I Was Raised as a Christian Scientist
Submitted by Spinouette
Our church was one of those picturesque white steeple churches with red velvet pews. The congregation was small, made up of mostly white, middle class families. Children went to Sunday school during the Sunday morning adult service and joined the adults for Wednesday evening services. We sang hymns to traditional melodies with words written by our founder, Mary Baker Eddy. Weekly Lessons, compiled by the Mother Church in Boston were read aloud by Readers, who were elected by church membership. We didn’t have priests or charismatic pastors. Readers never ever inserted their personal opinions into the service, as everything was always read directly from either the King James version of the Bible, or from Science and Health (the companion text written by Mrs. Eddy.) All this made the experience of going to church rather quiet, intellectual, and peaceful, but also somewhat boring.
The main teaching of Christian Science is that all sickness, injury, and “evil” is an illusion. All can be fixed by simply “seeing the truth” of our “perfection in the mind of God.” As such, we were taught that we could be healed through prayer. This was not the charismatic faith healing that I later saw on television. Rather, it was a quiet, contemplative practice that we did alone or (for serious issues) with the help of a trained Christian Science “Practitioner.” I never went to a Practitioner, so I’m not sure exactly what they did. But I suspect that it was mostly assigning relevant passages from our two books and suggesting more prayer. I later heard stories in the news about parents who faced criminal charges for depriving their children of proper medical care, but nothing so dramatic ever happened in our church. In fact, most families did go to the doctor for obvious problems like broken bones. I was treated for a broken collar bone when I was 11. As a teen, I was taken to the orthodontist for braces. However, we were never vaccinated, and I received a religious exemption from biology class in high school. Other than that, I felt completely normal.
The first time I recall questioning my religion, I was in the second youngest Sunday school class. I think that probably means I was about 7 or 8 years old. In response to a sudden thought, I asked the teacher “Hey, how do we know there’s a God?” This seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to me. I assumed there was a good answer and that the teacher would simply tell me. The look of horror on the teacher’s face told me that I was mistaken. Apparently, church wasn’t the right place to ask this question. Off and on, I would be looking for an answer to that question for many years to come.
The next time I recall questioning my faith was when I was around 12 years old. I had been talking to a neighbor boy about religion and I was incensed at how wrong he was. He was contradicting what I had been taught was true! (I don’t recall the nature of the disagreement, but it seems likely that it was about the existence of hell, which we did not take literally, or about some other small point of doctrine.) I told my mother about this, and was astonished when she replied by saying, “Well, not everyone believes what we believe.” I felt betrayed. They had given me the impression that what we learned in church was just as factual as what we learned in school. I was deeply embarrassed that I had argued with my friend, and angry that I had been misled.
Growing up in the Bible belt, it seemed that everyone was some flavor of Christian. It was not uncommon to ask a new acquaintance what church they went to, and phrases like “bless your heart” or “god has a plan” were common. However, it wasn’t as in your face as it seems to be today. It was just assumed that everyone was Christian, so evangelizing was less of a thing. At least that’s what it seemed like to me. Certainly, evangelism was not a part of our church culture at all.
As I became older and learned more about science, and my critical thinking developed, I found church teachings to be less and less believable. I found reasons to avoid going to church, which my mother noticed and did not appreciate. She was — and still is — deeply involved in church matters, reading her Lesson daily and serving in leadership positions throughout her life.
In my first semester in college, I took an intro to Philosophy class. Some of the students seemed to not get the point of it at all. Rather than discuss the ideas as an exercise in learning to think clearly, as was intended, some students would argue every viewpoint against their personal belief of what was “the truth.” I remember being puzzled by this. I loved the class and found that I was good at it. I couldn’t understand why this was so hard for some people.
Later, I moved to California where New Age, hippy beliefs were more common. I worked at a bookstore and read everything. (This was before the internet.) I became interested in meditation, Louis Hay, and NLP. I read a book on how to develop your psychic abilities and did all the exercises. (None of it worked.) I took Logic and a second level philosophy class in college. I aced them both, while my fellow students complained that they were “hard” and that they resented being “told how to think.”
When my husband and I met, neither of us went to church and religion was not really a big deal with any of our friends. I don’t recall us talking about whether we would take our children to church, although I’m sure it was a hot topic with all of our parents. He had been raised Catholic. His grandmother once told me that she wanted us to be married “in the Catholic Church” (we had gone to Vegas for a 15 minute wedding because it was easier and cheaper.) I told her that if she wanted to plan it and pay for it, I would show up. She stopped asking after that.
When our kids were small, I started to feel that maybe taking them to church was the way to help them develop a moral compass. We tried a lot of different types of churches, including Scientology. We took auditing courses together and gave Dianetics a fair try. (It didn’t work.) The worst was a conservative evangelical church in which the pastor instructed the ushers to “block the doors with your best karate stance” and then proceeded to preach against homosexuality. If it hadn’t been for the ushers blocking the doors, we would have got up and left. We did leave during a service at another church when a conservative political candidate was given a platform during the service. Eventually, we ended up in a queer friendly liberal church that I quite enjoyed. We stopped going mostly because it was too far from our house. For a while, a neighbor took our oldest child to my mother’s church, because the child supposedly wanted to go. That didn’t last long either.
I continued searching. Life was hard, finances were always tight, I often felt frightened, inadequate, and lost. I knew I needed something. I would have done almost anything to have some kind of guidance. Religious people seemed so sure of themselves. I wanted something like that. Eventually, a new-age friend sent me an audio copy of The Science of Getting Rich. I found an online forum and thus joined the community of people attempting to practice the Law of Attraction. In retrospect, I realize that a big part of what I liked about it was the community. I loved being able to log on, talk about my issues, and get feedback from others. I was also a very good student. I did the advertised course, including all the exercises, and learned a lot about myself along the way. I also investigated many of the suggested related courses, teachers, and sites. I found a lot of processes intended to improve emotional or psychological health, or to help you “find your purpose.” Fortunately for me, some of them actually helped. I downloaded meditation tracks and joined a hot yoga class.
Eventually the modern Atheist movement penetrated my internet bubble and I was home. Once I realized that it was okay to believe in nothing supernatural, and that atheists were merrily living perfectly agreeable lives, I gave up searching and settled into the secular community with relief. I did go through an unfortunate “angry atheist” phase during which I picked fights with my religious friends on Facebook. It wasn’t pretty, and I’m not proud of it. I lost a lot of friends.
I now volunteer for Recovering From Religion because I see how much damage is being caused by religion. Even well meaning, sincere people can have the effect of causing severe trauma in those they teach. I finally feel strong enough to want to help others. My goal is to relieve the pressure off at least a few people, so they can find peace and healing for themselves. Hopefully, this will cause a ripple effect of people being stronger, happier, and more able to help others in turn.
Recovering from Religion provides support to people coping with doubt, seeking answers about religion, and living without faith. We have telephone and chat helplines, local and virtual support groups, and an online peer support community. This story was submitted by a user from our online community , Spinouette.
