Mary Baker Eddy: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

Impact

Eddy forbade her church from keeping a tally of the membership, but scholars have calculated that the number of Christian Science branch churches has declined at 2 percent a year in recent decades, with 823 churches closing since 1987 (while seventy-three have opened in that period). One estimate of church membership suggests that there may be fewer than sixty thousand members worldwide. Nonetheless, despite those losses, the impact of Science and Health, along with the church that continues to promote it, has been undeniably profound. Aside from the scores of people attracted to the religion through study of the book, especially during the great flourishing of the faith in the early decades of the twentieth century, the church has had an enormous impact through the lobbying arm that Eddy established, known as the Committee on Publication, renowned for attempting to influence media coverage and public policy.

The church’s own members have occupied positions of considerable political and bureaucratic power in the United States. Renowned Hollywood actors—from Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney to Robert Duvall and Val Kilmer—have at different times espoused Christian Science. Many Scientists—teetotalers and hence considered good security risks—have been recruited to serve in the FBI and CIA. President Richard M. Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, and domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, were lifelong Scientists, as were other key figures in the Nixon campaigns and White House. In 1971 a Christian Scientist, Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, shepherded through Congress a bill reinstating and extending the copyright of Science and Health, which had expired; Nixon’s powerful aides prevailed upon the president to sign the bill later that year. Challenged by dissident Christian Science groups that wished to print and distribute different editions of Eddy’s textbook, the law was declared unconstitutional in 1987, and since then, all editions of Science and Health have entered the public domain.

One significant impact of Science and Health has been the passage of laws in the United States, on both federal and state levels, designed to exempt Christian Scientists from having their children vaccinated or provided with medical care. Lobbied for by church officials and members, these laws represent the most significant public expression of Eddy’s teachings. A recent article in the journal Pediatrics documented 170 children’s fatalities in the United States between 1975 and 1995 resulting from religiously motivated medical neglect, twenty-eight occurring in Christian Science families. The religious-exemption laws allowing such fatalities potentially endanger minors in all sects eschewing medical care and can be traced directly to Eddy’s teachings in Science and Health.