Posted inChristian Science

I couldn’t bring myself to put my kids through the same crap I went through

This is Part 2 of a series of posts by Sharon, an Ex-Christian Scientist Group contributor.
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People in our church with problems were condemned behind their backs as someone who ‘needed to straighten out their thinking.’ Ill members who disappeared out of their regular pews were ignored and never talked about again. One couple who let their daughter die of a ruptured appendix came to church the next Sunday as if nothing had happened and no one said a word about her.  It was as if she never existed.

My mother was never very sympathetic towards anyone’s illness or plain bad luck. She preached her great love, but her constant statement was ‘there certainly is something wrong with their thinking!’ Then she got old and had to use a walker, and I remember she wouldn’t go to church because of the walker.

I told her that there actually are churches where people would bring you a casserole when you had trouble like that, but of course, not the Christian Science church. To even look at someone who needed a walker or was infirm in some way was paying attention to Error; you were just to turn away and deny you saw anything.

Posted inChristian Science

Someone introduced Mother to a CSP

This is Part 1 of a series of posts by Sharon, an Ex-Christian Scientist Group contributor.
Sharon's Story Header

I envy those folks who say they grew up in a Christian Science household, but their parents were warm and nurturing. I was not that fortunate.

I was raised in the Christian Science church by a mother who converted to Christian Science shortly after my birth. I grew up in the middle of the polio epidemic and I remember my classmates lining up for the first inoculations of the salk vaccine while I waited in the classroom. I was legally exempted from any medical testing, any health classes and any discussions surrounding health or the human body. I was required to leave the classroom if such a discussion started. I felt like a freak.

I never was allowed to discuss any problem or any illness with my family. The reply to me was just to ‘know the truth’ and ‘straighten up your thinking’ and I would get over it. Christian Science talks about being loving, but spending my childhood experiencing terrible sore throats, fevers, and tonsils so swollen I couldn’t swallow, while all the time being told I wasn’t sick and to get up and go to school was not loving. Being forced to go to school sick—and if I threw up and my mother was called, she would be angry when she picked me up—was not loving.

Whenever I read about a child dying under the care of a Christian Science practitioner I know that I would have been there too, except for pure dumb luck, because my mother definitely would have let me die. I spent the early part of my adulthood mentally berating myself because I was unable to have all these so-called healings and thinking that it was because I just wasn’t a good enough Christian Scientist.