[’Caroline Fraser, herself raised in a Scientist household, traces the growth of the Church from a small, eccentric sect into a politically powerful and socially respectable religion. She takes us into the closed world of Eddy’s followers, who reject modern medicine even at the cost of their children’s lives. And she reveals just how Christian Science managed to gain extraordinary legal and congressional approval for its dubious practices’.
Memoir of a former Christian Scientist, a Christian cult which believes all illness is spiritual and that medicine is useless/sinful and so whose adherents refuse medical treatment, describing her father’s slow decay from injuries and eventual death from a spreading gangrene that could have been treated. Author describes how (akin to Scientology) Christian Science is in decay itself, with rapidly declining numbers despite healthy financials and real estate assets from better days. While Christian Science may soon shrivel away, it leaves a toxic and literally infectious legacy: to profit off offering ‘treatment’ and enable its members to avoid real medical treatment for their children and themselves, Christian Science spearheaded the legislation of ‘religious exemptions’ to vaccines, empowering the current anti-vax movement, which may kill more children than Christian Science ever did.]