“Hopelessly Insane over Christian Science”?

At the turn of the twentieth century, hundreds of Christian Scientists, including their founder Mary Baker Eddy, were charged with insanity owing to their religion. Like revivalism and Millerism before it, Christian Science became part of the medically-sanctioned etiology of insanity. Newspapers were swift to pathologize Eddy and members of her church thus justifying their institutionalization in prisons and insane asylums. Their stories were manufactured into tabloid sensations that depicted Christian Scientists in a variety of denigrating frameworks such as murderer, family-disrupter and subverter of gender roles. Superintendents of insane asylums, such as the renowned Allan McLane Hamilton, served as expert witnesses in trials where they were utilized by both the defense and prosecution to demonstrate the scientific credibility of belief in Christian Science as a precipitator of insanity.

The proposed paper examines how the turn of the century American politics of religion and medical science intertwined to construct Christian Science as a cause of insanity. I draw not only from medical sources such as scientific journals and conference proceedings, but popular coverage of emerging tropes of madness in connection with religion. To focus my discussion, I employ historical media coverage of two turn of the century trials in which Christian Scientist defendants were adjudged both sane and insane by physicians called in as expert witnesses. In both of these cases, the female defendant's mental capacity was questioned owing to their religious identity as a Christian Science. Despite the centrality of insanity charges against members of the religious fringe, scholars have yet to systematically analyze these charges especially in terms of gender. I argue that charges of insanity levied against member of Christian Science reveal complex tensions concerning the negotiation of new religious movements, medical theories of insanity, and gendered performances of faith.