A Visit With The Faith Healers
By Lisa Mildred
Lisa Mildred is our boots on the ground cult reporter. In each of her articles, Lisa visits a cult and meets the members in person before writing an essay detailing her experience. Earlier articles by Mildred included stories of dropping in on two sects of the Moonies and a two part article about visiting, and being visited by the Amish. She is currently working on a live show about her frequent daliences in the cultiverse.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in all my culty travels, it’s that cultyness exists on a spectrum. One religious community might check off a few of the boxes, and another might check them all. This can make some groups that are missing common identifiers more difficult to classify.
In the case of the First Church of Christ, Scientist (Often just referred to as Christian Science… and often confused with Scientology, which absolutely checks ALL the boxes) this is certainly true. On the cult spectrum, they land further from something as blatantly sinister as Jonestown and closer to something like Mormonism, or Jehovah’s Witnesses. These are the groups that have the whole cult + 100 years= a religion equation working in their favor. Their charismatic leaders die off, their members settle down a little, and if the movement survives a few generations, they earn the social perception of respectability even if there remains cause to lump them in with the more obvious groups that form the most prominent constellations in the cultiverse.
This past October, I was in Washington DC waiting to meet up with a friend on Black Lives Matter Plaza and had some time to kill. I was in the middle of a road trip to visit a few different religious communities and had made a pit stop in DC to take a break for a few days.
While I waited for my friend to finish their workday, I wandered into a Christian Science Reading Room. You’ve probably seen one before if you’re well-traveled or live in a major city because there’s a ton of these bookstores in metropolitan areas. They seem to serve as not only a place for active Christian Scientists to purchase new reading material, but also as outreach centers to gather new members.
It was no surprise that as I perused my way through the bookstore the woman in charge came and found me. She asked if I had any interest in learning more about her church. Obviously!
As we sat and talked, this woman told me about how she doesn’t take medicine or go to see doctors, because all she has to do to heal her illnesses is pray with a Christian Science “Practitioner.” Well, that’s a pretty neat trick. She talked about a recent trip to Boston, where the Church of Christian Science got its start, and in that moment, I knew my road trip was about to be extended. I simply had to know more.
After my time in DC was up, I traveled to Boston to visit the headquarters of Christian Science to see what they’re all about.
After a long day of driving, I parked in their very large underground garage and came above ground to check out what practitioners of Christian Science call “The Mother Church.” There’s a joke in there somewhere about people with foil hats exploring the universe and a mother ship, but I’m too classy to make it.
The Christian Science Plaza is beautiful. It includes their original church building, commissioned by their founder, Mary Baker Eddy, who had it built way back in the day. Adjoined to that original church is a newer and larger cathedral. Unfortunately, it’s under construction, so I missed out on a lot of its architectural wonder. The rumor mill that is the internet claims that the scaffolding won’t be coming down any time soon, or so the claims read, because the church’s numbers are dwindling rapidly, as are their funds.
Just outside these two buildings is a large reflecting pool, reminiscent of the one you find stretching in front of the Lincoln Memorial in our nation’s capital. As I stopped to take a picture of the beautiful buildings reflecting in the water, I overheard a member of the church explain to a tourist that the large building across the way used to contain Christian Science’s offices, but that the building is being rented out now.
When you’re renting out your large office building, you know your parishioners are dropping like flies. I mean that quite literally because the church of Christian Science believes that God can’t answer your prayers for wellness if you’re also taking medication, so their ill parishioners tend to die off with impressive efficiency. More on that later.
The plaza also contained a large building that serves as a museum, and that was my next stop. Inside I purchased a ticket for the Mapparium. This is a giant inverted globe that the church commissioned in the thirties, which you can walk inside and see. If you’re a cult geek or not, I would urge you to include this on your itinerary if you ever make a trip to Boston. It’s such a unique experience to walk inside this giant globe, which is made of stained glass and still shows the borders of countries as they existed nearly one hundred years ago.
Before going inside, the tour guide explained that photos aren’t allowed, and that cell phones need to be tucked away in general because if you accidentally drop it off the platform, it might be a while before someone can go down to Antarctica to retrieve it for you.
As I stood on the walkway inside the globe and listened to the presentation, I looked at the literal world around me and thought deep thoughts. I found the places that are dear to me where I’ve lived through the years: The little dot that is New York City, the giant land mass of Australia, and Jamaica, which wouldn’t have yet had its independence when this impressive structure was built. I thought about how bossy entitled white people colonized so much of the world, pushing their western religions on people who’d been perfectly content without hearing about their particular brand of Jesus, using faith as an excuse for enslaving and exploiting people that the only god I would care to believe in would call their brothers and sisters.
I looked at the stained glass around me and saw borders and names that have changed as a result of war and revolution. I thought about how the planet whose effigy I was currently standing inside is dying, and how organized religion is largely what keeps us from preventing that from happening.
Anyway, go check it out if you get a chance!
After feeling my feels inside the Mapparium, I checked out the other exhibits. There were interactive displays to teach you about what Christian Science outreach is accomplishing all over the world and a collection of old copies of their newspaper, which is called The Christian Science Monitor, a publication that has gained some serious notoriety through the years. There was also an exhibit on the life and times of the founder of the church, Mary Baker Eddy.
Mary Baker Eddy founded the church in the late 1800’s, which can be construed as a big ol’ win for feminism. Being batshit crazy enough to lead large groups of people down a path of delusion is not just a job for men! #girlpower, or whatever. Boss Babe Mary apparently got injured, and with the help of the God of the Bible, healed the injury with her mind. As one does. Fine upstanding citizen that she was, Mary wanted to share what God had revealed to her, so she wrote a book about it called Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Followers of this church do not worship Mary Baker Eddy, but they do regard this book as an integral and necessary tool for interpreting the Bible. As I learned when I then went to their church service that evening, they also read verses out of this book alongside scriptures from the Bible.
I entered the original church building and sat in their lovely sanctuary among a group of unmasked people. It was October 2021, so while a mask mandate wasn’t necessarily in affect, Covid cases were on an uptick and wearing a mask in a large indoor group would have been a good idea…or at least, it would be if you didn’t believe you could pray away the inconvenient side effects of a global pandemic.
My masked face and I sat there through their service, which is unlike any other church service I’ve ever attended, and I actually mean that in a good way. Other than a board of trustees who have no hierarchy among them, this church does not have clergy. They also don’t have sermons or preachers. During their church service, two volunteers stand up and read verses taken directly from the two books that they consider to be holy: The Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and other than singing a few hymns, that’s literally it. No reverend or priest gets to stand up there and cherry pick verses out of their original context and string them together to fit into a message that fits their speculative agenda. No persuasive or manipulative or emotionally-charged speeches. While I don’t personally believe either of these books to be God-breathed, I recognize that if I did, this is how I’d want them to be handled. So, kudos to this group for that level of integrity, at least.
No trip down the Christian Science rabbit hole would be complete without a chat with one of their practitioners, AKA the people who know better than doctors how to eliminate an illness or injury. I went online and found a local practitioner in the nearby town where I was staying, and a few days later we met up for an interview. Let’s call her Lydia, which in my mind, is short for chlamydia, which is a disease that according to Lydia, she can cure through prayer.
I met up with Lydia at her local Christian Science Reading Room, and we set off in search of a café to have a chat. A terrible storm had passed through the area two days earlier, leaving many businesses shuttered. After discovering that the two cafes she had in mind were closed, we wound up at a Yellow Deli. If you’re worth your weight in cult knowledge, you know that Yellow Delis are run by a culty group that checks a whole bunch of boxes called the Twelve Tribes. I’ll tell you about my experience with them in a later piece, but you can imagine my elation. Here I was sitting in a Twelve Tribes establishment, having a heart to heart with a Christian Scientist. It was a beautiful moment as I reached this level of cross-pollinating in the realm of cultyness!
It seems I got lucky in reaching out to Lydia, because she had a pretty impressive Christian Science resume. Her grandmother had been among the first generation of Christian Science nurses in the United Kingdom, she had served on the board of directors for The Mother Church, and had helped curate the exhibit on Mary Baker Eddy at the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, as well as the exhibits in Boston I’d visited a few days earlier. I really know how to pick ‘em!
Lydia told me everything I wanted to know about Christian Science. She was incredibly open and accommodating to me and didn’t shy away from any hard questions, and for this I am thankful. Lydia was a lovely person and I want the record to show that while I personally believe she has spent her life in service to a very culty and problematic group, I can also recognize that she seems to have a kind heart and I do not want to ridicule her lived experiences. There are shades of grey within every person and every organization.
She started off by confirming that the church’s numbers are in fact dwindling. Her children have left the church, and while there used to be a church building in this small town where we were meeting, there were so few people in attendance that they opted to sell the church and have their services and meetings in the CS Reading Room instead. We talked about how this is a general trend, not just for Christian Science, but for churches in general. Fewer and fewer people are seeking community within an organized religion, and that especially with the pandemic making so many things virtual, the use of designated buildings in general is shifting very quickly.
Lydia told me that as a young girl she’d intended to study to be an actress, but later felt called by God to be a Christian Science nurse, which is what she ended up getting trained to do. The training took three years, and Lydia explained that Christian Science nurses such as her grandmother and herself are not like the nurses we meet in hospitals or Doctor’s offices. They don’t administer injections or take blood samples or anything along those lines. Christian Science nurses don’t diagnose an illness, but they will treat symptoms that are there to a degree. They won’t administer medication, but they will dress a wound, or make sure that a patient is turned over safely or fed appropriately.
These nurses who work in Christian Science hospitals do not supply oxygen or drip feeds or perform CPR, although they might do the Heimlich so as to not be considered negligent. They will help someone who is injured stand up safely and help someone who can’t stand up safely use a bedpan. Basically, it sounds like Christian Science nurses just try to make a patient as comfortable as possible while not trying to look for any sort of cure. It seems like in a Christian Science hospital, it’s all hospice all the time.
She told me that a patient might take pain medication once, but only so they’re able to think and speak clearly enough to pray with a practitioner, and that a nurse would not be the one to distribute that painkiller.
After being a Christian Science Nurse for many years, Lydia eventually served as a CEO for the Christian Science Library and then decided it was time to become a Practitioner.
Lydia claims to have healed herself prior to going to practitioner training, which ironically, takes significantly less time and training than it does to be a nurse. It’s a two-week program, and then once a year you go back for a one-day refresher training. If you’re looking to avoid student loans or time-consuming trade school, being a Christian Science Practitioner might be just the gig you’re looking for. Lydia made the very valid point that during Mary Baker Eddy’s day it was a very empowering thing for a woman to become a practitioner, because women rarely made a living on their own in those times.
After you complete your training, you make like Jesus and start healing people. Once you heal a certain number of people, you’ve earned your stripes and can be listed in the official journal of Practitioners, complete with references from people you’ve healed. Practitioner prayers don’t necessarily need to be given in person or at the hospital. There have been many times where she’s instructed people via email or prayed with a sickly customer over the phone. If the person is too ill to pray for themselves, Lydia will do the praying for them and instruct them to feel God’s love. There have even been times when a patient is unconscious, but a nurse still holds the phone up to their ear so that, if they can hear, they will hear their practitioner praying for them. Most of the time, it’s a, “Say these prayers and call me back in thirty minutes if you’re still in pain,” sort of thing.
She didn’t say much about how expensive her services are, but she did say that the invoice is always the priciest the first time around. She charges the most for the first three days, because she expects full healing within that timeline. If a person isn’t healed in three days, the price drops as time goes by. If eventually things aren’t moving in a healing direction, she might refer the patient to a different practitioner. With a healthcare system as broken as ours is in America, I can certainly see the appeal of having a more affordable option. It is a bit of a high-stake situation, though, because Practitioners are not allowed to have any other job. They must be always available to pray with and instruct the sick. They are on call 24/7, and she sends her itemized bill at the end of the month.
Lydia was an absolute champ about answering all my random questions. She explained that while a CS Nurse can be present at a birth, it’s the law that a doctor or midwife must be in charge. It would be unlikely to find a CS nurse at a hospital birth because of all the epidurals and such that might happen, but they are often present at home births. I asked her if she knew the success rates for these home births, or for any cases of anything treated in CS hospitals or by CS practitioners in general. She said Mary Baker Eddy had always maintained that they shouldn’t keep track of those sorts of glorifying numbers (convenient, if you ask me) but that I could read the Christian Science Monitor and see plenty of success stories.
If you’re wondering when I’m going to get to the elephant in the room that is COVID, you’ve made it. I asked Lydia what her beliefs meant for vaccines. She told me that because she was raised in Christian Science, her parents never had her vaccinated, and that things like medication and vaccination don’t work if you don’t believe in them. Apparently, her CS-practicing father had taken medication for something at some point, and it hadn’t worked for him because he didn’t believe.
She explained that when Mary Baker Eddy was alive there was a smallpox outbreak, and that Eddy had told her parishioners that they should get the vaccine. Not because the vaccine had any power to affect them, but because it was the right thing to do to keep the people in their communities from worrying; that the right thing to do was to make their community feel better, and the vaccine would have no power over them either way.
The same blatant cognitive dissonance was being applied to the modern-day pandemic. Lydia sat before me fully vaccinated and boostered, not because she thought it would help her fight off Covid, but because her husband wanted her to be vaccinated. She did it to avoid unrest with her non-believer in-laws.
While there’s obviously a complete lack of logic in this scenario, I can appreciate that Lydia wants to do the loving thing for her husband, that this religion wants to bring comfort to the community at large. In this way, I’d rank this particular cult as dramatically less problematic than the Americans opting to walk around unvaccinated. Anti-vaxxer Evangelicals could learn a thing or two about loving their neighbor from the Christian Scientists.
Lydia made a point to make it very clear that her patients are always welcome to practice free will and may make use of medicine and hospitals, that the church is not forbidding these choices. She gave me the example that her husband, who is not a member for the church, had a very invasive surgery one time. She could not pray for God to heal him, because he was accepting medical care. She could only support him and love him and pray that the doctors do a good job. If you ask me, that seems like the best of both worlds.
There have been plenty of studies showing that having a positive attitude and being surrounded by people who care about you can lead to less suffering and even speed recovery and prayer for healing could certainly fall under this umbrella. And we don’t live in a world that is without miraculous stories of healing, right? Lydia had quite a few of them to share with me, and that’s lovely. But you know what else is lovely? Actual medical care. Medication. Surgery. Help from experts and doctors. And while the statement above maintains that those things are available to members of this church, they also are saying that help from experts should not be your first choice. We’ve seen the danger of that in this country throughout the pandemic.
Perhaps even more dangerously, they’re saying that faith should ideally be your first choice. To quote Bill Maher: Faith is making a virtue of not thinking.
In the last two years, we saw plenty of idiots far less loving than Lydia claiming that their faith would protect them from covid, and those unvaccinated fools overwhelmed our hospitals and died in those beds. For Christian Science followers, if they resort to taking medicine or going to the hospital for any reason, that means their faith wasn’t strong enough to get the job done. I shudder to think how many believers, especially children, have died completely preventable deaths because prayer didn’t have the same effect as an organ transplant or a blood transfusion or a strong antibiotic. To make people choose between medical care and their god is setting a dangerous precedent, and this type of logic (or lack thereof) puts God, whoever she might be, in a shitty position.
