Unity Church

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Myrtle Fillmore was forty when the physicians named her case tuberculosis and gave it about six months. She had carried a constellation of ailments her whole life; the sentence only sharpened what was already there. What altered the outcome was a sentence of a different order. Sitting through a lecture in Kansas City in 1886 given by a teacher named E. B. Weeks, sent out from the metaphysical schoolroom that Emma Curtis Hopkins had opened in Chicago, she took hold of a single proposition and turned it on her own body: that she was a child of God and therefore did not inherit sickness. She repeated it, worked it against the diagnosis day after day, and by 1888 pronounced herself well. Out of that recovery — one woman’s insistence that the divine in her was larger than the disease in her — the entire apparatus of Unity unfolds.

Unity — long known formally as the Unity School of Christianity — is a New Thought movement founded in Kansas City by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore at the end of the 1880s. It teaches that God is an indwelling presence reachable through prayer and disciplined thought, and that sickness, poverty, and unhappiness yield to the right ordering of the mind. Its enduring instruments are not creeds but practices: silent prayer, affirmation, and a steady stream of printed devotional words.

Charles Fillmore (1854–1948), who with his wife Myrtle co-founded Unity and named the movement in 1891. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From one illness to a publishing house

Charles Fillmore came to the inquiry as a skeptic. A Minnesota-born businessman with a real-estate practice and a leg crippled since a boyhood skating accident, he watched his wife’s transformation with the wariness of a man who trusted ledgers, then followed her into the reading that had produced it. The two studied across an unusually wide field — the Bible read in a new key, Hinduism and its doctrine of an immanent divine, Theosophy, the Spiritualist and mental-healing literature then circulating through American cities — and around 1890 traveled to Chicago to sit under Emma Curtis Hopkins directly, the teacher whose lectured affirmation had reached Myrtle through Weeks. From Hopkins they took the conviction that healing was a teachable science of mind and the confidence to teach it themselves.

They began, as the movement’s founders so often did, in print. In April 1889 they issued a sixteen-page magazine, Modern Thought — the publication that named the work and gathered its first audience. The title proved restless. Within a year it was Christian Science Thought, then simply Thought; and in June 1891 Charles Fillmore settled on the word that would carry the whole enterprise. He chose Unity not as a brand but as a thesis: the oneness of God, of humanity, and of truth across the world’s religions, the single ground on which his eclectic reading could stand. From that magazine grew everything else — a publishing house that would become one of the largest religious presses in the country; a correspondence ministry answering mail from strangers; the children’s magazine Wee Wisdom, which Myrtle edited from 1893 and which ran for the better part of a century; and eventually a campus south of Kansas City, near Lee’s Summit, that began as Unity Farm on fifty-eight acres bought in 1919 and matured into Unity Village, an incorporated municipality and the movement’s center to this day. The Italianate water tower the Fillmores’ son Rickert raised there in 1929, a hundred-thousand-gallon reservoir crowned with a carillon, still marks the campus against the Missouri sky.

The Italianate Tower and the adjacent Silent Unity building at Unity Village, both opened in 1929 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

The institution caught up with the publishing in 1914, when the work was formally incorporated as the Unity School of Christianity and a new administration building was dedicated on the last night of the year. The local congregation that worshipped alongside the school took the name Unity Society of Practical Christianity — the adjective practical doing deliberate work, marking a faith measured by what it could mend rather than what it required one to believe.

The Unity Inn, the movement’s vegetarian cafeteria in Kansas City, shown in 1924; the Fillmores’ dietary teaching was part of Unity’s practical institutional life. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A teachable science of the indwelling God

Doctrinally, Unity belongs to the wider New Thought family that grew from the healing work of Phineas Quimby, the Maine clockmaker who, after years as a practicing mesmerist, set aside the trance and concluded that cure followed corrected belief rather than any magnetic fluid. That conviction passed through a chain of teachers — Quimby’s patient and first systematizer Warren Felt Evans, a Swedenborgian minister; Mary Baker Eddy, who carried it into the institutionally separate Christian Science; and above all Emma Curtis Hopkins, the teacher of teachers whose Chicago seminary seeded most of the movement’s churches at once. From Hopkins’s classroom radiate Unity, the parallel Divine Science of Denver, and the principal author of Unity’s own canon, the homeopathic physician H. Emilie Cady, whose Lessons in Truth — serialized in the magazine in 1894–95 and issued as a book in 1903 — became the textbook a million readers learned the teaching from.

Unity shares with that family two premises. The first is that mind shapes circumstance: thought is causal, and the disciplined redirection of attention can reorder body and fortune. The second is immanence — the divine is not a remote sovereign but a presence resident in every person, what Unity names Divine Mind. The lineage of that second premise reaches back past Quimby. It runs through the American Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essays are quoted across the whole New Thought canon and whose insistence on the God within is the movement’s nearest literary ancestor; and behind Emerson it reaches the visionary theology of Emmanuel Swedenborg, whose doctrine that the natural world is the sensible language of a spiritual one, and whose rejection of vicarious atonement in favor of a salvation realized in the living of charity, entered the stream directly through the Swedenborgian Evans. Further back still stands the Mesmerism of the eighteenth century, which gave the whole current its founding intuition that one mind could act curatively upon another.

What distinguishes Unity within this company is its insistence on remaining Christian in vocabulary. Where some of its kin drifted toward a generic metaphysics or, later, toward frank prosperity teaching, Unity kept Jesus at the center — but read him in its own register. It draws a careful line between Jesus, the man of Nazareth, and the Christ, which in Unity’s usage names the divine potential resident in every human being. Jesus is the great demonstrator, the Way-Shower, the elder brother who realized that indwelling Christ completely and so revealed what every person is capable of becoming. The Bible, on this reading, is less a chronicle than an allegory of the soul’s own unfolding, every figure and event answering to a state of mind. Charles Fillmore systematized the scheme in books like Christian Healing (1909) and in his teaching of the Twelve Powers, twelve faculties of the developed person mapped onto the twelve disciples; the Fillmores also held, quietly and without dogma, a version of reincarnation, Charles going so far as to identify himself with the apostle Paul reborn. The temper of all this is devotional rather than chiefly therapeutic — closer to a discipline of communion than to a technique for results, even where results are expected.

Silent Unity and the Daily Word

The movement’s two best-known creations both grew out of the conviction that prayer is real work that can be done on another’s behalf at any distance. In 1890 the Fillmores and a few friends began meeting nightly at ten o’clock in their home for a quarter-hour of silent, concerted prayer, and invited readers of the magazine to join them in thought at the same hour. Myrtle called the small band the Society of Silent Help; it grew into Silent Unity, a prayer ministry that has never since closed. It answers requests around the clock, by post and later by telephone, holding each petitioner in affirmative prayer for thirty days and writing back — an industrial-scale intercession run with the regularity of the publishing house beside it. The companion to the prayer ministry is Daily Word, a magazine of brief daily meditations launched in July 1924, each day a single affirmative passage. Its circulation has long run well past the movement’s own membership, carried into the homes of readers who never set foot in a Unity church and could not say which denomination produced it.

This is the shape of Unity as a lived thing: a congregation and a school at Unity Village; a network of affiliated centers gathered today under Unity Worldwide Ministries; the prayer ministry answering its unending mail; and the printed word going out by the millions. It is a religion organized less around assembly than around correspondence — a faith one can practice alone, at the appointed hour, in silence, with a magazine open on the table.

Christian, or not

Unity’s relation to mainstream Christianity is contested on both sides. The movement has generally described itself as a teaching open to people of any church rather than a denomination demanding exclusive loyalty — Charles Fillmore called it a link in the educational movement Jesus began, its aim to discern the truth in Christianity and prove it. It asks no convert to leave another church and sets out its essentials as a handful of principles rather than a creed. Orthodox critics have placed it outside Christian bounds all the same, for its claim that divinity indwells every person, its allegorical handling of Scripture, its openness to reincarnation, and above all its near-silence on sin, hell, and the atoning death — the doctrines that, for its critics, make Christianity what it is and that Unity sets quietly aside. Scholars of American religion read it as part of the metaphysical strand — the lineage running through Mesmerism, Swedenborg, and the Transcendentalism of Emerson into New Thought — that has shaped popular spirituality far past the borders of any organized group.

The two parties are weighing different things. To its critics Unity is a body of propositions to be checked against a standard; to Unity itself the propositions were never the load-bearing part. The movement was born not from an argument but from a sick woman’s daily affirmation, and it has always understood its Christianity as something done rather than something professed — a matter of the indwelling Christ awakened, the silent hour kept, the word repeated until the life around it bends to it. Measured by its own vocabulary, Unity is Christian in precisely the sense it cares about: it takes Jesus at his word that the kingdom of God is within, and it spends its whole institutional life — the press, the prayer ministry, the carillon over Unity Village ringing the hours — trying to reach the God who lives there.

Texts and scholarship

The movement’s own canon begins with H. Emilie Cady’s Lessons in Truth, which the magazine carried in 1894–95 and Unity issued as a book in 1903; it remains the work through which most readers first meet the teaching, having passed a million copies in some eleven languages. Charles Fillmore’s Christian Healing (1909) and The Twelve Powers of Man set out his metaphysical anthropology, and the posthumous Letters of Myrtle Fillmore (1936) preserve the correspondence-ministry voice in which so much of Unity’s actual teaching was done. These sit within the larger New Thought library, much of it now public domain — James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh (1903), the most reprinted single text of the whole popular canon; Wallace Wattles’s The Science of Getting Rich (1910); and the philosophically anchoring lectures of Thomas Troward — that Unity shared with its sibling movements even where its devotional temper diverged from theirs.

The scholarly literature treats Unity as one institutional crystallization of a much older American current. Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit (Yale, 2007) places it within the long stream she calls metaphysical religion, running from colonial Hermetic correspondences through Mesmerism, Swedenborg, and Emersonian Transcendentalism into New Thought; Charles Braden’s Spirits in Rebellion (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963) remains the foundational narrative of the movement as a whole, and John Haller’s The History of New Thought (Swedenborg Foundation, 2012) traces the Swedenborgian thread that reached Unity through Warren Felt Evans. The dedicated biographies are Neal Vahle’s: Torchbearer to Light the Way: The Life of Myrtle Fillmore (2002) and The Spiritual Journey of Charles Fillmore (2008), built on the Unity archives at the Village. Gail Harley’s Emma Curtis Hopkins: Forgotten Founder of New Thought (Syracuse University Press, 2002) recovers the teacher from whom the Fillmores received the method, and Beryl Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom (University of California Press, 1999) reads the movement through the women — Hopkins, Cady, Myrtle Fillmore among them — who disproportionately built it.

→ In the library: Allen — As a Man Thinketh (1903), a core text of the shared New Thought canon · Atkinson — Thought Vibration (1906), the law-of-attraction strand of the same milieu

→ Related: New Thought American Metaphysical Religion · Christian Science · Divine Science · Christianity · Jesus Christ · Immanence · Mesmerism · Emmanuel Swedenborg · Swedenborgianism New Church · Ralph Waldo Emerson · Spiritualism · Theosophy