Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Mrs. Patterson hurt her back in an accident. After reading the Bible’s account of Jesus curing a paralytic, she found her own injury cured. She set about inventing her own quasi-Christian pseudoscientific belief system, which she presented in a book called Science and Health. There’s only “belief in pain.” “We say man suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue. This is human belief, not the truth of being, for matter cannot suffer,” and “what is termed disease does not exist.” And not just pain, not just illness, but dying and matter itself—none of it is real. What’s more, “evil is an illusion, and it has no real basis. Evil is a false belief” that “has no reality.” Over the next few years, she married for a third time and retook her maiden name, becoming Mary Baker Eddy, and founded the Church of Christ, Scientist. Her followers, forming more than a thousand Christian Science churches in America within thirty years, were called not believers but scientists.