Photo: A ruined empty Christian Science Church in Chicago, similar in style to the one I attended (this is the former Tenth Church of Christ, Scientist, on the South Side; mine was in good repair but ended up being sold to an Assyrian “Oriental Orthodox” congregation in the 1980s).

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When the prominent American literary critic Kenneth Burke wrote his classic book Permanence and Change in 1935, he said he wanted the work — which from the opening describes a sense of form permeating the universe and a cosmic role for the critic in engaging the symbolism of life — to be as all-encompassing and immersive a mental world as Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (the “Christian Science textbook”). Burke was raised by a Christian Scientist mother at the high-water mark of the cultural influence of Christian Science in the 1920s. He did not stay in the faith but represented the ongoing flirtation of Anglo-American culture’s quest for spiritual meaning with this strange and cultish, yet for a time oddly appealing, brand of heretical Christianity. Adherents from Doris Day to Walt Disney’s family had made it seem All-American despite its dark side.

But by the late 1970s, the British Socialist historian E.P. Thompson would be mocking the fall of “Christianly Scientific mama’s boys” on the Nixon White House staff who had been members of the denomination and succumbed to the Watergate Scandal, as the already ailing movement began to sink precipitously in its social fortunes. Not long before, I had wandered into my mother’s old Christian Science Sunday School at Sixteenth Church of Christ, Scientist, a remnant of the Anglo elements of Chicago’s aging Rogers Park neighborhood. It also had been attended for a time in the Depression by young Charles Percy, later a U.S. Senator and a Christian Scientist. The building was to my teenage eyes a vast Greek-temple-style edifice, immaculately kept but nearly empty, and a fascinating evocation of some past missing spiritual wisdom, tending the paired matching leather books of the King James Bible (minus Apocrypha) and Science and Health, the “pastor”-texts of Christian Scientists. Those books in that empty Classical-style space exuded to my innocency an ancient wisdom renewed, although it all actually was a revival of ancient heresies. I had been raised originally in another faith that denied the Trinity, that of Unitarian-Universalism, in the brutalistic modernist structure of its congregation in nearby Evanston, a social-justice bookend to the more conservative culture of Christian Science. But it was the faux sense of the historic in the latter that suited my growing predilection for high school Latin and antiquity, which would lead me ultimately into work first as a Chicago newspaperman (in a dying business) with an eye for history, and then into study and teaching as a medievalist. Finally, God’s grace led me out of false antiquity into the living healing but genuinely ancient tradition of the Priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, a branch of Orthodox Christianity that is the exile Church of Old Russia.

Yet my long spiritual journey was in part the result of a dangerous misinterpretation. When I was in high school, taking a psychology class with a Jungian practitioner and starting to try to pray and read the Bible, I had a vivid dream in which I was in an antique store. It was much like my parent’s house, which was full of old family mementoes. I saw a vase with a Crucifix on it, and Jesus Christ spoke to me from the vase it seemed, saying “Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” It was a very vivid and light-filled dream. I interpreted it in my Jungian class context as meaning that I should go deeper into Christian Science as the old religion of my family. But I didn’t go deeply enough beyond my limited horizons, to see that it was beckoning me to traditional Christianity and a real relationship with Jesus Christ in His actual Church. Whether it was a “true” vision or not is another issue. When I told my spiritual father who led me into Orthodoxy about it, the priest-monk said such dreams are most likely demonic delusions. So was my sojourn over a number of years in Christian Science. However, some time after I had entered into it, and then left, and was led by God’s grace into Orthodox Christianity, another priest-monk added this: Truths that we experienced in our life on the way to full faith in Christianity — which needs be found in Orthodoxy as the living continuous Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church — remain true, even if they were imperfect and blurred. It was Father Ambrose, formerly Alexei Young a student of the Blessed Seraphim Rose (an American convert of the 1960s whose writings helped lead me to Orthodoxy) who told me that. He added that those in 19th-century American society who lacked exposure or contact to the Church Fathers had wandered into areas such as Christian Science, and in that way we should be understanding of them. But Truth is a “Who” and not a “what,” our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, Who is found in His Church.

Besides the writings of Father Seraphim Rose, a former beatnik-era intellectual interested in East Asian spirituality who wandered into sin in 1950s San Francisco, found Orthodoxy, and then transformed the lives of many through his example and work, another influence in my trek to Orthodoxy from Christian Science became John Scottus Eriugena. A ninth-century Irish philosopher (and according to legend the founder of Oxford University), Eriugena’s work along with Celtic Christianity generally was described to me once by a British Christian Scientist, when I was doing graduate work in Wales, as akin to our then-shared faith. Many branches of heterodox Christianity seek to find their origins and analogues with early strands of Christianity, and until with God’s grace I submitted my will unworthily to the Church, I continued my interest in early Christianity often in relation to Christian Science. However, the latter, being Gnostic, Sabellian, and Arian all in one, actually represented many old heresies revived in industrial Anglo-American life. Its pride in healing involved the deaths of children and others from deprivation of proper medical care as part of its beliefs.

However, in studying over and over again, as a budding academic, Eriugena’s Periphyseon, an early tome on Christian cosmology with a mystical opening of “Nature is that which is and is not,” together with the Arthurian legends of the Holy Grail and Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, and engaging with the early saints of Wales and Ireland, I was with God’s grace building a bridge to the Orthodox Church. That happened across much turmoil and change in my life, switching from the context of a suburban-residing big-city newspaperman to a graduate student in a small farmbelt city, ultimately departing from Christian Science and hanging somewhere in the air sinfully and demonically struggling with faith. But, by God’s grace, the influence on Eriugena of St. Maximus the Confessor, and the relation of the latter’s seventh-century work to modern Russian Orthodox philosophers, notably Vladimir Lossky and the writings of Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos among others, helped lead me into Orthodoxy, as did reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, and an early edition of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Church. This all came together for me most of all with finally starting to attend Orthodox Christian services and being overwhelmed by the beauty of God in them. Truly, “come and see.”

The Orthodox Church to me involved what writers have called the essential healing thrust of Orthodox Christianity, as opposed to institutional religion, and a focus on theosis or union with the uncreated energies or grace of God. This in a sense reminded me of Christian Science. Orthodoxy also includes the mentoring role of a spiritual father, which reminded me at first of the role of the encouraging words of my former denomination-registered teacher in Christian Science. But the Orthodox Church went beyond Christian Science in re-connecting me with actual Christian tradition, including the dogmas of the Holy Trinity and the Christology of Holy Scripture and the Church Fathers. Theosis involved an authentically ascetic Christianity unlike the individualistic and often self-asserting ethos of Christian Science. The influence of an Orthodox spiritual father went much deeper, too: The experience of meeting him at a monastery was entirely different from my encounters with my Christian Science teacher in a skyscraper office high above downtown Chicago’s lakefront, not to mention the substantive theological differences.

Instead of the “British Israelist” tendencies of Christian Science, whose WASPy American culture included many who (following Mary Baker Eddy, its founder) saw Anglo-Saxon ethnicity as related directly to the Lost Tribes of Israel, Orthodoxy offered me the traditional true realization of the Church as the continuing and fully realized Israel of Scripture for Gentiles and Jews in all nations. The historian Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University wrote that Christian Science was the religion of the “Milner Group” that had tended the legacy of the British empire-builder Cecil Rhodes in the Anglo-American establishment of the mid-20th-century. Quigley used the name “Milner Group” to identify the loosely affiliated thinkers behind transitioning the British Empire to the British Commonwealth, managing the original Rhodes Scholars program, founding Chatham House, hosting the so-called Cliveden Set, originating the Round Table and the Council on Foreign Relations networks, and generally aspiring to an Anglo-American-led globalism. It could be classified as a somewhat nebulous effort to advance the neocolonialism of a global federal administrative state, a technocracy stressing social welfare, within the framework of the old British Empire and its perceived successor the US, morphing into the latter’s post-World War II treaty and banking networks. Quigley (academic mentor of Pres. Bill Clinton) wrote of the key role of Christian Scientists in the continuation of the Milner circle between 1925 and World War II.

That cachet of elite Anglo-American spirituality carried over to the influence of the denomination’s newspaper The Christian Science Monitor, with prominent Monitor journalists such as Joseph Harsch having access to high levels of international leadership. Then there was the dominance of Christian Science in the Nixon White House, influential Christian Scientists in Congress, and adherents who led the FBI and CIA in 1970s and ’80s. While such influence has largely passed, the spirit of what Eddy called “Anglo-Israel” still walks the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, where you can go inside the antique “Mapparium” built by the Christian Science Publishing Society and look onto a giant glass globe representing world political boundaries in the 1930s, with the British Empire still intact and dominant in the virtual glass world around you. Some have seen parallels between Christian Science culture and influence during this period and that of Freemasonry earlier (to which Eddy and other early Christian Scientists had ties, and which shared a certain parallel spirit in tendencies toward Unitarian Deism and occultishness, alongside very self-aware networking).

However, converting to the Orthodox Church opened up to me not the false Israel of “British Israelism” amid the WASPiness of Christian Science culture even in decline, but the Israel of the whole oikumene of the Christian world, the true Israel of the actual Church of Jesus Christ our Savior. St. Cyprian of Carthage wrote that to know God as our Father, we must know the Church as our Mother. This was infinitely beyond the sense of the “Mother Church” in Christian Science, with its cult-like denial of medicine, tragic effects of which I had seen in my time as a Christian Scientist, and cult-like regard among many Christian Scientists for Mary Baker Eddy as “the woman of the Apocalypse” fulfilling biblical prophecy. I had seen and experienced instances of physical and emotional healing in Christian Science during my time with it, and yet understand now in Orthodoxy how both God works in mysterious ways, and how often such “signs and wonders” can be demonic delusions. For Orthodox Christianity is not modern American “moral therapeutic Deism” in the sense pioneered by Christian Science, with its many Hollywood adherents, but offers a sense of healing the soul for salvation in Christ. Indeed, it shows Christian (rather than New Age) panentheism of the Gospel, in which all Creation is in Jesus Christ. For the foundational biblical verses “In the beginning was the Word,” and “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth” indicate how we “live and move and have our being” in Him. And the Church is the Body of Christ our Savior and also His Bride exemplified by the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, not Mary Baker Eddy.

I have written briefly on Christian Science in American life and its decline in The Federalist. My own resignation from The Christian Science Monitor in 1988 with other editors and staff reflected my own commitment to a sense of “traditional” Christian Science as opposed to a New Age watering down of the faith. But over time I realized that there was in a Christian sense no real authentic “traditional” Christian Science, because it had been a vanguard of New Age heterodoxy from the start. Its history included a confusion of “Chicago” and “Boston” schools, and most of all, as mentioned, a re-hash of old heresies from early Christian times serving a very modern sense of self-asserting identity. The movement, which touched on my family tree on my mother’s side, was, as Father Ambrose noted to me, in its better side part of a quest for spiritual meaning and authentic Christianity in American life, with an ascetic element alongside a New Thought gospel of “success.” It included many fine people better than myself at expressing Christian virtues, alongside potentially harmful psychological aspects of mind control, and emotional and physical dangers, while being its entirety inimical to Christian salvation. Christian Science has ended as a very American religious experiment in a dead end, just as the whole American civic experiment now slips into precipitous decline. May we pray in this growing chaos that the Orthodox Christian mission to America continues apace, with God’s grace, to open up avenues for true spiritual healing for America, in relation to the ancient living faith of the historic Church of Christ our Savior. I was baptized unworthily into the Orthodox faith in 1999, married in the Orthodox Church in 2002, have fathered two sons in the Church, and as a sinner went on to work at our mission in Northern Appalachia as first lay Warden in 2015, was made a Reader in 2017, then Subdeacon, and by 2020 Deacon. I became an Orthodox Priest in 2023, after studying at the St. John of Kronstadt Orthodox Pastoral School online for a few years and training liturgically at Holy Trinity Orthodox Monastery in Jordanville, NY, including 40 days of the cycle of services at the monastery following priestly ordination. I ask for your prayers for this sinner priest and struggling Christian by God’s grace. Glory to God for all things!