Healing and conscience in Christian Science - Cover Story

Christian Century, June 29, 1994 by Thomas Johnsen

"I prayed with all my heart for the right thoughts and words that would help my child.... What happened next is still ... very difficult to describe. I felt myself being filled to the brim with love. This was more than a personal or maternal feeling of love welling up within.... I knew that I somehow was at one with divine Love. . . . Immediately my son's countenance changed."

--a Christian Scientist mother, writing

of a healing of her son in the Christian

Science Journal (November 1991).

FEW COURT CASES in recent years have generated such intensity of feeling as those brought against parents who have lost children while relying on prayer for healing. Beyond the grief shared on all sides over any tragedy involving a child, perceptions of these cases differ radically. To much of the public, the issue is simple: medical care is the only viable means of health care. To others, however, the conclusions to be drawn are more complex because the nature of healing itself is more complex. For those most visibly associated with spiritual healing ministry, Christian Scientists, these cases involve profound issues of conscience and commitment.

Several recent legal developments are prompting broad reflection within the Christian Scientist community about the values underlying that commitment--what it means to them, and what it requires of them, in a society committed to conventional medical care. Last August the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned the 1990 manslaughter conviction of David and Ginger Twitchell, a Christian Scientist couple whose child died eight years ago after a short illness. The case, which generated headlines internationally, was traumatic for a denomination that has traditionally placed strong emphasis on the family and on respect for the law.

Some observers, and afterward even some jurors, were uneasy about prosecuting a couple who clearly had no criminal intent. The caricaturing of Christian, Science theology and practice at the trial fueled the public policy debate. Yet there remained the searing fact of a child's death and the inescapable questions of responsibility. Following the court's decision, the Massachusetts legislature repealed a longstanding statutory provision on spiritual healing that the Twitchells' attorneys had cited in their defense.

Last August, a Minnesota civil suit again involved the question of responsibility for a child's death several years ago. After a four-week trial, a jury levied $14 million in damages against the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston and several co-defendants, including the child's mother and a Christian Science practitioner. A judge recently reduced this amount to $10.5 million. In this case, jurors stated bluntly that they hoped the large penalty would "send a message" to Christian Scientists. The local press lauded the verdict for providing "vengeance." In December a lawsuit asking for similar damages was filed in California.

Precisely because they do love their children as other parents do, and because they are not zealots captive to a self-enclosed "belief system," Christian Scientists must confront the questions raised--just as many physicians have following tragedies in medical practice. A grandmother in one of the cases, a lifelong Christian Scientist who had seen innumerable healings in her family, put it as anyone might, calling her grandson's death the "hardest thing I've ever had to deal with." A letter published in the Christian Science Journal in 1991 reminded readers that "we haven't dedicated ourselves to healing work" in order "to cause inadvertent harm to those we are seeking to help. . . . We can't merely shrug off a death ... as a regrettable statistic."

FOR CHRISTIAN Scientists, coming to grips with this imperative involves thinking through the relation between the deep faith and spiritual commitment that underlie their healing ministry and the essential "common sense and common humanity" that church founder Mary Baker Eddy identified with this ministry. Not dogmatic belief but "Christly affection," she held, enables the healer to "deal with his patients compassionately." As a matter of golden-rule ethics, the denomination has historically urged that parental differences on child care within a family be worked out on a basis of mutual respect--that reliance on prayer not be pressed by one parent, for example, if it is not supported by the other. On a broader scale, Christian Scientists have traditionally sought to distinguish between obligations that society can fairly ask of them and rights that they, or any responsible minority, can legitimately ask of society.

Christian Scientists grapple with these issues at a time when their century-old denomination confronts the deepest organizational crisis in its history. Evidence of breaches of ethics and of church bylaws on the part of church officers has caused widespread consternation within the membership. Many members have expressed particular concern about the effects of failure of stewardship on the denomination's healing ministry, which they see as profoundly related to the integrity of the church institution. Whether that ministry continues into the next century may depend on Christian Scientists' capacity to face internal as well as external troubles squarely and bring to them the same healing dynamic they value so highly in individual life.