CNN - Like Jonestown in slow motion

Yes, the parallels between Christian Science and Scientology are fascinating. While the Christian Science Church was never as litigious as the Church of Scientology, Christian Science was once terrifically controversial, just as Scientology is today. Mary Baker Eddy was a notorious figure, and she and her teachings were the target of contemptuous books and articles by Mark Twain and others. A century ago, Christian Science was as scandalous as Scientology is now, but, largely through the influence of its newspaper, the Monitor, Scientists managed to calm society's fears and grow ever more respectable. Christian Science also managed to impress people with its own celebrities and millionaires: George Getty, the founder of the Getty fortune, was a Scientist, as was Lady Astor. As I discuss in the book, Christian Science became hugely popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and '40s.

It strikes me that Scientology's reputation is now roughly at the juncture where Christian Science found itself during the latter part of Eddy's lifetime. It still remains troubling to the public, but it's successfully legitimizing itself. A street in Hollywood has been renamed L. Ron Hubbard Boulevard. And Scientology won its epic battle for tax-exempt status with the IRS. So it's halfway to respectability, but it remains to be seen if its celebrity associations with stars like John Travolta and Tom Cruise can carry it further.

What about the child cases? They seem to me to be more damning to the Christian Science Church than anything, really, that Scientology has done. How do you think Christian Science's public image now stands as a result of those hugely publicized cases?

Of course the child cases are damning, but you're so right that it's other groups, including Scientology, that are seen as the real threats. A prosecutor in California who handled one of the child cases told reporters that Christian Science is like Jonestown in slow motion, and he was right. But the American public is so conflicted about parental rights, the rights of children and the issue of religious freedom that it tends to be queasy about the spectacle of faith-healing parents on trial, particularly Christian Scientists, who are usually white, middle- to upper-class and prominent members of their communities with no prior criminal records. Americans are squeamish about anything that seems to punish people for their religious beliefs. Of course, I don't think these trials were about the parents' First Amendment rights to religious freedom; I think they were about the violation of their children's rights to life itself.

And the church has done everything it can, with some success, to reinforce the notion that the parents (rather than the kids who lost their lives) were the real victims, running full page ads in the Boston Globe during the manslaughter trial of the Twitchells (for the death of their 2-year-old son Robyn) announcing that prayer was being prosecuted in Boston. Just as Congress has accepted the church's number of published testimonials as scientific fact, so some journalists have accepted the church's argument that its parents do the best they can for their children. Earlier this month, for example, Diane Sawyer, on "20/20," introduced a segment on a faith-healing sect in Oregon that, in the last 35 years, has buried 78 kids, many of whom would have lived with medical intervention. Sawyer issued a specific apologia for Scientists, saying, "In serious situations, many [faith healers], most notably Christian Scientists, will seek outside help," an observation that isn't at all accurate but indicates how confused journalists have become about Christian Science, largely because of misinformation proceeding from the church.

Philip Zaleski's review of "God's Perfect Child" in the Aug. 22 New York Times Book Review contains a line that I can imagine you found irksome: "The Christian Science archives contain over 50,000 testimonials of spiritual cures; horrific tales of child deaths cannot explain away these apparent successes." This seems like a deliberate misreading of your book, which does criticize the testimonials, but not on the grounds of the child cases. Can you respond to that?

I was astonished at that sentence. To suggest that I was using details of the suffering and deaths of Christian Science children to "explain away" anything seems a perverse misrepresentation. But I'm almost more troubled by the blithe acceptance of 50,000 Christian Science testimonies as "apparent successes." Do sheer numbers imply moral authority or scientific accuracy? If millions of people believe they've been abducted by aliens, does that mean such abductions really happened? Zaleski also ignores my analysis of the testimonies and the reasons why they're unreliable as scientific evidence or even, in some instances, verifiable anecdotes.

Could you review, briefly, your arguments challenging the testimonials, that is, the accounts of healings that the Christian Science Church uses to bolster claims for the legitimacy of its treatment? Zaleski is not the first to accept the church's statement that they've been "corroborated."

Christian Science testimonies that are published in the church periodicals are "corroborated" (or "verified," in the church's words) only by three other friends or family members (usually Scientists themselves) "who can vouch for the integrity of the testifier or know of the healing." As sociologists have noted, these testimonies are brief, anecdotal accounts, often of "healings" that took place years, if not decades, ago. (And some healings, significantly, are reported to have taken a long time, sometimes years.) Many of the healings are of self-diagnosed conditions that undoubtedly corrected themselves on their own (warts, bumps, scratches, pains, minor burns, relationship problems, job problems, etc.). Some contain allusions to diagnoses by medical professionals, but no medical or hospital records, physicians' names or specific data accompany the published testimonies, so it is impossible to verify them independently. Some testimonies contain misleading or false information.

Moreover, and perhaps most damningly, the church keeps no records of the deaths of Christian Scientists, children or adults, and it publishes no testimonies about Christian Science failures (some of which are documented in my book), so the church's loss rate is impossible to calculate. And it has never allowed any independent researcher to study Christian Science. So, from a scientific point of view, these anecdotal, self-selected and self-reported accounts are meaningless. As I say in the book, they are testimonies of faith, of religious belief. They are not evidence.

How would you prefer to see the illnesses of Christian Science children handled? Would you favor government intervention, and to what degree?

What I'd like to see is the removal of religious exemption laws from all state statutes. This special class of laws protecting faith-healers from the consequences of their actions endangers children and seems to be a clear violation of the First Amendment. I see no reason why a system similar to those in place in Canada, England and other European countries wouldn't work here. In those countries, parents are required to provide their kids with routine medical care, and, from what I hear, doctors have been quite flexible in working with parents to provide the least aggressive or intrusive forms of care.

No one, including me, is arguing that Scientists should stop taking their kids to Sunday school or teaching them about their religious heritage or beliefs. They absolutely have a right to do that. But they don't have the right to martyr their kids. The church's refusal to consider any kind of compromise or to engage in discussion about the rights of their children seems deeply unreasonable to me. I once asked a Christian Scientist who had worked for the Committee on Publication why American Scientists are so vehemently opposed to any system that would require medical care for children. He said it was because Christian Science branch churches in countries with such requirements had been weakened by them. His answer, and the church's policies over the past century, indicate that Scientists value the health of their church over the health of their children. In my view, if Christian Scientists really want to practice the love that they preach, they should reconsider their position on this.

Laura Miller is an editor of Salon.

Salon.com -- What's really going on in the world of technology? Know the trends, read our technology section.

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