The Mary Baker Eddy Bicentennial, and Some Christian Scientists in the Show Business

I have always been fascinated by Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910) and the religion she created, commonly known as Christian Science. There is a logic to its having been born precisely when and where it was. If Eddy hadn’t done it, I am convinced someone else would have. Today most people know the religion for just one of its tenets, since it often makes the headlines or becomes a plot device in police procedurals and legal dramas. Its adherents believe in the power of prayer over conventional medical science, and sometimes that leads to tragedy and lands them in trouble. But that particular peculiarity of their religion is but an outgrowth of their overriding metaphysical belief: that all that exists in the universe is spirit. Thus the world of substance is an illusion. (I have always thought her an interesting antipode to Ayn Rand, founder of the quasi-religion Objectivism, for whom all was material. There may not be truth in such extreme formulations, but there is virtue, in the form of consistency and logic. And it allows you to solve the age old mind-body problem by deciding that one or the other doesn’t exist).

The Bakers were of old Puritan stock, and raised in New Hampshire in a strict Congregationalist family. Her father, a Yankee farmer, was apparently pretty brutal toward her, and as a consequence the daughter seems to have developed all sorts of real or imagined health problems, things like fits and fainting episodes and headaches and the like, which can be hard enough for doctors to sort out in the present age, let alone during the time of leeches. And theoretically “legit” medicine did not necessarily offer a lot of relief in those days. So people frequently looked…elsewhere.

So much was swirling around in those days! We know that in the early 1860s, she studied with the mesmerist and folk healer Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866) and that later she was was a practicing spiritualist. These were unmistakable influences. Also in the air were Revivalism, Transcendentalism (with its echoes of Eastern religion),Swedenborgianism, and the idealism (used in the philosophic sense) of Berkley, Hegel, Hume and Kant. I find it very interesting as well that her third husband Asa Gilbert Eddy hailed from Vermont, the same state that gave us the fraudulent mediums William and Horatio Eddy, who influenced Madame Blavatsky’s development of Theosophy. Were they cousins? How could they not be? Later, Mary Baker Eddy would repudiate mesmerism and spiritualism, but only because she claimed to have her own answers.

In 1875 Mary Baker Eddy wrote her first book, a summation of all her thinking up ’til that point Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Four years later, she founded Church of Christ, Scientist, otherwise known as Christian Science. The Manual of the Mother Church was published in 1895. The famous Christian Science Reading Rooms were founded in 1899. The highly respected newspaper The Christian Science Monitor was started in 1908. For those curious about the word “science” in the context of this religion, it has nothing to do, either positively or negatively, with reference to the conventional meaning of the word as it relates it to the study of the physical, natural world. It is merely used in the much broader, literal sense of a “system of knowledge”. It is used in the same sense Hamlet uses “philosophy” when he is speaking to Horatio.

At any rate, this is a very American thing, to found your own religion. And women have always led such movement nearly as often men, dating all the way back to Anne Hutchinson. Christian Scientists have never been very numerous in the scheme of things. At their peak, there were a quarter million; today in America, about 50,000. Given that, they would seem to be overrepresented among the showfolk. As I have done with Mormons and Quakers, et al, I will now point you towards people in the performing arts who were either raised as Christian Scientists or converted themselves. They include: Pearl Bailey, Kenny Baker, Valerie Bergere, Carol Channing, Joan Crawford, Doris Day and Martin Melcher, Ellen De Generes, Colleen Dewhurst, Robert Duvall, George Engel, Horton Foote,Kelsey Grammer, Spalding Gray, Charlotte Greenwood, Joyce Grenfell, Corinne Griffith, Henry Fonda, Howard Hawks, Ernest Hemingway,Jim Henson, Audrey Hepburn, Bud Jamison, Leatrice Joy, Val Kilmer, Kay Kyser, Johnny Marvin, Marilyn Monroe, Ward Morehouse, Conrad Nagel, Michael Nesmith, Paul Newman, Antoinette Perry, Mary Pickford, Ginger Rogers, J.D. Salinger, Jean Stapleton,Martha Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, W.S. Van Dyke, King Vidor, Robin Williams, Anna May Wong, and Alan Young.

At any rate, while I admire Mrs. Eddy’s system as an abstraction, and envy her boldness of thought, I find that I am content to appreciate these things from afar. I like my body, and I have found that doctors can be very good at keeping it going.