by Sarah Gerard
As editor of the Christian Science Journal, Hopkins had enlarged it and made it a monthly publication. She also made a point of skewering anyone whom Eddy perceived as having violated or misappropriated her teachings. This included Eddy’s own students: in the decade before meeting Hopkins, Eddy had taken several to court for using her work. She had returned to a puritanical religious approach in Christian Science, eschewing all other schools of metaphysics50—including the Spiritualism, clairvoyance, and other mystical avenues she had once dabbled in herself—especially those that taught variations of Christian Science. She considered herself something of a prophet with a sole claim to truth;51 those who strayed from the truth, or misrepresented it, were frauds and heretics.
Eddy was also sensitive to possible rivals. In the year since her editorship began, Hopkins had shown herself to be an important actor in the Christian Science movement.52 Loyal to Eddy, Hopkins was also ambitious and charismatic, with a decidedly countercultural streak and a taste for religious eclecticism, reading voraciously from all faith traditions. In 1885, thirteen months after hiring Hopkins, Eddy abruptly dismissed her.53
In the months prior to her termination, Hopkins had befriended another energetic and enterprising former student of Eddy’s, Mary Plunkett. With encouragement from Plunkett, in late 1885 Hopkins left her husband and son to move to Chicago,54 where the “mind cure” movement was booming. By spring 1886, she’d founded the Emma Curtis Hopkins College of Christian Science,55 naming Plunkett as president. Shortly thereafter, she founded, alongside a group of prominent students, the Hopkins Metaphysical Association,56 an open forum for people interested in metaphysical healing of all kinds. Members of the group went on to establish independent branches, and, by the end of the following year, between seventeen and twenty-one Hopkins Metaphysical Associations were operating across the country.57 Hopkins toured and gave lectures to audiences sometimes numbering in the hundreds. By the end of 1887, she had personally instructed six hundred students.58
Like Eddy, Hopkins taught that God is all, God is good, and God is Mind.59 Therefore, matter cannot exist. Therefore, there is no true evil. Therefore, health and spiritual redemption can only be attained once God’s true nature is understood.
Though she called herself a Christian Scientist, unlike Eddy, Hopkins strongly opposed teachings about sin and repentance,60 claiming that such teachings created evil by implanting false beliefs. Instead of instructing her students to “argue” evil away, Hopkins taught them to “enter the silence” and meditate on “affirmations” and “denials”61 to cleanse the mortal mind of false beliefs and enable the Divine Mind to shine through it. In addition, practicing such affirmations and denials empowered believers to embrace their Divine nature and become creators of their worlds. In her tract “The Radiant I AM: A Self-Healing,” filled entirely with such affirmations and denials, Hopkins demonstrates: “I AM power of Life to the universe.62 Because I live, all that hath form or name shall live. There shall be no death nor fear of death throughout the boundaries of eternal spaces from this day forth forever. That which proceedeth forth from Me is Life and the power of Life forever.” Significant among Hopkins’s teachings is her conceptualization of the Trinity. Eddy had believed the Trinity was suggestive of polytheism, so was against it, but spoke of God as being both Father and Mother—a masculine, or material, aspect countered by a feminine, or spiritual, aspect—with the two constantly at war. In Hopkins’s ideology, God is Father, Son, and Mother-Spirit, or “Holy Comforter.”63 Each corresponds to a different historical epoch: God the Father represents the patriarchy of the past; God the Son represents the Second Coming of Christ and the freeing of human thought; and God the Mother-Spirit represents the dawn of the new era. Together, they are the whole spirit of God.
My mom became director of the Spouse Abuse Shelter of Religious Community Services in 1986, the year Pinellas County passed its preferred arrest policy.64 I was one year old. The shelter was a dreary two-story house with few windows. It had a big, drafty living room and bedrooms off the living room with enough space to sleep twenty people. The shelter had built a kitchen and an area upstairs for the house manager. On Christmas, a man in a Santa Claus costume passed out candy to any children staying there.
At the time, there were six and a half people on staff, including my mom: a secretary, two counselors, an overnight house manager, a day care worker, a part-time house manager for the weekends, and occasionally a volunteer. As director, my mom supervised the staff, wrote grant proposals, spoke at public events—even answered the phone. It was a heavy workload. Stress made her irritable all the time. Now four years into her sobriety, she’d learned not to lash out; instead she stuffed her feelings down. She carried her anger around like an anvil, pretending it wasn’t heavy, lest she feel its full weight and let it fall.
Though the preferred arrest policy had been instated, police response continued much as it had before, and there was still no penalty for abusers violating injunctions for protection—they could rip up their injunction in front of a police officer and the officer couldn’t do anything about it.65 There were no domestic violence units in state attorneys’ offices,66 and no protocol for prosecuting abusers if victims refused to testify. In those instances, the cases were dropped. My mom wanted all of these things to change—and more. She knew what it was like to feel unsafe in your own home; it was an unacceptable way to live. She wanted a cultural revolution. She wanted to bring about a nonviolent world.
In addition to her work with the Domestic Violence Task Force, and the trainings she was doing for local police—who misbehaved in class and often mistook her discourse on male privilege to be evidence of lesbianism—she was also a member of the Florida Coalition Against Domestic Violence, as was every shelter director in the state. Every few weeks, she’d leave at four in the morning to drive to Tallahassee for meetings, and to lobby legislators for better laws. The coalition wanted a statewide arrest policy like the one in Pinellas, stronger injunctions, mandatory training for state attorneys, and laws to protect police officers from legal action if they chose to arrest abusers. They also wanted to expand the legal definition of domestic violence, to require judges to set higher bail for abusers, and to prevent abusers from being able to buy guns. If they couldn’t get a meeting with a legislator, they showed up in the legislator’s office. If they couldn’t get a meeting that day, they’d wait until the next day. They worked with legislators’ staffs to draft language for bills, and testified at committee meetings, and marched on Tallahassee for abortion rights, and drove to DC to march for the Equal Rights Amendment.
When she wasn’t lobbying legislators, and training, and marching, my mom was hosting NOW meetings in our living room, and meeting once a month with the task force—and outside of that, she was taking classes at the church, and raising a child, and spending time with my father. Often it still didn’t feel like enough.
Women at the Spouse Abuse Shelter could stay for thirty days. Back then, there was no transitional housing, so women who came through the shelter and couldn’t find other living arrangements were forced to return to their abusers. There was nothing my mom could do for those women but keep the doors open. One morning, walking through her secretary’s office, my mom passed a woman whose body was covered in bruises. Her eyes were flat. She was one of many like her, but something about her struck my mom. She proceeded past the woman into her office, shut the door, and burst into tears. She’d never understand how someone could do that to another person. She couldn’t tolerate the idea that this woman might have to return to an unsafe home. My mom sought solace in her faith, went to church every Sunday, read books, prayed often, but where was solace for these women? She was burning out.
In 1888 Hopkins and Plunkett parted ways, and Hopkins assumed the presidency of the College of Christian Science and the Hopkins Metaphysical Association. The preceding months had been trying for Hopkins; differences between her and Plunkett had come to a head, and Plunkett had absconded to New York with the
mailing list for Truth.67 The journal was the organ of the college and connected the school to Hopkins’s outreach satellites nationwide. As a result of this breach in communication, many of those satellites seceded or aligned with Plunkett, who was now their main contact in the New Thought Movement. It was time for Hopkins to take radical action.
That same year, Hopkins transformed the College of Christian Science into the Christian Science Theological Seminary,68 deemphasizing the professional aspect of Christian Science and emphasizing ministry.69 Believing she was on a spiritual mission, she met one-on-one with every advanced student in his or her final year, developing an individualized curriculum for each.70
The seminary’s first ordination ceremony was held in January 1889.71 Suffragist Louise Southworth was guest speaker. The class was comprised of twenty women and two men, marking the beginning of a new spiritual epoch for women in divinity. In her speech, Southworth proclaimed: “Divine Truth has come at last to give woman her proper status in the world.”72 In the seminary’s lifetime, Hopkins would ordain hundreds of female ministers.73 Many would go on to become prominent members of the New Thought Movement, or to found churches of their own. One of these churches was Unity.
II.
In 1886 a young, bookish housewife named Myrtle Fillmore attended a mental-healing seminar in Kansas City, Missouri, held by the New Thought teacher E. B. Weeks,74 a student of Hopkins. Myrtle had contracted tuberculosis at a young age and tried myriad courses of traditional medicine to cure it. When the Kansas City real estate market crashed, sending the Fillmores into debt, Myrtle’s symptoms flared and her doctors recommended she leave Kansas City for preferable climes.75 Desperate for relief, she signed up for Weeks’s seminar, where she heard the teacher utter an affirmation that would change the course of her life: “I am a child of God and therefore I do not inherit sickness.”76 She abandoned traditional medicine and devoted herself to faith, attending every metaphysical lecture that came through Kansas City.77
By 1888, Myrtle considered herself healed, attributing her cure to prayer alone. The following year, she and her husband, Charles, began publishing their own New Thought journal, Modern Thought,78 later called Unity, and in 1891, Hopkins ordained them at the Christian Science Theological Seminary.79 It was the heyday of New Thought, and churches were springing up in diffuse locations across the country,80 each with a slightly different approach to the power-of-mind philosophy inspired by different leaders of the movement. In the tradition of Hopkins’s thinking, the doctrine of New Thought did not to adhere to a singular dogma, but rather sought Truth continuously and omnivorously.
Though Myrtle supplied the original impetus for founding what was then called the Unity School of Practical Christianity81 and was an active participant, Charles became the principal leader of the Unity movement and its most active scribe. Despite a lack of formal education, since childhood he had immersed himself in Shakespeare, Tennyson, Lowell, and Emerson,82 and works of Spiritualism, the occult, and Eastern religion,83 and he was a talented writer. Charles had rarely attended church as a child84 but, like Myrtle, was deeply spiritual and eclectic in his theology. Despite his esoteric tendencies, his approach to metaphysical Christianity was decidedly practical—indeed, Unity is often referred to as “Practical Christianity.”
Like Hopkins, the Fillmores taught that God is all, God is good, and God is Mind.85 Affirmation and denial are cornerstones of the faith, as is the application of such statements in healing.86 Practitioners are taught to affirm health, well-being, wealth, and safety. These affirmations at times ring so practical as to border on humorous: some early pamphlets and articles published by Unity feature titles such as “Curing Colds,” “An Airplane Blessing,” “An Automobile Blessing,” and “A Salesman’s Prayer.”87
Also like Hopkins, the Fillmores regarded the Bible as both a sacred text and a piece of literature with a complex history. Their interpretation of it was strictly allegorical. Unity distinguishes between the Jesus of history and the divine Christ, emphasizing the “Christ consciousness” and “Christ in you” that each person possesses. While Jesus was a master teacher, says Unity, Christ is the divinity of all people; while Jesus was Divinity in human form, he was not special in that sense, as we are all Divine. We can all do what Jesus did.88
At the insistence of Mary Baker Eddy, the Fillmores abandoned the name Christian Science89 and adopted that of the Unity School of Christianity.90 The choice of new name is telling; it was the Fillmores’ intention to establish not a church,91 but an educational movement. It was only for the purpose of teaching others how to transform their lives with Practical Christianity that Charles finally sought to make clear to himself and others what he really thought and believed.92 Even then, he did so in a set of twelve informal lessons based on his own personal experiences, which he taught in an informal, discussion-based format over two weeks.93 Under pressure from students seeking teaching certification or ministerial ordination, Unity finally came to be formalized as a church.94
This presented a challenge. The New Thought Movement had stressed individual reliance, using one’s own inner truth as a guide. Now people were being taught the principles of Unity from a definite point of view, and going on to establish churches of their own bearing the Unity name.95 Charles had always resented Eddy’s centralized doctrine. It forced the Fillmores, having diverged from it, to stop using the name Christian Science. Nonetheless, a Unity field department was established and Unity ministers naturally organized themselves into a ministers association.96 They set standards for groups that wanted to be Unity Centers and set the qualifications for students intending to minister and teach.
The standards were strict; the organization’s bylaws said that any group that wished to be recognized had to adhere to the Unity teachings and textbooks97—and get rid of any texts and teachings that didn’t conform to the Christ Standard as recognized by the Unity School of Christianity. Though the seminary curriculum was meager compared with the standards of other churches, Unity was still a young religion. It was expected that the standards would be raised with the passage of time.98
In May 1989, one month before I turned four years old, my father ascribed his name “in prayerful openness to the Spirit of Truth and with the guidance of God”99 alongside three others’, founding the Unity-Progressive Council (U-P.C.). Never one to hover around the fringes of things, in the seven years since he’d joined Unity-Clearwater he’d become a vital member of its inner circle. Concern had arisen among them that the Unity religion was becoming diluted by churches whose practices were not in line with its foundational teachings.100 In recent years the lines differentiating Unity from other religions, New Thought or otherwise—and even from some New Age belief systems—had begun to blur in ways Unity-Clearwater’s senior members found disquieting. The U-P.C. sought a return to fundamentals.
At the first U-P.C. meeting, Leddy Hammock sat at a six-foot table in the future U-P.C. headquarters at Unity-Clearwater with the other three founding members, including my father. As she listened to the group discuss their plans, she decided that even if she had to give up everything else she’d ever dreamt about in her life to be at this meeting, she would still be there by Divine appointment. The U-P.C. was that important.
After they had signed their names to the Progressive Reaffirmation of Unity Faith, the statement of faith of their new Unity movement, the meeting adjourned. They stepped out into the night. Leddy and my dad looked up at the stars. They’d involved themselves in a heroic endeavor, setting aside everything else that they cared about: families, professions, homes. In returning to the fundamentals of the Unity faith, they were restoring Truth to the tradition and teaching others its power. They had chosen this. It had chosen them.
“Friends. That’s what it’s all about,” said Leddy. “We have such friends in this. Most people never have.”
“Yes,” said my dad. “And we always will.”
So it was, and so they let it be.
In
1948, Charles Fillmore “made transition”—New Thought terminology for death—and his son Lowell assumed presidency of what was by then called Unity School. It was a decisive event in Unity’s history: Lowell was a religious moderate and had a vision of growing Unity’s reach in America.101 For the first six decades of Unity’s life, Charles Fillmore had been its sole director, ensuring that the identity of Unity was consistent with his vision, but all that was about to change. Lowell’s strategy was to try to position the Unity movement closer to the religious mainstream by allowing Unity churches to become autonomous102 and by promoting practices like crystal healing and channeling, or conversing with spirits103—practices Charles Fillmore had specifically spoken against.104 The Unity movement continued to grow.
After Lowell’s transition in 1972, his nephew Charles Rickert Fillmore took over. Then Charles Rickert passed and his daughter Connie Fillmore Bazzy assumed his place in 1987.105 Control of the mission was handed off so many times that the path of the Unity religion swerved far outside the route Charles Fillmore had originally planned for it.
Elsewhere, a new institution had arisen: the Association of Unity Churches, or AUC. Whereas Unity School had been a center for prayer, publication, and ministerial training,106 though not accredited, the AUC had come about in response to a perceived crisis in doctrine and a failure of leadership107 on the part of Unity School, which had come to have little to do with the operation of Unity churches.108 Now the AUC served as the organizing body of as many as five hundred Unity ministers.109 Lowell’s revisionist leadership had caused a de-emphasis in the movement on such central concepts110 as regeneration, or reincarnation; the Father-Mother God construct; human divinity; and the pitfalls of the traditional Christianity institution described in Unity’s literature and teachings. Whereas there was intellectual commerce between the AUC and Unity School, they were functionally and philosophically independent.111 This gulf between the two leading Unity institutions resulted in a contradiction, and resultant vagueness, of self-definition112 that frustrated members of the U-P.C. when they were asked fundamental questions about their religion.
