacy of its healing method."

Apart from the gruesome and heartbreaking accounts of the deaths of Christian Science children from treatable diseases, perhaps the most alarming revelation in "God's Perfect Child" is that many elected officials support both the right to withhold medical treatment from children for religious reasons and Medicare reimbursements for the services of Christian Science nurses -- nurses whose training is entirely religious, not medical. As Fraser points out, the effectiveness of spiritual healing methods resists proof or disproof by any conventional scientific means, but the notion of federal funds going to any form of care that actually forbids the use of treatments of proven effectiveness is shocking. It's one thing to waste federal moneys on speculative "alternative" therapies; it's another to spend them on nursing homes that endanger people's lives.

Yet the politicians who support continued Medicare/Medicaid coverage for Christian Science nursing and the preservation of legal protections designed expressly for the church include Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah (a Mormon who believes in faith healing) and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who as recently as 1998 was "lavishly supportive of the church's position" on the Medicare issue. Fraser speculates that Kennedy "may believe that Scientists constitute a significant voting block in Massachusetts, home to the Mother Church." Perhaps he ought to goose his research staff -- estimates of the worldwide population of Scientists are as low as 60,000.

Although the ranks of the Christian Science Church have dwindled, its example ought to still loom large for aspiring young sects with more fanaticism than credibility. The church, although hotly controversial in its early days, managed to lull the public and the press into seeing it as the very model of a polite, middle-class American religion. Joan Crawford was a Christian Scientist, but so, more importantly, was Lady Nancy Astor, who as a convert doesn't quite have a contemporary counterpart -- although if the Scientologists or the Unification Church could convert Caroline Kennedy, that would come close. Instead of suing journalists, give them good jobs at your award-winning newspaper (the Washington Times doesn't cut it). Make sure that the people you mobilize to protest "unworthy" books and articles, or to lobby for legislation, come from the very best families. If the kids in some of those families wind up dying excruciating and unnecessary deaths, that, after all, is an unfortunate side effect of the freedom that makes America great. "Cults" are what we call the lowlifes attracted to the likes of David Koresh and Jim Jones. They've got nothing to do with people like us.
salon.com | Sept. 1, 1999

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