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The respectable cult
A new book asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin.
By Laura Miller
[09/01/99]

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A close look at garbage comes up with gold.
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[09/01/99]

Ivory Tower
Fear 101
Seasonal teaching anxiety reduces the most experienced professors to raw nerves and nightmares.
By Elizabeth Bobrick
[09/01/99]

America the brutal
In his follow-up to "Angela's Ashes" Frank McCourt confronts the indignities of immigrant life.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[08/31/99]

The suffering Irish
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By Daniel Reitz
[08/31/99]

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The progression in my book from the first person to a wider angle parallels my own progress, I think. As a child, my knowledge about Mary Baker Eddy and the church as an institution was so severely limited that all I really knew about them was what I read in "Science and Health" (Eddy's book) and overheard in the church lobby. I distinctly remember, however, that one day after Sunday school, my teacher took me aside and told me, apropos of nothing, that Mrs. Eddy had never taken morphine and that I shouldn't believe any rumors I might hear. (I now suspect that his remark was inspired by Scribner's 1970 paperback reprinting of Edwin Franden Dakin's critical biography of Eddy, which discusses her morphine use.) Of course, the remark fascinated me, and I ran right out to the public library and tried to find anything that might explain it. I failed then, but my curiosity was reawakened in the early 1990s, long after I thought I'd left Christian Science behind, when reports about dissension in the church began appearing in the national press, in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, on "60 Minutes." I was astonished to discover that my own personal experience of a Sunday School classmate dying was not an isolated instance, that Christian Science children were dying all over the country and their parents were being prosecuted.

And the more I learned about the history of the church, its rigidity and inflexibility, the more I began to discount the received wisdom it gives out, particularly the argument that Christian Scientists, with their healing "system," are giving their children "the best possible care." They're not. If there's a villain in the book, it's the church itself, and the people who unthinkingly tend and obey it, like bees with their queen. On the other hand, I grew to admire the Christian Science dissidents who at least think for themselves.

Another inspiration for taking on the project was the maddening phenomenon of people like Larry Dossey and Herbert Benson rising up in the '90s and simplistically touting the "power of prayer." Dossey and Benson, along with others of their ilk, have embraced Christian Science while knowing next to nothing about it, and their ignorance of the history of what they're promoting could have real consequences in peoples' lives.

Your comments about Larry Dossey and Herbert Benson raise an interesting point. Is your objection to the "power of prayer" philosophy that it provides too much cover for the dangerous doctrines of the Christian Scientists, or do you have larger objections to the very principles of that movement? After all, not all of the power-of-prayer crowd advocate renouncing standard medical care, and it seems like the peril in Christian Science is its insistence that you can't use both.

My problem is not with prayer itself but with the marketing of prayer. It's true that folks like Dossey, Benson and Andrew Weil commonly deliver caveats suggesting that patients shouldn't throw out traditional medicine (I think it's Dale Matthews, another power-of-prayer doc, who advises "prayer and Prozac"). But their willingness to use their authority as medical doctors to promote prayer as a form of treatment is troubling. So is their uncritical acceptance of things like Christian Science (which discourages the use of all what they call "materia medica," as many of these doctors seem to have forgotten). Larry Dossey admiringly cites the "research," if I can even call it that, of two Scientists in Oregon who prayed over some petri dishes and were so disturbed by the Christian Science Church's rejection of their "evidence" that they subsequently killed themselves. The power-of-prayer movement is so amorphous -- driven largely by bestselling self-improvement books -- that it's doubtful that it has any well-defined principles, or standards, at all. I suspect that the main goal of many of those involved is simply to make money.

I certainly don't mean to mock or belittle prayer. As I argue in the book, it may have wondrous effects for many people, but it is intangible and unquantifiable, so it doesn't lend itself to scientific study. Indeed, many of the studies that have been done suggesting that there's a link between prayer or church-going and improved health have been bankrolled by a single organization, the Templeton Foundation, which is devoted to promoting "spiritual information through science," a fact that calls into question the objectivity of its findings. Fortunately, most religious people accept medicine as a gift from God and reap the benefits of both realms.

Next page | Diane Sawyer defends Christian Science