In A New Christian Identity, Amy B. Voorhees tells the fascinating story of the relationship between an enormously influential woman and her equally impactful book. Voorhees argues that the life of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy is inseparable from the career of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the denominational “textbook” that Eddy published in 1875 and then repeatedly revised until her death in 1911. At the same time, Voorhees’ well-crafted monograph also tells the compelling story of how early Christian Science practitioners engaged with their “dual pastor,” the Bible and Eddy's Science and Health.
Part I explores the historical and biographical contexts in which Mary Baker Eddy and Science and Health emerged. It recounts the evolution of Eddy's experimental Congregationalism from her rural upbringing in 1820s New Hampshire through the trials and tribulations of her early life (including chronic struggles with neuralgia) to the 1866 accident and recovery that inspired her to begin writing. Part II covers the period from late 1866, when Eddy wrote the “Genesis manuscript” explaining her healing experience, through the tumultuous 1870s, which brought a definitive break with New Thought founder Phineas P. Quimby in 1872, the first edition of Science and Health in 1875 and the second in 1878, and Christian Science's institutionalization of what Voorhees dubs a “transmillennial” orientation. Part III recounts the welter of competing perspectives on Christian Science in the 1880s, a period featuring continued rapid growth and a third major revision of Science and Health in 1886. Finally, Part IV, extending from the 1891 edition of the book and the “ordination” of the dual pastor in 1894 through Eddy's death in 1911, looks at how the continued growth of Christian Science fostered a new Christian identity among its early practitioners.
There is much to admire about Voorhees’ book. Standing at the intersection of history and religious studies, it shows how the constantly evolving relationship between Eddy's personal experiences and her revisions of Science and Health shaped Christian Science as a religious tradition. Voorhees’ central claim—that we ought to view Christian Science as “a singular expression of Christianity with a restorationist, revelatory, healing rationale” (6)—is both compelling and skillfully argued. As she underscores, Eddy's unique form of restorationism placed healing front and center while simply abandoning “creeds and traditions” (81). Voorhees’ attentiveness to “the inseparable link between author and text” informs her conviction that Eddy's “unfolding, sifting, gradual process” of revelation constituted “a new contribution to world religions” (8).
Although Voorhees uses the relationship between Eddy and Science and Health as her main interpretive lens, a deeper goal becomes clear as the book progresses: to explain Christian Science's appeal to its earliest adherents and its continued flourishing today by pinpointing the precise nature of Christian Science identity. Voorhees gradually turns her focus from Eddy and Science and Health toward the book's reception by practicing Christian Scientists and their supporters and detractors. This shift is complete by Part IV, which unpacks how reading practices intersected with the healing experiences and personal testimonies of Eddy's earliest followers. Voorhees’ dual emphasis on careful textual analysis and lived religion mirrors the impact of Eddy's understanding of revelation on the religion as a whole.
Voorhees augments her focus on Eddy and Science and Health by using the life of Marietta T. Webb, a Black Christian Scientist in Boston, to frame her book. This approach reflects her emphasis on the interplay between the lived religious experiences of a diverse array of adherents and the texts and reading practices that came to define Christian Science as a faith community. Just as Webb's life contained elements that were “both distinctive and representative” of Christian Scientists’ experiences as a whole, Voorhees notes, so too has Christian Science been “both exceptional and typical of American religious experience as it moved more fully into modernity” (1).
The challenge for Voorhees and other interpreters is how to describe the patterns of similarity and difference that made Christian Science what it was by the early twentieth century. The analytical categories underpinning typical stories about religion and modernity do not fit Christian Science well. Most importantly, the tradition is difficult to map onto the religious-secular binary. To resolve this interpretive problem, Voorhees suggests that we ought to abandon all rigid taxonomies and instead view religious life in nineteenth-century America—and, by extension, elsewhere—as “a vast overlapping network having nodes handling greater or lesser amounts of traffic” (5). Rather than being walled off from other traditions, Voorhees writes, Christian Science “tracked across multiple nodes on the vast networks making up American religion and culture, conversing and interacting with many while retaining its own singular teachings and message” (231).
The interpretive stakes of this intervention become clear in Voorhees’ conclusion, “Christian Science Identity.” Having sifted through countless perspectives on Eddy's new religion, Voorhees identifies Christian Science as “a radical theology of practical Christian metaphysics with a central concern for the survival of Christianity in modernity through the ‘proof’ of healing” (233). The helpful precision that Voorhees achieves in defining Christian Science identity makes this book a serious scholarly contribution that will attract the attention of specialists. At the same time, all scholars of American religious history and religious studies will find this masterful account of early Christian Science illuminating, for it beautifully demonstrates how “the outliers of American religion” challenge us to view the entire religious landscape in new ways.
