On being raised by a Christian Scientist

An exploration into abuse with roots specifically related to my mother's religious practices.

In some pretty complex and negative ways, my mother's practice of Christian Science underscored and influenced my whole life. It still does. Many of my deepest fears and phobias are rooted in my religious upbringing. These issues have been difficult to separate from other abuse issues and sick family dynamics. It is my hope here to isolate and examine them. To try to set aside all other history or trauma and deal with just my mother's religion as it influenced my life. This is a work in progress. The writing and concepts may be somewhat redundant or convoluted. It's not my intention at this time to make it all crystal clear to readers. The very process of writing, rewriting, and editing my exploration, over time, is my therapy process. Here you see the process in action.

Christian Science, Officially called Church of Christ, Scientist, is a faith healing religion founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy. It is a religion that claims to explain the spiritual "science" behind Jesus’ healing methods. Christian Scientists believe that because God is completely good he could not possibly have created anything evil, including sin, disease, and death. The perception of evil must therefore be a human error. The basic premise of healing is to acknowledge that God's creations are all perfect – that sin, sickness, and death are only illusions.

Christian Science teaches that God and his creation are completely spiritual and perfect. Matter does not exist; it is an illusion to be overcome by understanding its nothingness. People are subject to the laws of matter (called "mortal mind") only to the extent that they believe the laws are real. As human beings begin to understand that all physical matter is an illusion, they will supposedly become increasingly free from the consequences of living under that illusion.

Mrs. Eddy presented Christian Science as a scientific system of healing based upon spiritual laws. She taught that these laws must be followed to the letter for Christian Science healing to work. According to Mrs. Eddy, Christian Science cannot be mixed with any other religion or system of healing, it is incompatible with medicine.

Confusion

"None but a seasoned Christian Scientist can examine a literary animal of Mrs. Eddy's creation and tell which end of it the tail is on"
"She is easily the most baffling and bewildering writer in the literary trade"
                  ~Mark Twain~

As a child, I was expected to understand and believe confusing nonsense like the above quote from the churches main textbook. I did not and could not. What I did understand was that I was stupid, wrong, and evil. I was not able to make heads or tails of the circular logic and mishmash of spiritual rhetoric found in the Science & Health and other Christian Science literature. The Science & Health is the church's book that explains the religion and supposedly interprets the Christian Bible's true meaning. However, its various parts often conflict directly with each other and the Bible. It is written in a meandering, cryptic, haphazard style that is anything but scientific.

According to my mom, God was "all in all" everywhere, and the world he created was perfect—a world of abundance and harmony. Everything else was "mortal mind" or error. Error was code-word for evil and "the devil". But the world I saw, the world I experienced was nothing like perfect. My parents constantly argued about money. They seemed to hate each other. Things broke, accidents happened, and pets got sick and died. I felt pain and lived in fear. From my earliest memories I was acutely aware of the difference between what my mother said about God's perfect world, and the world in which I lived.

Loss of self

Because a "good Christian Scientist" believes that acknowledging the existence of disease and illness is a failure of faith, my mother did not engage in the normal nurturance a child needs to thrive and get through childhood illnesses, scrapes, and bumps. Instead, I received lectures on religion. I was made to feel that my feelings, my problems, my pain was not real. We did not celebrate birthdays for the same reason. She thought that would be an acknowledgment that age and death were real. I only understood that, I didn't matter.

Did I really exist? To be told that acknowledging aches and pains was false, that your illnesses were an illusion, that a "good Christian Scientist" knows these things are lies, that they really don't exist, is a real set up for enduring psychological problems for a child.

"A good Christian Scientist"

No true Christian Science member should ever go to a doctor, hospital, or take any kind of medicine, for to do so is to deny "Divine Science." (Christian Science Sentinel, May 9, 1942, p. 469.)

In my mother's opinion, based on church teachings, if one was a good enough Christian Scientist, they would not get sick or have problems. They would be able to see and experience God's perfection and his perfect world. I was never able to be a good enough Christian Scientist. In my mother's world, I was responsible for all of my aches and pain, feeling sick, and even being hurt after an accident. My thinking and incorrect application of religious teachings was the problem.

There's no way I could meet my mother's expectations for perfection. I didn't feel it. I didn't see it, and I didn't understand it. She said that I was God's perfect child and I knew I wasn't. My self concept was all askew and mixed up. Was I my insides or was I the elusive perfect outsides my mother harped about incessantly?

Empathy?

Hour after hour screaming and crying and scared to death. My head was exploding in agony. My mother busy denying the very existence of pain. Proclaiming loudly that I was God's perfect child, that there was no room for pain and sickness in God's perfect world. I had an ear infection. Eventually my ear drained huge amounts of puss and blood all over my pillow and I felt blessed relief. My mother claimed that I had received a healing. Of course any objective reasonable adult knows that most such problems resolve themselves eventually. That's how our body works. But Christian Scientists like my mother claim a healing was preformed, discounting the needless pain and suffering of their children in their zeal to prove their "Science". They seem woefully ignorant, even purposefully so, of the natural healing and regenerative powers of the human body.

It was always the same story at home, whether it was an earache, abscessed tooth, strep throat, or the time my sister nearly cut her heal off on a broken bottle—a gaping wound received in a dirty drainage ditch. She should have had stitches and a tetanus shot, but instead received prayer. Prayer that always felt stern and punishing no matter how softly my mother spoke. It was all very frightening. It was as if she spoke a foreign language. One that everyone seemed to understand, but me. Prayer was an intellectual exercise not a warm loving act. A child in crisis needs medical care, reassurance, and actual warm fuzzy love, not words read out of a book and lectures.

My mother was more concerned about her religion and "right thinking" than what was happening to my sisters and I. Her religion came first in her life. I felt emotionally abandoned, disconnected; I did not receive what I instinctively wanted or needed (validation, acceptance, warmth, safety, love). I was left to deal with my fears, feelings, and inner conflicts all by myself.

As a little boy, she was the "all powerful" part of God that they talked about in Sunday school. God was everywhere they said. He was omnipotent. My mom was both God and the devil in a very literal sense. She was not the giver of nurturance or safety. She gave life all right—and she could take it away. And I was always acutely aware of that fact. I can't count the times I watched her pray over sick pets. They always died slow horrible deaths. That was my view of Christian Science healings from a very early age. And it was a horrible knowledge to bear.

I am so grateful that my sisters and I never came down with anything too terribly serious. We were not vaccinated against any of the common diseases including polio. The church's history is replete with well documented cases of children who have died needlessly from very treatable problems like appendicitis, measles ¹⁹⁸⁵, diphtheria ¹⁹⁸², meningitis ¹⁹⁸⁴, untreated juvenile onset diabetes ^{1986, 89 & 92}, bowl obstruction ¹⁹⁸⁶, and pneumonia ¹⁹⁸⁵, because their parents refused to seek medical attention. It's more than simple negligence or child abuse, it's homicide by Christian Science. The religion kills. One recent study documented 28 child fatalities between 1975 and 1995 in Christian Science households from illnesses in which survival rates exceed 90% with medical care. None was given in these cases. I'm certain that in previous decades, there were countless more needless deaths. I know in my heart of hearts my mother would never have taken us to a doctor or hospital for help no matter how bad we were ailing.

For all of my mom's religious machinations and rhetoric, I never once in my life experienced or saw a demonstration of a Christian Science healing.

Embarrassment and shame

When I was in grade school, I was not allowed to participate in health education classes. Usually the teacher would quietly guide me out of the room before the lessons started. A couple of times I was forced to publicly remind the teacher that I was a Christian Scientist and that I needed to leave the room. It was embarrassing and humiliating and terribly hard to try to explain to the other children who were naturally curious. It wasn't long before I figured out that I didn't have to do that. My mother would never know. By the third grade, I was attending all of the health classes. They were mostly about dental hygiene and personal cleanliness. I just didn't need one more thing to make me feel different than and separate from. My life was already overflowing with that. But keeping secrets from my mom was pretty scary too.

As a side note, I tried my first puff of a cigarette when I was in the third grade. Dangerous behavior indeed for a little Christian Science boy, but the excitement of sneaking out with the "bad boys" during recess to smoke a stolen cigarette was intoxicating, scary, and glorious. For those few minutes during recess, I was free. My mother, and God, would never know.

During the summer between the second and third grades we moved to Scappoose. Chapman actually, which was several miles further on into the depths of the forests. My dad, a contractor, went broke and moved the family into a friends little logging shack at the end of a dirt road in the woods. School was a long bus ride away from home (several miles). I think it was this distance that allowed me to feel separated enough from my mother to do things like attend the health classes and try puffing on a cigarette.

Don't Speak of it, don't fix anything

For the longest time I thought it was just my mother's nature to keep everything inside and keep everything hush hush. Family problems, personal differences, and any difficult issue of growing up were never openly talked about. Discussion was out of the question. I've come to understand this now in terms of her Christian Science. Again, in Christian Science, God is everything and everywhere and perfect. To think or act differently would be a lack of faith and to invite problems. I believe my mother's religious zeal compounded any emotional or psychiatric problems she had. In particular, her narcissism (narcissism in the psychological sense that she saw herself and meeting her own needs as the center of the world—not necessarily self-love). Her family was there only to meet her overpowering need to protect her ego and sense of self. Her religiously filtered vision of reality was the only valid reality. This made other people, including her children's, ideas and feelings largely irrelevant. It also made their physical and emotional pain irrelevant.

There was no debate. There was no calm sane discussion. There was only mother's religious rhetoric and her iron will. Anything that challenged her position, belief, or will, would usually lead directly to outbursts of violent hysterical rage. In latter years as an adult, I still could not discuss anything of merit with her. She would squint her eyes and set her jaw and I would know that she was busy "knowing the truth". It's as if she would just go inside of herself and go away. Communication was out of the question. And when there is no communication, there is no chance for a real relationship, no chance for love, no humanity.

In Christian Science, man is considered perfect. In light of this, I believe it made it almost impossible for my mother to question her own behavior. She seemed incapable of offering anything close to an apology for even the smallest thing. Problems do not exist. Redemption is unnecessary because sin is only an illusion. I know this may not make much sense, but a lot about Christian Science and my mother's behavior don't easily make sense.

Growing up in a Christian Science household meant that my problem-solving and conflict-management skills were underdeveloped to say the least, as were my social skills. I was totally unprepared during childhood to handle budding relationships of any kind. I didn't know how to build or sustain friendships. I didn't have a functional model to pattern these things after. I grew up mistrustful and with a huge fear of intimacy of any kind. Our family was rather isolated. My parents didn't have much of a social life and it only became more so after they divorced.

Black or White

My mother was an absolutist. She saw the world and everything in it in black or white terms. Things were either all good or all bad (evil). I believe Christian Science is basically a philosophy of absolutism. There is simply no middle ground on spiritual matters or church doctrines. One must stick rigidly to church teachings, not only from the organization's governmental standpoint that starts with the autocratic authority of the Mother Church in Boston, but the very idea of their faith-healing demands what is called a "radical reliance" on faith and "knowing the truth". That is, to the exclusion of all other philosophies or healing methods including doctors and medicines.

The awful repercussions to black or white (all or nothing) thinking is that it is necessarily extreme and rigid. It does not bend with the wind, so to speak, to allow for change. It does not accommodate the flexibility needed for growth to happen. It is static. I find it interesting that the church has been in a steady state of decline for decades (actually quite happy that it is) but that's how my mother lived, rigidly clinging to ideas disregarding the fact that they didn't seem to work. As a child this felt smothering and oppressive to me though I didn't have words to describe it then.

Mother Eddy

Mary Bake Eddy,  the founder of Christian Science, used her power and position in the church to control and manipulate people, primarily through her religious rhetoric. She would make new rules or claim to have new spiritual laws revealed to her by God to suit her ends. In other words, if she perceived a church member to be gaining too much power, she would make new rules that would limit the possibility of their further rise within the church. If and when that didn't work, she would accuse them of using spiritual forces against her and excommunicate them. She wielded absolute power over her followers, demanding absolute loyalty, and with a high degree of paranoia that people were against her or against the church.

My mom, in so many ways, mirrored Mrs. Eddy's paranoid obsessions and would often accuse people of being against her—even her children. Like Mrs. Eddy, my mother justified all of her behaviors with her religion. My mom was constantly warring with those around her, her children, husband, natal family, neighbors, workmates, and even strangers. In her world people were always plotting against her intending her harm.

I imagine my mother and Mrs. Eddy had a lot in common; a disdain for the physical, the body's five senses, the sensual, sexual, and yet I'm quite sure, they were drawn secretly to those very things. Control was a must for them. They "had" to be right and were so certain of their rightness, that there was no room for other people's opinions, thoughts, ideas, or manner. They were very difficult people and used their religion as a barrier to protect them from any real intimacy or closeness.

Escape

How could I escape the abuse, the feelings of being wrong and even evil. How could I escape my mother's powerful religious rhetoric—not only her spoken words, but the constant condemning voice she had in my head. How could I escape the nagging questions of my own existence when it went so much further than my mother. It was my father's passive acceptance of what was going on. It was my aunt and grandparents (all Christian Scientists on my mother's side). It was the cooperation of my teachers at school to remove me from health classes. It was the other children at Sunday school who seemed to understand and even enjoy it. It was the church here in Portland (Sixth Church of Christ Scientists) and the so-called Mother Church in Boston. It was God himself. Note: To this day I still have recurring nightmares that include the big brick church building of my youth in downtown Portland.

My ideas of escape were radical fantasies of going off and living with the Indians, of becoming an animal and living in the forest, of being a condemned man being lead off to the gas chamber. My feelings of powerlessness regarding my mother were practically absolute because I perceived her as "all powerful". I managed my escapes carefully and I did escape in my own way. I must have been in the about the first grade, maybe younger the first time I remember escaping. I drew pictures of the cartoon character, Crabby Appleton, from the Tom Terrific cartoon show on my bedroom wall. Crabby was an old mean man and the villain of the cartoon series; he was "rotten to the core". I also drew pictures of daggers next to him. In my mind this represented me throwing daggers at my mother (stabbing her over and over actually). I got in trouble for drawing on the wall, but she never knew the truth, my truth about that drawing. I felt power by making my feelings concrete, by marking the wall with them, by having a sort of code for my feelings that only I understood, by breaking my mother's rules to not mark the walls up.

Rage

My mother was filled with anger. She was a very bitter women prone to hysterical outbursts and fits of rage. Her behavior was often unpredictable and bizarre. I'm sure the roots of this are in her own childhood, but much of it was probably due to the conflicts that are inherent within the Christian Science view of the world. That is, to be a "good Christian Scientist" one would have to be acutely aware of the incongruities between "right thinking" or the image of God's perfect creation, and the physical world. The energies required to constantly mentally reinterpret the world and "know the truth" must have been substantial.

Mom considered herself a very good Scientist. She had taken various church sanctioned classes and was a member of a Christian Science Association. She owned boxes full of church approved literature. She was constantly reading church literature. I believe she had the training to become a Christian Science Practitioner (authorized healer) if she had wanted to be one.

If God created all, and all is perfect, where does the illusion of sin, disease, and death come from? What then is the origin of evil?
Christian Science cannot and does not answer this basic question. It has been called the Achilles heel of Christian Science.

The fact that her life was obviously dysfunctional and filled with financial and relationship problems must have bothered her greatly. Not only did the realities of her difficult life cause her to pray even harder, it had to point out the very weaknesses in her faith. How could one not be bothered when none of one's hardest held beliefs seemed to be working. Her precious metaphysical healing wasn't working on any demonstrable level. God's perfection was not being manifested. Her life's work, all of her study, all of her books, just weren't fixing anything. What conflict to have to live with! And, the more discrepancy that existed between her religious ideals and the real world about her, the tighter she clung to her prayer and religious rhetoric.

I think it was this tension of trying to hold her world together with prayer and "right thinking" that kept her wound up like a too-tight spring. She was constantly on the verge of her breaking point. The personal energy that she invested in trying to keep the forces of evil at bay left precious little for interpersonal relationships, including those with her children. So, when she perceived disobedience, disrespect, or dissent from those around her, she exploded—her spring would break.

Revenge and Catharsis

About a year after mom had her stroke I dug out the boxes with her books in them. One by one I fanned through the books to make sure there were no important papers hidden inside, and dumped them in the garbage. I was taken by the extent of margin notes she had scribbled in some of them. It truly was something that showed a deep commitment that might be called a life-work. When I got to the notebooks of handwritten notes from her Christian Science classes and association, I was awestruck. Not so much because of their existence, but by the sheer insanity of what was written. I'd have to categorize much of it as paranoid babbling, going on and on about mental malpractice, mesmerism and malicious animal magnetism (some sort of evil mind force supposedly used against Christian Scientists by their enemies).

I had thoughts about offering these books and notes to my oldest sister or perhaps my cousin Nancy, but those thoughts quickly were replaced with a gleeful destructive binge. I ripped all the pages from the notebooks and destroyed them along with the books. All that stuff went to the dump never to be seen again. I decided that I would not be responsible in any way shape or form for propagating this awful religion (cult). I would not take part in extending its legacy in any way. I went so far as to pour dirty water and old latex paint on the heap of books after putting them in the garbage so there would be no possibility of anyone ever salvaging them.

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