For the sake of family, for the sake of humanity
Not everyone has had the experience of growing up in a strong and loving family. Even so, many people feel pretty deeply about the subject.
It shows in their tendency to create family groupings wherever and whenever they can. Sometimes a sports team, for example, or office workers at their best take on the feeling of family.
Families can accomplish something that no bureaucracy or government agency can ever achieve. It's a lot more than a cliché to say it is in a family setting that moral and spiritual values are most effectively nurtured. No country can legislate a moral climate that produces a citizenry imbued with honesty, moral courage, self-sacrifice. But the laws of a country can provide families with the room and the right to work toward that end.
Nowadays, though, there seems to be a trend moving powerfully in the opposite direction. The state tends more and more to take the role of "father knows best"—under a doctrine of jurisprudence called parens patriae.
If we look at the bleak statistics of child abuse, at the harsh human situations of families gone wrong, where there is no parental sense of responsibility to build on, all this might seem simple necessity. Who wouldn't be moved to tears and to action by thousands of cases of neglect, abuse, and sheer ignorance? Yet it is also equally clear that policing by the state in such circumstances should be a last resort. It must not be an avid enthusiasm for substituting the authority of the state for the role of the parent.
Suppose, however, that under pressure for increasing public regulation of private lives by a government, conventional medical care is mandated, and then that people are closely watched to see they supply it. Suppose, for instance, that federal regulations were to be established requiring every state in the United States to override parental judgment and provide medical care "to the child when his health requires it." In the broadest terms this would mean that Christian Scientists, for whom the healing presence of God is a practical reality, are no longer to believe in divine power. Or, at least, what they believe, they are no longer to act upon. They must, in effect, turn their family over to the judgment of the state and to material medicine as the only means of proper care. And if the laws of the states do not incorporate reporting regulations which demand this, then the states will not be eligible for federal financing.
What would be the effect of such regulations on these deeply responsible and moral families, many in their fifth generation of commitment to Christian Science? Wouldn't it strike at the spiritual center of the family, aggressively, intrusively undermining the understanding of God as having any significant import in human affairs?
Is this a far-fetched futuristic scenario? No. Similar requirements that all parents provide medical care are already in place in Great Britain. And regulations at the federal level now exist in the United States. These regulations, coupled with a new aggressive campaign of legal prosecution and pressure, would threaten to overturn existing religious provisions. Such provisions have been included over the years throughout the United States and elsewhere to protect the religious rights of Christian Scientists and others to seek an effective spiritual approach to healing.
It was in a far different climate of constitutional guarantees of freedom of religious practice that Christian Science, devoted to reinstating the power and practice of original Christianity, was first able to put down roots and grow. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, could write confidently some eight decades ago: "The Constitution of the United States does not provide that materia medica shall make laws to regulate man's religion; rather does it imply that religion shall permeate our laws. Mankind will be God-governed in proportion as God's government becomes apparent, the Golden Rule utilized, and the rights of man and the liberty of conscience held sacred" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany).
The decline of seriously held religious values, and with it the erosion of individual freedoms, might have been difficult to conceive eighty years ago. But society has now come to the point where it must ask itself some very sobering questions. Is God going to be tolerated only as a kind of inspirational poetry? Are we truly ready to decide that the teachings of Christ Jesus regarding prayer and healing are no longer to be allowed to be taken seriously in a materialistic, technocratic society? As Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mrs. Eddy points out: "Denial of the possibility of Christian healing robs Christianity of the very element, which gave it divine force and its astonishing and unequalled success in the first century." Is society ready to take the long, decisive step into a night of secularism by throwing its weight wholly on the side of materialism over against any hope of practical Christianity?
Before such a step is conclusively taken, it needs to be understood thoroughly where this may well be leading in regard to individual freedoms, not simply in regard to the rights of a religious minority. It is, after all, the concept of man as having spiritual individuality that undergirds strong convictions of the rights of the individual.
The truth is that the present trend, which seems so commanding, is by no means irreversible. If those who are committed to the continuance of Christianity as practical and viable even in a scientific age are fully wakened to the significance of the hour, the mental climate can change. The danger is not so much from without as from somnolence and unnecessary surrender within ourselves.
The fact is that never before in history has there been such widespread questioning of the definition of man as wholly material. There is a new thirst for the fulfillment that only morality and spirituality afford. And not in fifty years has there been such stir and shifting in the medical world itself, as it tries to assimilate remarkable new discoveries of the mental sources of disease.
This is no time to be seeking some bland protective coloration, some withdrawal from the rest of society. Now is the time to understand the true dimensions of these issues. Much progress has been made in loosening the grip of materialism that would deny any spiritual fulfillment to mankind. While fully respecting law, we must do what is required to further and to continue this progress. We owe it not only to Christian Scientist families of the future but to a humanity freshly, intuitively—if tentatively—reaching out toward a resurgence of spiritual hope.
Allison W. Phinney, Jr.
