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September 2, 1999
Web posted at: 4:32 p.m. EDT (2032 GMT)

The respectable cult? | page 1, 2, 3

Still, the church has never quite shaken off the pathology of its founder, whom Fraser describes as "a deeply fearful person." By the end of her life, Eddy, whose much-revised, difficult and often equivocal book "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures" is the cornerstone of the faith, believed herself the victim of "malicious animal magnetism," the malevolent thoughts and wishes of her enemies, which she blamed for everything from the "belief of disease" to an ill-fitting dress. Wary of potential usurpers, Eddy went through protégés like Kleenex and designed the church's training programs and local chapters to prevent talented members from acquiring their own followings. When she died in 1910, she left the church with no clear successor or leadership structure -- with, in fact, no clear mandate for its continued existence.

After Eddy's death, various factions grappled for power, but church officials were united in their efforts to squelch independent accounts of Eddy's life or the religion's history. They launched a campaign against the 1929 book "Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind," by showing up at the publisher's office and demanding to vet the manuscript; when that failed, they threatened booksellers with boycotts if they carried the title and demanded that librarians exclude it from their collections. The church used similar tactics to limit the sales and distribution of books that presented Eddy adoringly but were nevertheless unacceptable because they weren't preapproved by church officials.

In 1945, a devout but dissident Scientist published a book relating the secret teachings of Christian Science class instruction (pupils in these classes were forbidden even from taking notes), but he did so only after the church had scared off his first publisher and menaced his second with "everything from threats of legal action by church authorities to boycotts to implied death threats." The church repeatedly pursued this strategy for dealing with books it deemed "false" or "unworthy" until as late as 1993, when it pressured the University of Nebraska Press into including a vaguely worded disclaimer in its reprint of "The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science" (a 1908 book written by Willa Cather under a pen name).

This kind of interference tends to alienate the press; it's earned Scientologists a reputation for behaving like jack-booted thugs waving subpoenas instead of truncheons. But the Church of Christ, Scientist, which had the advantage of having been founded by a genteel Victorian lady rather than a writer of pulp science fiction, was able to finesse it. And Eddy had had the sense to appoint a Scientist named Alfred Farlow to act as a sort of ur-press agent for the church. "I sit and chat with them," Farlow said of the newspaper editors and reporters whose acquaintance he cultivated, "even listen to their yarns and laugh and joke with them. I accommodate them by reporting certain matters ... I make them see that I am their friend and this serves as a barrier against the publication of things which they know are offensive to me."

It turns out there is one weapon more effective than a really scary lawyer: peer pressure. "We do not feel that it would pay us to antagonize this class of people," wrote one bookseller to the publisher of "Mrs. Eddy." "We are not in business to offend classes, and this group of people are good book buyers and are very close friends of our establishment," complained another. The committees of concerned church members who showed up in publishers' offices to protest the most recent "attack" on Eddy or her movement were well-off, well-behaved, prominent burghers. Christian Scientists -- "overwhelmingly white and largely middle-class or wealthy," according to Fraser -- belonged to the same social class as journalists (or perhaps the class to which they aspired). And the booksellers certainly didn't want to offend people like that. The fact that the Christian Science Monitor, the church's daily (and generally secular) newspaper, became a haven for quality journalism made the sect seem yet more innocuous, even laudable, to the press.