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Manhood and Mary Baker Eddy: Muscular Christianity and Christian Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2021
Abstract
On first examination, “muscular Christianity”—with its emphasis on manly vigor and physical strength—positions itself well afield of Christian Science teachings on the non-physical basis of existence, as propounded by founder Mary Baker Eddy. Nonetheless, both movements arose in the nineteenth century with a deep commitment to revitalizing Christianity and its practical value in an increasingly scientific and secular age, especially regarding bodily well-being. Both Eddy and advocates of muscular Christianity defended their respective systems on scientific and religious grounds, focusing on questions of health. At a time when the Young Men's Christian Association was a leading exponent of muscular Christianity, Eddy saw fit to give it significant philanthropic support. While her gift reflected civic goodwill as opposed to a close relationship with the Association, I argue that it was not anomalous to Eddy's overall values and vision for Christian Science. Like muscular Christians, Eddy was calling for a progressive Christianity that met the criteria of a pragmatic age. In giving attention to issues around manhood, Eddy was signaling the necessity as well as potentiality of Christian spirituality to be a source of health and empowerment for modern man.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History
Footnotes
I am grateful to Peggy Bendroth, Heather Curtis, Chris Evans, Mike Hamilton, Cliff Putney, and Jon Roberts for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I also would like to thank the editors of Church History and the journal's anonymous reviewer for their comments and guidance, which spurred important improvements to the work. I am also appreciative of Bailey Poletti's copyediting of this work for Church History.
References
1 For an account of the donation, see Peel, Robert, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1982), 9–10Google Scholar.
2 Mary Baker Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, in Prose Works other than Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1924), 206.
3 Eddy, Mary Baker, No and Yes, in Prose Works Other Than Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1925)Google Scholar, 45, 46. First published in 1891.
4 See Stark, Rodney and Bainbridge, William, The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 237–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The authors cite a 1926 census on religious membership in the United States in which the breakdown by gender for Christian Science is 75.5 percent female in comparison to a statistic of 55.7 percent female for overall church membership in the United States. A 1906 census, as published in Religious Bodies: 1906, vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1910), gave a gender breakdown for the Church of Christ, Scientist, in the United States as 72 percent female. I conducted a gender analysis of the Christian Science Practitioner (healer) listing in the December 1910 issue of The Christian Science Journal. My results gave a rough figure of 89 percent female for Christian Science practitioners as authorized by the Christian Science Church at this time: the month and year of Eddy's decease.
5 Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 218. While Gottschalk identifies such a Christian Science persona as representative of only a minority of Christian Scientists, his analysis indicates its prominence in perceptions of Christian Science culture. For example, he also remarks in the same paragraph that “some of the more ethereal of Mrs. Eddy's followers affected a high-pitched, superficially sweet tone of voice—so that Ezra Pound, for example, could readily identify a woman he referred to in a letter as having a ‘Christian Science voice.’” See Paige, D. D., ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (New York: 1950), 17Google Scholar, cited in Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, 218.
6 Putney, Clifford, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 144Google Scholar.
7 Beginning with the landmark fiftieth edition of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1891), Eddy included a new chapter, titled “Science, Theology, Medicine,” in which she systematically discussed Christian Science in relation to these disciplines.
8 Gottschalk has argued that “Christian Science is best understood as a pragmatic interpretation of Christian revelation.” Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life, 278.
9 Erwin Canham, Commitment to Freedom: The Story of The Christian Science Monitor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), xvi. Canham held the following editorial positions at The Christian Science Monitor: managing editor (1941–1944), editor (1945–1964), and editor-in-chief (1964–1974).
10 “Mr. Thomas Hughes And His Address,” Harvard Advocate Supplement 10, no. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., October 14, 1870).
11 Winn, William E., “Tom Brown's Schooldays and the Development of ‘Muscular Christianity,’” Church History 29, no. 1 (March 1960): 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, https://doi.org/10.2307/3161617.
12 See Brett McCay and Kate McCay, “When Christianity Was Muscular,” in Muscular Christianity: The Relationship Between Men and Faith (Jenks, Okla.: Semper Vigilis, 2018), chap. 3, Kindle. They note that “the Muscular Christianity movement was never officially organized, or headed by a single person, but was instead a cultural trend that manifested itself in different ways and was supported by various figures and churches—predominantly those of the liberal, mainline Protestant variety.”
13 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 7.
14 See Putney, Muscular Christianity, 69–70.
15 Luther Gulick, “What The Triangle Means,” Young Men's Era, January 18, 1894.
16 Gulick, “What The Triangle Means.”
17 Putney, Clifford, “Luther Gulick: His Contributions to Springfield College, the YMCA, and ‘Muscular Christianity,’” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 39, no. 1–2 (Summer 2011): 158Google Scholar. Luther Gulick's grandfather, Peter Gulick, took up the Christian missionary cause in the 1820s, accepting an appointment in 1827 from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to serve in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Subsequent descendants of Peter Gulick also took up careers and posts as missionaries in foreign lands.
18 Gulick, “What The Triangle Means.”
19 Gulick, “What The Triangle Means.”
20 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 72.
21 Mary Baker Eddy wrote this in a passage on “Testimonials” for the Manual of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1895), 47.
22 See Putney, Muscular Christianity, 150–153.
23 See Mary Farrell Bednarowski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 34. While Bednarowski has observed that viewpoints of Christian Science as gnostic are “misleading,” she also has acknowledged their preponderance.
24 See Williams, Peter, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 132Google Scholar.
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26 Ahlstrom, “Harmonial Religion since the Later Nineteenth Century,” 1019.
27 Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 295.
28 Stephen Gottschalk, Rolling Away The Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 364.
29 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 150.
30 Eddy, Manual of The Mother Church, 41, advised: “When it is necessary to show the great gulf between Christian Science and theosophy, hypnotism, or spiritualism, do it, but without harsh words.” On Helen Van Anderson as “one of Hopkins's star missionaries,” see Beryl Satter, Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 116; and see Charles Braden, Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 140–141. According to Braden, Hopkins took instruction in Christian Science from Mary Baker Eddy in December 1883. Beginning in September 1884, she served as an editor of The Christian Science Journal and subsequently “was dismissed as editor in October 1885.” Also, for a biographical entry on Hopkins, see accession nos. 550.58.010–550.58.027, The Mary Baker Eddy Papers, accessed November 11, 2020, https://marybakereddypapers.org. It reads in part that Hopkins “was a student of Mary Baker Eddy's, taking Primary class instruction in December 1883,” and that she “joined the Christian Scientist Association (CSA) in 1884 and was briefly the acting editor of The Christian Science Journal.”
31 Mary Baker Eddy, “Questions Answered,” The Christian Science Journal 5, no. 1 (April 1887): 25.
32 For an analysis of the relationship of Spiritualism and Theosophy, see Stephen Prothero, “From Spiritualism to Theosophy: ‘Uplifting’ a Democratic Tradition,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 3, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 197–216; and see Robert Ellwood and Catherine Wessinger, “The Feminism of ‘Universal Brotherhood’: Women in the Theosophical Movement,” in Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Exploration Outside the Mainstream, ed. Catherine Wessinger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 69. They write that Theosophical Society founders Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steele Olcott “believed that if the nonsubstantial realities of which Spiritualism hinted could be penetrated and joined with the science of the progressive spirit of the day, then the unity of life might again be grasped.”
33 Boston Daily Globe, January 7, 1895.
34 See A10835B, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
35 L. L. Doggett, History of the Boston Young Men's Christian Association (Boston: Young Men's Christian Association, 1901), 72.
36 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1881), 233 (hereafter cited as Science and Health [1881]).
37 See Ann Douglas, “The Loss of Theology: From Dogma to Fiction,” in The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 121–164.
38 Douglas, “The Loss of Theology,” 124.
39 Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1934), 227 (hereafter cited as Science and Health [1934]).
40 Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany (Boston: First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1913), 218.
41 Charles Howard Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America (New York: Association Press, 1951), 246.
42 Hopkins, History of the Y.M.C.A. in North America, 254–255. Gulick read this talk at the twenty-ninth international convention of the Young Men's Christian Associations, Kansas City, Missouri, May 9, 1891. See Young Men's Era, November 26, 1891.
43 Mary Baker Eddy, “Christian Science in Tremont Temple,” Miscellaneous Writings, 1883–1896, in Prose Works Other Than Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1925), 96.
44 The Theosophical Society's early emphasis on Spiritualism made it attractive to women in the Spiritualist community. See “Theosophy,” in June Melby Benowitz, ed., Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, Cali.: ABC-CLIO, 2017), 597.
45 Banner of Light, November 10, 1866, p. 2, cited in Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 83.
46 Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority, 10.
47 See Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 203–204.
48 William James, Is Life Worth Living? (Philadelphia: S. Burns Weston, 1896), 61.
49 See Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 204.
50 Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 205.
51 Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 205–206.
52 Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (Merriam Webster, 1991) dates the origin of the term “rapid transit” to 1873.
53 Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 206.
54 Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 207.
55 See Donald Meyer, “The Scientific Humanism of G. Stanley Hall,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 11, no. 2 (October 1971): 201–213. Meyer notes, “In 1904 Hall revealed the wider dimensions of his ‘higher anthropology’ when he published his greatest work, Adolescence.” Meyer describes Hall's view of adolescence as “an especially crucial time in a person's growth because, in this period, the higher sensibilities develop and the ideals of love and service take form.” Meyer, “The Scientific Humanism of G. Stanley Hall,” 209.
56 G. Stanley Hall, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, vol. 1 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, & Co., 1917), 30.
57 Hall, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, 1:293.
58 Hall analyzed Jesus's healing work in a chapter titled “The Miracles” in Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, vol. 2 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1917), 592–676. For the most part, Hall assumed the healing accounts to be exaggerated and more legendary rather than objective and factual. Nonetheless, for Hall, they carried deep significance as testaments to Jesus's evolved spiritual nature and as an example of human potential. He asserted, “The lesson and moral of the miracles, therefore, is the higher powers of man. . . . They show that there is nothing in his real life not possible to us, according, of course, to our gifts of insight, feeling and endeavor; for all his powers differ from ours only in degree and not in kind.” Hall, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, 2:674–675. Eddy came to view Jesus's healing ministry as not miraculous in the sense of defying natural laws but as revelatory of divine law that was applicable to human and temporal conditions. She wrote, “The miracles recorded in the Bible, which had before seemed to me supernatural, grew divinely natural and apprehensible; though uninspired interpreters ignorantly pronounce Christ's healing miraculous, instead of seeing therein the operation of the divine law.” Mary Baker Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection, in Prose Works Other Than Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1925), 26. First published in 1892.
59 Hall, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, 2:601.
60 Mary Baker Eddy, Rudimental Divine Science, in Prose Works Other Than Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: The First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1925), 3. First published in 1891.
61 Putney, Muscular Christianity, 45.
62 See Eddy, Science and Health (1881), 1:160–161.
63 Eddy, Science and Health (1881), 1:161.
64 Eddy, Science and Health (1881), 1:161.
65 Eddy, Science and Health (1934), 35.
66 Higginson wrote his “manifesto” after introduction to the writings of the British clergymen and novelists Kingsley and Hughes, which endorsed a call for “manly” Christianity.
67 Thomas W. Higginson, “Saints, and Their Bodies,” Atlantic Monthly 1, no. 5 (March 1858): 583.
68 Higginson, “Saints, and Their Bodies,” 582.
69 Higginson, “Saints, and Their Bodies,” 584.
70 Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection, 33.
71 A11029, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
72 Paul Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971), 69.
73 Eddy, Science and Health (1934), 37.
74 Heather Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 18.
75 “Charitable Activities of Mary Baker Eddy,” a handout compiled by The Mary Baker Eddy Library, updated September 2002.
76 The letter, which accompanied Eddy's donation of $500 in 1901 (equal to $15,000 in 2020), was published as part of an article titled “All Races United: To Honor the Memory of the Baron and Baroness de Hirsch.” Eddy's words read in part, “The movement to erect a monument to the late Baron and Baroness de Hirsch enlists my hearty sympathy. They were unquestionably used in a remarkable degree as instruments in the Divine Love.” Mail and Express, January 1, 1901.
77 T. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Harper Collins, 2009), 102.
78 For an account of the fundraising drive in 1909 for the new Boston YMCA building, see William B. Whiteside, The Boston Y.M.C.A. and Community Need: A Century's Evolution, 1851–1951 (New York: Association Press, 1951), 138–139. He notes, “Newspapers gave ample dramatic coverage, and also large sums of money: $1,000 each came from the Herald, Globe, Post, and Transcript. The Monitor solicited several thousands from its readers, and Mrs. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, personally contributed one thousand dollars.”
79 The Boston Traveler, Oct. 25, 1909, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
80 Boston Journal, Oct. 29, 1909, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
81 On November 1, 1909, The Christian Science Monitor published the “Names of Contributors to the Y.M.C.A. Fund.” Numbers of Monitor reader donors run well into the hundreds (est. 400), with about one-third of the donations at $100 or more, including many at the $500 level.
82 Letter to Mary Baker Eddy from F. P. Speare, Educational Director of Boston Young Men's Christian Association: October 26, 1909, L17787, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
83 Eddy also generously contributed to the YMCA in Concord, New Hampshire, during the years 1902–1906, when she was a resident of that community, and to the Newton, Massachusetts, YMCA in 1909, when she was living in that community. See “Charitable Activities of Mary Baker Eddy.”
84 Doggett, History of the Boston Young Men's Christian Association, 48.
85 Letter to Mary Baker Eddy from F. P. Speare, October 26, 1909.
86 Boston Times, October 30, 1909, The Mary Baker Eddy Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
87 Eddy, “Pond and Purpose,” 206n53.
88 Doggett, History of the Boston Young Men's Christian Association, 72n35.
89 See L. Ashley Squires, Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 4.
90 See Eddy, Science and Health (1934), 199.
91 Eddy, Science and Health (1934), 199–200.
92 Eddy, Science and Health (1934), 200.
93 Eddy, Science and Health (1934), 199.
94 Scrapbook (SB018), The Mary Baker Eddy Library Collection, The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
95 See Bishop, Morris, A History of Cornell (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 416Google Scholar.
96 Porter, Harry F., “Selected Articles,” Christian Science Sentinel 10, no. 23 (February 8, 1908): 447Google Scholar. First published by Toronto Star (Ontario).
97 Porter, Harry F., “Selected Articles,” Christian Science Sentinel 11, no. 39 (May 29, 1909): 767Google Scholar. First published by Cornell Era.
98 Harry F. Porter, The Christian Science Journal 29, no. 6 (September 1911): 347.
99 Hall, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, 2:614.
100 Eddy, Science and Health (1934), xi.
101 Canham noted, “In a broad, nontechnical and nonlegal sense, the Monitor is not a religious newspaper. Down through the years, from the very outset, the Monitor was designed to be a ‘real newspaper’ as its first editor, Archibald McLellan, defined it before it was ever issued.” Canham, Commitment to Freedom: The Story of the Christian Science Monitor, xvi. For today's readers, the news source gives this account on its website about its religious underpinnings and affiliation: “The Monitor has built a reputation in the journalism world over the past century for the integrity, credibility and fair-mindedness of its reporting. It is produced for anyone who cares about the progress of the human endeavor around the world and seeks news reported with compassion, intelligence, and an essentially constructive lens. For many, that caring has religious roots. For many, it does not. The Monitor has always embraced both audiences.” The Christian Science Monitor, “What is The Christian Science Monitor?,” accessed February 27, 2020, https://www.csmonitor.com/About.
102 Doggett, History of the Boston Young Men's Christian Association, 74.
103 See “What was Eddy's Approach to Business?,” The Mary Baker Eddy Library, updated April 29, 2016, https://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/research/eddys-approach-business. It states, “When her husband, Daniel Patterson, deserted her in 1866, [Eddy] was nearly penniless; by 1907 she had a net worth of over $1,000,000 (about $25,000,000 in today's money).” According to the piece, Eddy was a capable investor and she earned income from “royalty payments from her books, such as Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” For Eddy's oversight of her intellectual property, see Ventimiglia, Andrew, “Authorship and Authority in Intellectual Property: The Copyright Activism of Mary Baker Eddy,” in Copyrighting God: Ownership of the Sacred in American Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 3, DOI 10.1017/9781108349444. Ventimiglia points out that “the acute attention she paid to her intellectual property rights, particularly the ownership rights in her central religious text Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, allowed Eddy to achieve key organizational objectives within the Christian Science Church (minimizing threats to her authority, limiting divergent interpretations of her work) while also helping her articulate an investment in both the ethics and economics of ownership in the religious domain.” Ventimiglia, Copyrighting God, 115.