A current project of mine focuses on the year of 1893 as a critical turning point in American culture and thought, and especially in religion. I am not of course suggesting that everything started on January 1 that year, but the chronology does serve as useful focus for understanding some quite revolutionary changes that were then in progress. Today I will discuss a movement that is forgotten except by specialists, but at the time it was phenomenally important and widely influential. This was New Thought, which in 1893-1894 was achieving a new degree of structure and organization – not to mention obtaining the name by which we know it. It retained that pivotal role in American life for a generation.
The Great Spiritual Unrest
In and around 1893, orthodox Christian thought was being roiled by multiple intellectual challenges, including the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and new feminist critiques. But a great deal of American religion was flourishing outside any kind of Christian (or Jewish) mainstream. In that year, for instance, the National Spiritualist Association of Churches (NSAC) was formed in Chicago: it remains the largest of the organized Spiritualist churches. Theosophy also boomed. At the great Parliament of the World’s Religions held that year in Chicago, Theosophical speakers were allowed to represent their movement as an independent faith-tradition alongside Hinduism and Buddhism. The Theosophical Society actually held its own distinct “Congress” as an offshoot of the Parliament itself. Wisely, perhaps, Theosophists were induced to withdraw their original offer to present material on Psychical Research and Phenomena. In 1893, William Quan Judge’s sweeping survey of the movement and its doctrines in The Ocean of Theosophy provided inquiring American readers with an invaluable textbook that was often reprinted.
And then there was New Thought.
Some years ago I posted about a remarkable book published in 1910 by the celebrated commentator Ray Stannard Baker, on The Spiritual Unrest that he believed was causing such fervor in the contemporary US, and which amounted to a kind of religious revolution. The source mattered: Baker (1870-1946) was an enormously respected writer and journalist, and a highly intelligent observer of American life. He was a mainstay of the muckraking movement and a leading Progressive, who was close to Woodrow Wilson. His 1908 book Following the Color Line was a pioneering exploration of American racial conditions.
The book’s epigraph quotes William James who in 1907 proclaimed that “It is quite obvious that a wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.” So what was this transformative “Unrest”? Looking back today, and given what we know about the early twentieth century, we might assume that he was talking about Pentecostalism, or new kinds of fundamentalism, or evangelical revivalism, or Modernism, or Higher Criticism, or the Social Gospel, or pre-Millennialism … Nope, not a bit of it.
For Baker, as for James, and plenty of other intellectuals at the time, the great religious movement about to sweep the world was the Mind Cure movement, and specifically New Thought. (We owe the “Mind Cure” terminology to James). I borrow the Wikipedia definition for convenience:
The concept of New Thought (sometimes known as “Higher Thought”) promotes the ideas that Infinite Intelligence, or God, is everywhere, spirit is the totality of real things, true human selfhood is divine, divine thought is a force for good, sickness originates in the mind, and “right thinking” has a healing effect.
As Baker wrote, the great force in modern spirituality was “the new idealism”:
The new idealism lays its emphasis upon the power of mind over matter, the supremacy of spirit. Its thinkers have interested themselves as never before in the marvelous phenomena of human personality, most of which were contemptuously regarded by the old materialistic science. The wonders of the human mind, the attribute we call consciousness, the self, the relation of mind to mind, telepathy, the strange phenomena of double or multiple consciousness, hypnotism, and all the related marvels, are now crowding for serious attention and promise to open to us new worlds of human knowledge.
Now, every great philosophical and scientific movement has its popular and practical reflex. Just as the spread of the materialistic philosophy in the last century was accompanied the world over by a wave of infidelity and agnosticism, among the people, so the present wave of idealistic philosophy finds expression in a number of most remarkable popular movements. Every philosophy has its correlated faith; the faiths of the materialistic nineteenth century were pessimistic, negative, deterministic, while the new faiths are optimistic and positive. “I do not” and “I cannot” are superseded by “I do,” “I know,” “I will.” They are expressed in the spreading and significant Christian Science and New Thought movements, in the rise to power of leaders of the type of [John Alexander] Dowie, in the revival of interest in spiritualism as a religion, in the idealistic side of socialism. At the very time that the philosophers and psychologists were thinking their way to the new philosophy, P. P. Quimby and Henry Wood and Mrs. Eddy and Dowie and many others were feeling their way toward new popular faiths. The world was weary of the old materialism, and the revolt, which some men reasoned out while others only felt, came alike to all.
Discovering New Thought
The story begins with the Mind Cure movements of nineteenth century New England, which had their best-known representative in Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. But Eddy had plenty of counterparts and would be imitators, including dissident Christian Scientists and pupils of the prophetic Phineas Quimby. Such thinkers explored the same range of ideas, which collectively flourished as the “Boston craze” of the 1880s. Former Eddy student Emma Curtis Hopkins founded the movement that would later be known as New Thought.
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By the early 1890s, the very disparate groupings were moving to a new stage of self-understanding, as isolated thinkers and societies became self-consciously part of structured and organized networks, inspired in part by the excitement surrounding the World Parliament of Religions. The International Divine Science Association was created in 1892. In 1894, the foundation of the magazine New Thought gave the movement its common name: the following year, the term was adopted by the new Metaphysical Club of Boston. Within a few years, advocates were producing books with titles such as New Thought Essays (1899) and What is the New Thought? (1901, by Charles Brodie Patterson). 1901 brought the New Thought Publishing Company and another New Thought Magazine.
The various emerging groups held national gatherings through the 1890s, culminating in a national convention in 1899. An International New Thought Alliance was formed in 1914. Among its founding principles, declared in 1916, the Alliance listed “To teach the infinitude of the Supreme One; the Divinity of Man and his Infinite possibilities through the creative power of constructive thinking and obedience to the voice of the Indwelling Presence, which is our source of Inspiration, Power, Health and Prosperity.”
By the 1940s, some eighteen distinct New Thought sects and churches were operating, bearing names like the Institute of Religious Science, Metaphysical School of Health, and Church of Advanced Thought. A few of these movements went on to success in their own right. Among the more influential were Divine Science and the Unity School, both of which date from 1889. Under the leadership of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Unity flourished through its exploitation of modern techniques of marketing and advertising.
How New Thought Went National
The combination of familiar and exotic ideas proved irresistible, so that Christian Science and New Thought ideas became a national presence. Although New Thought began in New England, it was imported to Los Angeles about 1904, and from about 1915, most of the New Thought leaders established institutions on the Pacific coast. George Wharton James accurately spoke of California as “the natural home of New Thought.” To quote California writer Carey McWilliams, “these two imported movements – Theosophy and New Thought – constitute the stuff from which most of the later creeds and cults have been evolved … the mystical ingredients came from [Theosophical] Point Loma; the practical money-mindedness from the New Thought leaders.”
For both strands of the emerging tradition, the year 1915 proved a crucial turning point. This marked the twin great Expositions in San Francisco and San Diego, and San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition actively promoted New Thought as the religious vanguard of the new century. This was indeed the setting for the First International New Thought Congress.
Man is God Incarnate
Though agreed on many basic principles, the various therapeutic schools differed as to the relationship of mind and matter: New Thought groups believed in the paramount role of mind in controlling matter, while Christian Science preached an absolute idealism, altogether denying the existence of matter. For Eddy, “Mortal existence is a dream; mortal existence has no real entity, but saith, ‘It is I’.” Still, the schools were at one on fundamentals, in their optimism, and the belief in the divinization of humanity. They also gave a powerful role to women, and extolled women’s spirituality.
A healthy mind and body were to be achieved by recognizing the oneness of our human lives with the life of God, a point suggested by the title of Ralph Waldo Trine’s best-selling In Tune With The Infinite (1897). If men and women all partook of the divine, could they not in a sense claim to be God? Or to quote Trine, “There is no separation between your soul and the soul of the universe. In the deepest sense, you are the great universal soul… Man is God incarnate.”
New Thought, New Age, and the Prosperity Gospel
New Thought was syncretistic, and as William James remarked,
One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of “law” and “progress” and “development”; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind.
By spiritism, he means what we would call Spiritualism.
Though New Thought prefigured modern-day therapy movements, it was also rooted in older ideas: “with its constant thought of prosperity, its opulent-consciousness, its belief in the limitless possibilities of the individual, [it] is simply American psychology on dress parade.” As a rationalist critic remarked, dryly, “Their doctrine is ‘Be your own savior; don’t ask someone else to do it for you’. Isn’t this American independence?” Its modern heirs would certainly include Prosperity theology and, indirectly, the “Power of Positive Thinking.” We also find plenty of New Agey motifs, including “Noetic Science.”
Tracing New Thought Influence
Mainstream churches and Christian believers struggled to catch up with the revolution. In the Episcopal Church, for instance, we find the Emmanuel Movement (1906) which tried to provide medical healing within the framework of the church, in order to provide a counterweight to Christian Science. It offered a kind of pre-psychotherapy that did much to establish the practice of group therapy, and laid the groundwork for later movements to cure alcoholism and addiction.
Traces of New Thought surface in some unlikely settings. I have already described the feminist critique of Christianity offered by Matilda Joslyn Gage in her 1893 classic Woman, Church and State. As I suggested, she draws heavily on New Thought-related ideas in her extensive analyses of witchcraft through history, and the powers claimed by accused women. For Gage, the human will had incalculable power to control the environment through a form of science that was misunderstood as magic:
The empire of THE WILL over the astral light is symbolized in magic by the Pentagram, the growth of a personal will being the most important end to be attained in the history of man’s evolution. The opposition of the church to this growth of the human will in mankind, has ever been the most marked feature in its history. Under WILL, man decides for himself, escaping from all control that hinders his personal development.
Such ideas easily segued into Theosophy, and into occultism more generally.
Looking back at the turn of the twentieth century, we see plenty of critical trends in American Christianity, bt at the time, New Thought seemed to occupy a place of real prominence. And yet again, the years around 1893 marked the turning point.
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