New Thought

The nineteenth-century American doctrine that thought causes circumstance — ancestor of the prosperity gospel and The Secret, and structurally committed to blaming the sick for being sick.

What it is

The American movement holding that mind is causally prior to matter — that thought shapes health, wealth and circumstance, and that changing what you think changes what happens to you.

Its institutional forms include Unity, Religious Science (Centers for Spiritual Living) and Divine Science. Christian Science is closely related and separate, and takes the claim further: on Mary Baker Eddy's account matter and illness are not merely influenced by mind but are unreal.

Where it came from

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a Maine clockmaker turned mesmerist and healer, concluded from his practice that illness was caused by false belief and cured by correcting it. He treated large numbers of patients, including — in 1862 — a chronically unwell woman named Mary Baker Eddy, who recovered and later founded Christian Science while disputing how much she owed him. The dispute has never been settled and the documentary evidence is against her.

The movement proper was built by others: Warren Felt Evans; Emma Curtis Hopkins, "teacher of teachers", who trained most of the founders of the later denominations; Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, who founded Unity in 1889; and Ernest Holmes, who founded Religious Science in 1927.

Its publishing lineage is the important part, because it runs directly to the present:

Ralph Waldo Trine, In Tune with the Infinite (1897)
Wallace Wattles, The Science of Getting Rich (1910)
Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich (1937)
Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (1952)
Rhonda Byrne, The Secret (2006), which drew on Wattles explicitly

The prosperity gospel — the branch of American Christianity in which faith produces material wealth — is New Thought grafted onto Pentecostalism, and the law of attraction is its secular descendant.

How it is practised

Through affirmation, visualisation, and the disciplined refusal of negative thought. Denials and affirmations in the classical form: deny the reality of the unwanted condition, affirm the desired one, repeat.

What we can and cannot say

We can say expectation has real and measurable effects, and that this is the grain of truth the movement grew around. Placebo responses are genuine, expectancy influences pain perception and some symptom reporting, and attitude affects behaviour, which affects outcomes. None of that is in dispute.

We can say the causal claim as made is false. Thought does not cause circumstance in the way the literature asserts. Cancer does not respond to affirmation. Poverty is not produced by insufficient abundance-consciousness, and the enormous literature on the actual causes of poverty is not much troubled by vibration.

And we can say the structural problem, which is not incidental but follows necessarily from the doctrine.

If thought causes circumstance, then circumstance reveals thought. The sick person made themselves sick. The poor person is thinking poorly. The bereaved attracted their loss. This is not a malicious misreading of New Thought; it is the contrapositive, and the literature has said so openly since the nineteenth century.

Barbara Ehrenreich documented the consequences in Bright-sided (2009), written after her own breast cancer diagnosis put her inside a culture of relentless positivity — pink ribbons, the insistence that cancer was a gift, and the clear message that expressing anger or fear was both a failure of attitude and a risk to her prognosis. Her argument is that mandatory optimism functions as social control, silences legitimate complaint, and adds guilt to illness.

This is spiritual bypassing with an economic programme attached, and it operates at scale.

Christian Science has a body count, and it should be stated. Reliance on prayer instead of medical treatment has led to the deaths of children from meningitis, diabetes and other treatable conditions, and to criminal prosecutions of parents in several jurisdictions. Religious exemptions to child medical neglect laws — for which Christian Science lobbied successfully in many US states — have been the subject of sustained campaigning by organisations including CHILD, founded by Rita Swan after her son died of meningitis while under Christian Science treatment.

We cannot say the movement produced nothing. It fed into humanistic psychology, into the self-help industry, and into a genuinely useful strand of American thought about agency and self-efficacy. What can be said is that a doctrine which explains suffering by the sufferer's mind will, wherever it is believed consistently, hurt exactly the people least able to bear it.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading