Christian Science polity in crisis

Christian Century, March 3, 1993 by Stephen Gottschalk

The decision, however, was widely and mistakenly interpreted in the movement as meaning that the directors had succeeded Eddy as head of the church. Responding to this misapprehension just after the litigation, Adam Dickey, a director who had been a member of Eddy's household, noted that the board's role in transacting the business of the Mother Church "does not mean that the Directors are at liberty to inflict their will or their desire upon the Christian Science movement." The safety of the church, he said, rests not with the board but "in the integrity of each individual member, and in the determination of the members to obey the By-laws." During the half century following the litigation, the board used its powers in a relatively restrained way and largely confined itself to disciplining wayward teachers. At the same time, the assumption that unqualified support for the board was the litmus test of loyalty among church members became part of the folkways of the movement.

The constitutional crisis now facing the church had its roots in the late '70s when the precipitous decline in the church's membership could no longer be ignored. In the process of taking initiatives to counter that decline, board members during the early '80s began to exploit the latent powers they had been accumulating. Beginning in 1984, the church embarked upon an ambitious and expensive media expansion which the board claimed would bring renewal. A growing number of members were deeply disturbed by the apparent submergence of the church's defining spiritual purpose in an overwhelmingly secular media enterprise, as well as by the board's assumption of a leadership role well outside Manual specifications. The publication of Bliss Knapp's The Destiny of the Mother Church in September 1991 convinced more members that the board was operating beyond the parameters of the Manual.

According to the wills of Knapp and his family, the church could lay claim to a bequest of about $98 million once it published the book as authorized literature of the church. Whether it has in fact done so is being strongly challenged by alternate beneficiaries in a complex litigation in California. But the most disturbing fact about the book's publication to church members was that it violated key provisions of the Manual, especially the by-law under a section on "Discipline of Members" forbidding circulation of "incorrect literature."

Church officials have done semantic handsprings to obscure the fact that the book is absolutely incorrect according to Eddy's own teaching and that previous boards had rejected it for that reason. And no board member has ever said publicly that the book is correct. Repeatedly and unabashedly, the Knapp book places Eddy on an equal plane with Jesus in a way that runs at cross purposes with basic Christianity, with the reverence for him expressed in the church's founding purpose "to commemorate the words and works of our Master," and with Eddy's own explicit words.

THE CONTROVERSY OVER Knapp's book has become central to the constitutional crisis facing the church. Not only have the board members themselves violated one of the key rules for the "Discipline of Members" that they are obliged to administer, but their continued and unapologetic pursuit of the Knapp bequest shows that they have chosen to deliberately flout the Manual. For a growing number of Christian Scientists, this intolerable state of affairs is compounded by the enormous losses sustained by the church's media ventures. The merits of media expansion in general are arguable. But the loss of more than $325 million on TV operations, along with documented evidence of waste and mismanagement on a massive scale, reached proportions of fiscal malfeasance impossible to square with the Manual's mandate for "wisdom, economy, and brotherly love" in the conduct of church finances.