I’m Not Perfect

I spent the last two evenings watching the Frontline/American Experience piece The Mormons on PBS. I was interested because I grew up around a lot of Mormons and studied them some during college. I learned some things about the early years of the movement, but thought the program missed some key points on other issues.

For example, did you know that women in Utah were given the right to vote for the first time in 1870? Fifty years before suffrage was granted nationally. It was directly related to the controversy over polygamy. The response of women in Utah was not what the granters of the vote had hoped, but it does speak to the patriarchal structure of the church and membership obedience to it.

Anyway, this program and the anniversary C’s illness and my mother’s current situation (recovering from a major surgery) has me thinking about religion a good bit lately. Specifically about the religion in which I was raised.

I was raised Christian Scientist.

If you don’t know anything about Christian Science other than hearing about their newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, I’m not surprised. It’s rather a dying religion. They have a beautiful campus of buildings in Boston’s Back Bay, but they have serious money and membership troubles. The politics of all that are quite staggering.

If you do think you know something about Christian Science, you probably know that Christian Scientists don’t go to doctors, except for childbirth and to set broken bones, or get vaccinations. I didn’t get most of my childhood vaccinations until I was 17 and about to leave for college, then I received all that were due in one day and could barely move my arms for a week.

What does this have to do with Mormons? Mormonism and Christian Science are both uniquely American religions, founded amid religious fervor in the 19^th century. Once upon a time Christian Science was a growing religion in the country and the world. I saw plenty of parallels between the Mormons today and Christian Scientists – particularly in the fierce protection of the religions’ various claims and regarding intellectual critique from within and without.

The basic thing to know about the Christian Science is that it believes that matter is a construct of the mind. As such, our material world is directly dependent on the state of our spiritual health. Heal the spirit, and the body will follow. Faith healing at its most basic. When a Christian Scientist talks about being in one’s “right mind,” it has nothing to do with relative sanity (well, maybe it does), but it has everything to do with thinking rightly in a spiritual context. One of the phrases one hears a lot of in Christian Science is that one is “God’s perfect child,” and as such can’t possibly get sick, etc.

Christian Science has its own quirks, as do many religions. I came away from my childhood feeling like any physical illness or injury is my fault. I apologize profusely when ill or injured. Even though I know the mechanics of bacteria and viruses, I still feel guilty for getting sick. Last week in the ER, for example, I can’t tell you how many times I apologized to my husband and the staff for being there. It’s silly! It has to do with that whole God’s perfect child thing. Clearly I was not perfect if I was in the ER, and I was failing God in some way by not being perfect. When those lessons are ingrained early on, they can be hard to wash away.

As a small child, being a Christian Scientist made me a bit of an outcast. There were kids who were not allowed to play with me because of it. In the 70s, the Catholic church still called it a cult.

I left the church when I was 14 amid a family crisis. My mother, the devout one, was divorcing my father for someone else. I’d been having doubts, as many adolescents do, and as I wasn’t getting reasonable answers to my questions and my family was exploding it just seemed like the time to take a break. This was a huge issue with my mother and contributed to the widening gap between us.

I never went back to the church. But 26 years later, I can still sing the first verse to my favorite Christian Science hymn, know most of the seven synonyms for God, and can recite the Christian Science definition of angel (“God’s thoughts passing to man, spiritual intuition…”). Every time I recite the Lord’s Prayer in church now, I still have to remind myself to say the “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” part. Christian Scientists don’t say that.

Over the years I have followed news of the church, and specifically stories of Christian Science parents who do not getting medical care for their children. There are some stories of such children here.

Part of my break with Christian Science was over this issue. My (adolescent) reasoning was this:

1. If God did make us perfect in his image, then He/She (because in Christian Science God is the “Father-Mother God”) gave us our intellect and the gift of scientific thought and learning. Like all gifts from God, it is a challenge for us to use them well.

2. Children, while they often have very pure faith, do not necessarily have the intellectual, nuanced faith that I believe is necessary to participate in faith healing – and faith healing requires some buy-in and participation on the part of the person in need of healing. But kids do know when they hurt and sick, and they want relief from that - and they shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for wanting that relief, for not being perfect.

I still think this.

There are arguments on both sides of the debate that are far more complex and complete than I can convey here. One book that I found extremely interesting is “God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church,” by Caroline Fraser. In addition to the content of the book, the response of the Christian Science church to the book was telling, I thought. There’s some coverage of the book here and here on Salon. (I was astounded to read some accounts in the book. There were situations and actions that I thought were unique to my family, but no, they were common threads for other Christian Science children.)

Although I was hospitalized as a child once with pneumonia (my father’s influence – he was Baptist), I remember once having a bad case of tonsillitis. I think I was in sixth grade or so. My tonsils were huge. HUGE! I was feverish. I felt terrible. I layed in bed for a week not much interested in even the TV. My mother called the Christian Science practitioner, not a doctor. She also continued to go to work all week, so I was home alone most of this time. I tried hard to participate in the Christian Science healing and read what I was supposed to, but it was hard. I was just so sick.

I was lucky that I recovered. Just lucky. I really don’t think that praying had anything to do with it. It was time, it was the bacteria or virus running its course in my body, it was my fever trying to kill the germ with heat, it was the fluids flushing it out of my body.

The historical context of Christian Science is important here, too. Christian Science was “discovered” at a time when anyone could call themselves a doctor. There were as many quacks as there were people honestly trying to harvest some scientific knowledge for good. The results of healing by faith and healing by “doctors” were pretty much even. Overall, it was a toss up as to what would work.

The Christian Science church has not evolved with time – and this is part of why they are fading, I think. At a time when studies are showing the power of faith in conjunction with modern medicine, they could use their positive, “right” thinking rhetoric to offer hope and positive influence in medical situations. But they don’t. They stick to the God’s perfect image thing and deny all benefit of science and medical research.

So my bottom line is this: If you, as an adult, want to follow a group that believes only in faith healing, go right ahead. That is your choice. But get your kids medical care and attention. Make sure they grow up to understand your faith and develop their own.

My mom left the church after her second husband died. She says she doesn’t believe in God anymore because God wouldn’t take her husband away from her, but I don’t believe that. She’s struggling to believe when it’s not easy to, just like many of us. Since her surgery three weeks ago, she’s had issues with pain management and is in a rehabilitation center. I think she feels guilty every time she takes a pain pill (just like I felt guilty being injured) and as such isn’t keeping on top of the pain like she needs to. It’s impeding her progress toward recovery and an active life. It’s frustrating to watch how this idea of perfection is holding her back.

I thought about Christian Science a lot while C was sick, too. I had long felt good about my decision to leave Christian Science when I did and find my own way back to church and religion and faith and congregations I felt comfortable with personally and spiritually. But after C was sick I was downright thankful that I left Christian Science.

If I were a Christian Scientist and had tried to call a practitioner when C first became sick, he would not be here today.