Editorial November 7, 1994 Issue

"What are your politics?"

Mary Metzner Trammell

It was November of 1908, the same month the first issues of The Christian Science Monitor came off the presses. For months, the newspaper's founder—Mary Baker Eddy—had been the focus of intense public scrutiny. Reporters and curiosity seekers often clustered just beyond the driveway entrance to her new home in Chestnut Hill, on the outskirts of Boston, wanting answers to their questions. Why had the Leader of the Church of Christ, Scientist, suddenly left her rural home in Concord, New Hampshire, to return to Boston at this late stage in her career? What were her thoughts on world peace? Why was she founding a newspaper? And, time and again, they wanted to know about her politics.

Finally, Mrs. Eddy decided to answer the question about her politics—in the pages of the Boston Post (November 3, 1908). She said: "I am asked, 'What are your politics?' I have none, in reality, other than to help support a righteous government; to love God supremely, and my neighbor as myself" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 276).

That's quite a statement to make, especially in a presidential election year—with Americans going to the polls that very month! Yet to those who knew Mrs. Eddy well, her words must have been no surprise. As a young woman, she'd been a Jacksonian Democrat. At midpoint in her life, about the time she discovered Christian Science, she'd swung round to a "new Republican" point of view.

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