Kansas City

Myrtle Fillmore was tubercular and expected to die when she attended a lecture in Kansas City in 1886 and took away a sentence she repeated to herself for two years: that she was a child of God and therefore did not inherit sickness. She recovered, began teaching what she had done, and her sceptical husband Charles investigated the whole field of mental healing before concluding she was right. From 1889 they published a magazine, and the movement they built became Unity.

Its teaching belongs to New Thought: God is understood as principle rather than person, humanity as divine in nature, and the conditions of a life as shaped by the thoughts held about it. Illness is approached through prayer and affirmation. Unlike most religious bodies, Unity long declined to describe itself as a denomination at all, presenting itself as an educational movement anyone of any faith could use, and its influence has consequently spread far beyond its membership through popular literature about positive thinking.

Its most distinctive institution is Silent Unity, a prayer ministry that has received requests continuously since the 1890s by letter, then telephone, then online, staffed around the clock and answering every one. The daily devotional booklet the movement publishes has one of the largest circulations of any religious periodical in the world. The headquarters campus outside the city, a Mediterranean styled complex with gardens and a tower, has been the movement's centre since the 1920s.

In the summer of 1831 Joseph Smith announced a revelation designating Independence, then a frontier town at the edge of settled Missouri, as the centre place of Zion, and identified a spot west of the courthouse as the site for a temple. Land was bought and dedicated. Within two years the Saints had been driven out of Jackson County by their neighbours, and no temple was built.

The consequence is one of the strangest religious geographies in the United States. The Temple Lot itself is owned by the Church of Christ (Temple Lot), a small body formed in the fragmentation after Joseph Smith's death, which returned in the 1860s, bought the ground and has held it through litigation ever since. Across the street stands the headquarters of Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with a domed auditorium and a temple completed in 1994 whose spiral form rises over the lot and which is dedicated to the pursuit of peace and reconciliation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, much the largest of the movement's branches, maintains a visitors' centre nearby. Several smaller Restoration bodies keep offices within the same few blocks.

One revealed location has therefore produced multiple institutions, each with a defensible claim to be the heir of the same revelation, all of them on adjacent lots. Unity's headquarters lies a short drive away, so two distinct American religious foundings sit within one metropolitan area.