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Metaphysical spirituality has found a receptive audience among middle‐class Americans. The New Thought movement combined mesmerist psychology and the “power of positive thinking” to show Americans how they might learn to become inwardly connected with powerful spiritual forces. Theosophy built upon this tradition and added a new vocabulary, partially drawn from Asian religions, for describing the higher spiritual worlds to which we are said to be inwardly connected. Avid interest in such topics as mysticism, altered states of consciousness, angels, and near‐death experiences have all been avenues through which Americans have pursued spiritual discovery outside of our established churches. The phenomenal popularity of James Redfield's bestseller The Celestine Prophecy illustrates how fully metaphysical spirituality has penetrated the American religious vernacular.

This chapter presents a new picture of the extent and nature of as well as the channels for the popularization of psychological thought and practice in Britain, focusing on the period from the start of the 20th century to the end of the 1930s. It downplays the enthusiasm for Freud and psychoanalysis, instead draws attention to the ‘practical psychology’ and New Thought movements as well as spiritualism and Pelmanism. It highlights their suspicion of expertise and their interest in self-improvement via the interrelationship between mind, body, and spirit. It uncovers the role of clubs, correspondence courses, and advice literature in the transmission of practical understanding. It also demonstrates a shift in the nature of popular psychology in the interwar period, with greater interest, for instance, in psychoanalysis, sex, and lifestyle, relating this to class, gender, and the increasing influence of experts in the field.

This chapter examines the link between the mind and body using the perspectives of New Thought. According to New Thought writers, the body is not only the soul's mirror but, often enough, the elemental ground of spiritual progress and perfectibility. The roots of New Thought lay in the heady nineteenth-century world that mixed and matched mystical Swedenborgianism, mesmerism, spiritualism, holiness evangelicalism, and mind cure: a system which “attributed cures of physical illness to the mental or spiritual faculties.” Food has consistently remained an evil temptation in the literature of the past half-century. In earlier historical periods, latter-day religious diet reformers have promoted a variety of messages, some advocating fasting as a useful means of weight control and others urging against it; several advocating vegetarianism while opponents upheld the benefits of meat; recommending special vitamin supplements to fight toxins while the conservative proffered basic dietary variety mixed with exercise.

This chapter traces the development of ideas about the power of the mind to transform thought and speech into health and wealth. Many prosperity gospels were born from the combination of three different traditions: pentecostalism, New Thought, and an American mythology of uplift. New Thought ideas about the power of the mind and speech were prevalent in many forms. The evangelist E. W. Kenyon represented a minority tradition within pentecostalism that believed words to be a powerful instrument of healing. African American uplift movements in the urban north, particularly black spiritualism, produced many metaphysical promises for money and health. Popular self-help manuals churned out metaphysical and vaguely Protestant praises for businessmen of hard work, bootstraps, and sheer will. These diverse gospels became the foundation for the post-war prosperity movement.

This chapter reports ethnographic research on a storefront African American Word of Faith Church, Durham, North Carolina, that practices healing within a Prosperity Gospel. Faith is measured in the body—one’s health—making material reality the measure of immaterial faith. Black Protestantism has long combined metaphysical religions, New Thought, African-derived traditions (hoodoo, voodoo, conjure, rootwork), and pentecostalism. Leaders include: “Reverend Ike,” Frederick K. C. Price, Keith Butler, Leroy Thompson, Eddie Long, Creflo Dollar, T. D. Jakes. Faith is a force that actuates words through “positive confession.” Believers avoided “negative confession” by ignoring “sense knowledge,” acting as if well until healing “manifested,” not asking for prayer repeatedly. Believers conducted spiritual warfare against demons through deliverance. The congregation studied had access to medical care but mistrusted medicine as inferior to faith, partly because the healthcare system had failed to provide African Americans with color-blind treatment. Congregants variously interpreted “failure” to receive healing.

This chapter examines the practices of Buddhist meditation and Raja yoga in New Thought. Leaders of New Thought were first exposed to Buddhism and Vedanta philosophy through the publications of European Orientalists and the Theosophical Society and, later, though personal contacts with Asian Buddhist and Hindu missionaries. In addition to D. T. Suzuki, who helped to spark American interest in Japanese Zen, other important early missionaries were Anagarika Dharmapāla, a Sri Lankan Buddhist and Theosophist, and Swami Vivekenanda, an Indian monk of the Ramakrishna Order who launched the Vedanta Society in North America. New Thought leaders, Theosophists, and Asian missionaries met in person at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions and continued to develop relationships for more than a decade, particularly at the Greenacre conferences in Eliot, Maine. This chapter reveals the transnational nature of New Thought, which is typically considered to be an American metaphysical religious movement.

This chapter surveys the rise of the Mind Cure movements that spread outward from the teachings of Quimby, including Christian Science and New Thought. Like most histories of these movements, it discusses the contributions of Warren Felt Evans, Mary Baker Eddy, the Dresser family, and Emma Curtis Hopkins, as well as the major religious organizations inspired by Hopkins’s teaching. Unlike most histories of New Thought, however, it distinguishes between two forms, community-oriented and individualist, which had different trajectories. Community-oriented New Thought was led largely by white women and centered in religious communities. Individualist New Thought stressed personal prosperity and business success. This chapter also devotes attention to community-oriented African American movements inspired by New Thought, particularly the Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine but also Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Moorish Science, the Nation of Islam, and Black Hebrew Israelism.

In addition to providing an overview of the main arguments put forward in the book regarding pentecostals' and charismatics' healing practices in the United States, the introduction also contextualizes pentecostal healing practices in the early 1900s in relation to competing healing paradigms also available to Americans around the same time. The chapter outlines the basic contours of the divine healing movement among evangelicals in the late nineteenth century, as well as numerous alternative healing methodologies associated with everything from Christian Science to New Thought, homeopathy, and the health reform efforts of Sylvester Graham. Special attention is paid to the relationship between alternative healing paradigms and a broad-based metaphysical tradition in U.S. religion. The introduction also clarifies the author's use of key terms throughout the book, including “natural healing,” “holism,” “metaphysical religion,” and “therapeutic culture.”

This chapter examines how Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of positive thinking catapulted him to fame, mainly through his 1952 book, “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and contributed to the revival of American religion at the time. It first considers how the overwhelming reception accorded “The Power of Positive Thinking” made Peale a “minister to millions” and how his popularity coincided with the religious revitalization effort before discussing Peale’s interpretation of New Thought. It then looks at the criticisms hurled against “The Power of Positive Thinking,” including the accusation that Pealeism represented the worst aspects of the revival of populist religion, and the role played by Peale in the religious revival of the 1950s. Finally, it describes how the Foundation for Christian Living emerged as the nerve center of Peale’s independent ministry during the decade of the 1950s.

This chapter describes how members of the American medical and religious establishment appropriated some of the suggestive methods taught by Mind Curers and channeled them into mainstream Protestantism, scientific psychology, and orthodox medicine. The Emmanuel Clinic, a mental health and social work program founded by a group of elite, male clergy and physicians, was the linchpin in this process. The Emmanuel Movement that spread outward from the original Boston clinic influenced other clergy and physicians, who went on to develop Clinical Pastoral Education for chaplaincy, the fields of psychosomatic medicine and pastoral counseling, and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. This chapter also describes early medical research on the placebo effect, the relaxation response, and other psychological and physiological effects of meditation. Many pioneers in the fields of religion, medicine, and psychology set the stage for Mindfulness to burst onto the scene in the 1970s.

This chapter explores the Unity School of Christianity, which fully employed the concept of transubstantiation in its belief in the physical and spiritual benefits of vegetarianism. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, a number of Protestant sects arose and gathered under the general term New Thought. Despite their heavy emphasis on metaphysics, some New Thought advocates paid close attention to the body and its care and feeding. One of these was the Unity Society of Practical Christianity. Unity founders embraced vegetarianism—the acquisition of special food items and the preparation of meatless meals—because they believed it enhanced rather than undermined their metaphysics. Meatless meals mattered because they enable spiritual growth in a way that meat-filled meals simply could not. More importantly, vegetarianism bridged the divide between traditional Christian, even Catholic, practices and the still developing modern Christianity.

The introduction traces the astonishing growth of the Mindfulness movement over the past four decades and sketches the usual narrative about how it began in the 1970s, when Jon Kabat-Zinn developed the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) protocol. This book seeks to change that narrative. It traces the origins of efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically back to nineteenth-century teachers of Mind Cure, a religious movement led largely by American women who had learned these methods from Buddhist and Hindu missionaries; and further back, to eighteenth-century research on magnetism, the unconscious, and psychic phenomena. The introduction offers an overview of the book: four chapters of history, two chapters offering critical analysis of the modern Mindfulness movement, an epilogue, and an appendix describing the theoretical and historical challenges of piecing this complex story together. This account draws upon multiple academic disciplines, including the histories of science, medicine, psychology, Buddhism, Hinduism, Western esotericism, and American religions.

This chapter examines how LOHAS salvages its “New Age” focus on self-development or actualization. It examines the Mind Cure, New Thought, and New Age movements in terms of their relationship to capitalism to show how LOHAS extends and expands these movements through the LOHAS category of Personal Development (also referred to as the Mind/Body/Spirit market). In Personal Development goods and services, physical and spiritual self-healing reflects a moral pragmatism by linking self-healing work with that of healing the world. Threaded through the LOHAS discourse is a popular American theme—the power of positive thinking—and this healing modality is put to use in so-called the quantum spiritualities, the latest incarnation of the American therapeutic tradition. The end of the chapter shows how the LOHAS texts use examples of healed selves as testimonials to show that it is indeed possible for individuals to transform themselves to social warriors.

Chapter 2 narrates the history of religious healers from the time of the ancients through developments in Asia and the Greco-Roman world and in the early church. The chapter also describes the origins of hospitals as religiously sponsored institutions of care for the sick. These institutions emerged globally, across faith traditions—in the pagan world, in Christianity, in Islam, in the global East—and they remain today largely an expression of religious outreach. This can be observed in the United States, for example, in the countless religiously branded hospitals, medical centers, and healthcare facilities in most communities that go by names such as Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Adventist, Episcopal, Jewish, and so on.

This chapter argues that in Tan Sitong’s譚嗣同 (1865–1898) syncretic Renxue 仁學 (An Exposition of Benevolence), in addition to incorporating Neo-Confucian, scientific, and general Buddhist ideas, Tan particularly used Yogācāra ideas, especially in developing his theory of mind, which was based on his sociopolitical utopianism. The chapter examines two ways in which Yogācāra contributed to the scheme Tan advanced in An Exposition of Benevolence. First, it demonstrates that Yogācāra’s cognitive architecture played an important role in Tan’s philosophical system alongside other theories of mind drawn from Neo-Confucianism, science, and the Christian-based New Thought movement. Second, it shows that along with these other views, Yogācāra was central to Tan’s utopian social project. As such, Yogācāra helped enable Tan to achieve two aims of late-Qing modernizers: delineating the relationship between Chinese and Western ideas, and showing how they could be applied in ways that contributed to Chinese reform efforts.

This chapter considers the early, community-oriented wing of New Thought movement and the Mindfulness movement side by side and identifies several characteristics they have in common, as well as significant differences between them. The Mindfulness movement is similar in various ways to Individualist New Thought. This analysis reveals some of the problems and limitations inherent in the Mindfulness movement’s approach to meditation, from both Buddhist and scientific perspectives. By extracting meditation from its religious contexts and meanings and turning it into an individual technique for reducing stress, several important resources get “lost in translation.” These include the social and spiritual benefits of religious community; fundamental aspects of Buddhist and neo-Vedanta spiritual paths, particularly the ethical foundations of meditation and yoga; and systemic analyses of the causes of suffering and stress-related illness, including racism, sexism, and poverty.

The sixth chapter shows how the biography of B. J. Palmer recapitulated situations faced by his father. Endowed with energy and creativity, B. J. Palmer was dispossessed of leadership when a rationalizing profession rejected proprietary models, especially B. J.’s autocratic claims to power. This was symbolized by B. J.’s forceful introduction of the Neurocalometer, a controversial proprietary device that split the membership of the Universal Chiropractors Association. The chapter considers how in later life B. J. Palmer made a “spiritual turn” toward New Thought that imparted an elaborate metaphysics to Chiropractic Philosophy, which endures in the Straight chiropractic movement. When B. J. Palmer died in 1961, his son, David Daniel Palmer, was already managing most of the day-to-day operations at the P.S.C. “Dave” Palmer aligned the soon renamed Palmer College of Chiropractic with mainstream standards of education. The chiropractic profession also normalized its position in American society, with a series of legal and policy victories, including the federal anti-trust lawsuit, Wilk vs. A.M.A.

This chapter explores the far-reaching influences in American religion and medicine of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist and mystic, and Franz Anton Mesmer, who developed Mesmerism, the forerunner of hypnosis. Swedenborg’s theology filtered into homeopathy and the religious movements of Shakerism, Transcendentalism, Unitarianism, Mormonism, modernist Buddhism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, and New Thought. Mesmer’s theories about illness contributed to the development of osteopathy, chiropractic, and hypnotherapy. Before the development of chemical anesthesia, some nineteenth-century doctors performed complex and successful surgeries on patients who were sedated only by hypnotic suggestion. Ideas and practices derived from Mesmer and Swedenborg converged in the nineteenth-century mental-healing practice of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a New England clockmaker and the first American to discover that beliefs and mental states can affect one’s physical health.