New Thought (religious movement)

Formation: nineteenth century

Founder: Phineas Quimby

New Thought is a spiritual movement that originated in the United States during the 1830s. Adherents of New Thought believe in the primacy of ideas; they also believe that the spiritual realm gives shape to the material world. Mind holds sway over matter, and thinking creates reality. New Thought attributes disease, unhappiness, and misfortune to incorrect thinking. Consequently, correct thinking—having faith in a universal being—heals all ills. The movement’s concept of a divine God is a being of infinite intelligence, one who resides both everywhere and in each person. Opening the mind to God’s wisdom is the key to correct thinking, which can cure or change anything.

New Thought is also known as the mind-cure or mind-healing movement. Its belief system is based on metaphysical principles about the nature of reality that allow for a wide and varying range of views among its followers. This diversity makes it difficult to estimate the number of New Thought adherents or to pinpoint where they are located. New Thought is not based on a seminal text or written doctrine. The ideas of the movement are disseminated by leaders through speeches, conferences, and essays in the United States, Africa, Asia, and Europe. New Thought’s diverse followers include those who believe in religions like Christianity as well as those who hold no religious beliefs.

History

New Thought arose as part of a broad reaction to the ideas and constraints of Christianity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This religious philosophy included the concept of original sin and emphasized punishment in the afterlife. In the United States of the nineteenth century, people began to oppose this negative view. Many argued that man was not destined to a cycle of sin and punishment. Instead, people could affect their own happiness, health, and fortune by seeking the truth and being one with God.

Phineas P. Quimby (1802–1866) is credited with founding the New Thought movement. A clockmaker in Portland, Maine, Quimby became a follower of the mind-healing methods popularized by Franz Anton Mesmer, who believed that people possessed an animal magnetism—a universal force aligned to the tidal pull of the planets. According to Mesmer, illness could be cured through the healer’s own animal magnetism and by the application of actual magnets. Quimby rejected Mesmer’s basic theory, believing instead that it was belief in God that gave people the power to heal themselves. Quimby had many followers who swore by his cures. His—and Mesmer’s—ability to heal is attributed by modern-day health professionals to hypnosis. In hypnosis, the healer’s optimism, the patient’s motivation to get well, and the power of suggestion can often result in significant health gains. These results have often been described as the placebo effect.

Quimby had several names for his healing practice, among them Christian Science. This name was eventually used by Mary Baker Eddy, a former Quimby patient, to found a new, separate religion that does not accept medical science. It was Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925) who gave Quimby’s ideas the name New Thought and began organizing it into a national movement. The International New Thought Alliance was formed in 1914. Three years later, the group held a congress in St. Louis, Missouri, where attendees adopted a declaration of principles. This formal declaration has been modified several times since then. However, the movement’s most fundamental principle is its mutability—the idea that truth continues to be revealed over time and cannot be fixed in final form by any leader, organizational body, or institution.

Belief and Practices

Although the New Thought movement is relatively recent, its basic idealism is not. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, wrote about the primacy of mind over matter. In Asia, the spiritual teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism included ideas about the transcendence of the mind over the body. In the late eighteenth century, German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel also wrote extensively about idealism. American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) professed similar views. Emerson was the most prominent member of the American Transcendentalists, a group of writers who believed that people could use their own free will to move beyond the physical world to better understand God and themselves. Although Emerson was not an adherent of New Thought, his writings contributed greatly to the development of the movement’s ideas.

One of the first people to describe New Thought was William James, an American physician and philosopher. In his 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience, James noted that people are motivated either by hope or by fear. We can accept God either because we fear eternal damnation or because we believe in the promise of eternal rewards. New Thought, James wrote, reacted to the fear-based religious teachings of the time by embracing its hopeful opposite. He characterized the movement as an optimistic view of the world.

New Thought includes three main branches: Unity, Religious Science, and Divine Science. The spiritual breadth and organizational looseness of the movement allowed its various branches to arise on their own, either from religious groups or secular organizations. All groups share similar basic principles—among them that God is an infinite intelligence who exists everywhere and in each living thing. Aligning oneself with this universal spirit of the divine leads to correct thinking. Disease, unhappiness, and sin are caused by incorrect thinking, or being out of tune with God. Correct thinking can heal body and mind.

New Thought does not provide a formal method of worship, leaving leaders free to emphasize whatever aspect of the mind-cure principle they want to develop. One notable leader of the New Thought movement was Ernest Shurtleff Holmes (1887–1960), who founded the Church of Religious Science after leaving the Divine Science branch over ideological differences. Other leaders include Raymond Charles Barker (1911–1988), Ervin Seale (1909–1990), and Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958). Many of the New Age ideas of the early twenty-first century are based on the basic premise of New Thought, from hypnotherapy, the laws of attraction, the power of positive thinking espoused by Norman Vincent Peale, and the prosperity gospel, to the writings of thinkers such as Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, and Eckhart Tolle.

Bibliography

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