By an anonymous Ex-Christian Scientist Group Contributor.
I felt God’s hand was in everything that unfolded for me. I couldn’t take a step without praying about it, and all right decisions, activity, or relationships would have the appearance that fit perfectly with the moral, spiritual, and generally white-bread codes dictated by Christian Science.
If people were doing something different I internally judged them as heading in the wrong direction or being wrong. ’Reality’ in the human material world had to fall within the Christian Science parameters or it wasn’t real or wouldn’t contribute to spiritual progress in the Scientific plane of existence. When you are born into a cult like this it is not your fault. But it is hard to think differently. Christian Science programs thought at such a primal level.
I was hardcore for about forty-five to fifty years. My greatest sadness now, is that I brought my children up in Christian Science. My kids wised up before I did. My husband is not a Christian Scientist and has been very patient for over thirty years. But I had such a strong family influence growing up—third generation on both sides. And I didn’t really feel free to decide for myself until after my mother’s death. Now, I feel like I was let out of my cage. But daily, I have to give myself permission to think whatever I like.
So many Christian Scientists mimic each other. It really is a cult, as dangerous as the Jim Jones thing. I believe there is mind control going on. I never realized it before but that has to be how practitioners work. They kind of mentally rearrange your furniture upstairs.
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I really appreciate your comments on the mind control aspects of this religion. I knew it. I felt it. But I could not separate myself from it. I felt I was in it’s grips, but could not free myself mentally from it. There really is a cult-like aspect to it, but the religion presents itself so differently to the world, that an outsider to the religion really can’t get it, or understand it.
For years, I tried to separate myself from C.S. In the age before the Internet, a person in my situation was largely on their own, in the fullest sense of the word. There were no groups of former members trying to deal with the fallout of it (that I was ever aware of). If you went to a psychologist, likely, they would not have had any experience with dealing with former Christian Scientists. That was my experience, anyway. And one had to deal with the guilt of seeking out a psychologist/psychiatrist, as, to do so, went against Christian Science, because Christian Science was “the only truth”, and to go against it was to “go against truth”, and “you’d pay a mighty price down the line” for having done so.
Pre-Internet, there was very little to go on. Had I been aware of Willa Cather’s book, or Edwin Franden Dakin’s 1929 book “Mrs. Eddy: The Biography of a Virginal Mind”, ( the book that drove The Mother Church crazy, and which they did everything they could to repress), I would have been off and sailing.
Anyway, we have the Internet today, thank God, and people who have suffered from the mind-control aspects of this religion, cannot feel so alone. Thank you for your post.