Practitioners, Choice and the Courts

The church built an institutional structure around the practice of healing. Christian Science practitioners are members who have completed the church's course of instruction and who list themselves publicly as available to be engaged for treatment, which is prayer rather than counselling or manipulation, and who charge for their time. Nurses trained by the church staff its care facilities.

The Christian Science Journal and the weekly Sentinel have published members' accounts of healings continuously for well over a century, and the church has at various points required corroboration for those it prints. On recourse to physicians the church's formal position is narrower than its reputation: it does not excommunicate members who consult a doctor, it has always accepted the setting of broken bones and obstetric care, and it describes the decision as the individual member's. The teaching nonetheless gives that decision a strong direction, and the gap between a doctrine of unreality and a rule permitting choice is where the church's public difficulties have accumulated.

In the United States that meant litigation, chiefly in cases where a child died of a treatable illness under spiritual treatment alone. Several American states adopted religious exemptions to child neglect statutes during the 1970s, and prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s tested how far those exemptions reached. Rennie Schoepflin's study traces the whole arc, from a nineteenth century American setting in which orthodox medicine had far less to offer than it later did, to a twentieth century one in which the same refusal carried a very different weight.