Recently, a pillar of the American establishment died, aged 101. William H. Webster was appointed by President Carter to clean up the FBI. Later, President Reagan chose Webster to clean up the CIA (making him the only man to lead both). Webster, a veteran, lawyer, and federal judge, was trusted by presidents across parties because he had an unimpeachable reputation for integrity and patriotism.

Webster was also, like many others then in the American elite, a Christian Scientist, having converted on marriage (common for male adherents in a faith that has always disproportionately appealed to women).

Webster’s success and sterling reputation were entirely unaffected by Christian Science’s divergent beliefs. The Church of Christ, Scientist was founded in Massachusetts in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy who wrote a supplemental volume to the Bible (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures).  Scientists adopt a quasi-Gnostic metaphysics, denying the material world’s existence, especially illness. The illusion imagined to be illness is, rather, a spiritual defect. Scientists ostensibly will refuse even lifesaving medicine (though many, including Eddy herself, see physicians in practice). They are meant to seek ‘practitioners’ for spiritual healing. This practice had more appeal at its founding when medicine was poor and women (drawn most to it) were rarely listened to by doctors. In our era of working medicine, use of practitioners has resulted in deaths, including of children refused medical care by Scientist parents.

It is a crudely accurate simplification to describe the history of American religion as trending towards limited interfaith tolerance. By the 1950s, helped by the anti-communist framing of all religion as a defence against socialistic atheism, certain faiths gained an unofficial place in the American civic pantheon. This is often described by the trinity coined in Will Herberg’s eponymous book, Protestant, Catholic, Jew. Although this was an imperfect tolerance, it did successfully lead to mainstream America regarding the particulars of the God in whom they trusted as adiaphora. There were even interfaith martyrologies, like the Four Chaplains—two Protestant ministers, a Catholic priest, and a rabbi—who together made a heroic sacrifice in the Second World War, dying with hands joined in interfaith prayer.

What, then, of those American religions that did not fit into the Protestant, Catholic, Jew framework? Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses fought to crack the mainstream, while Christian Scientists quickly became comfortably honorary Protestants. Scientists were so firmly entrenched as ‘normal’ that they successfully obtained legal recognition.

The Scientists’ success is in part because tolerance in America has little to do with theology and much more to do with cultural assimilation. Lutheran churches were persecuted during the First World War because they were seen as too German, not because of the 95 Theses. Scientists, by contrast,  per  sociologist Rodney Stark,  fought to ‘preserve cultural capital’.  Eddy emphasised intense patriotism, aligned her teetotal stance with the rising temperance movement, and insisted Christian Scientists, unlike Jehovah’s Witnesses, answer the draft. A subtle but powerful cultural point was that Scientists rejected a distinctive dress that would make explicit their separation from the world; rather, Eddy encouraged fashionable, mainstream garments.

Most of all, absent mass proselytization, Christian Science spread through personal networks spread by high class, well-educated adherents replete with cultural and actual capital. In the United States, it spread from Boston Brahmins to the nation’s other unofficial nobility groups, while in Great Britain, Christian Science was disproportionately popular amongst the actual nobility. Scientists’ theology, unlike that of, say, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, poses no obstacle to pursuing the heights of education, culture, and politics.

The acceptance of Christian Science as honorary Protestantism also prefigured the faith’s precipitous decline: the church’s complete lack of internal authority, charismatic or otherwise.

American attitudes to new religious movements are shaped by the civic religion’s love of individual liberty. Scientologists cultivated the elite and promoted worldly success, but its authoritarianism (rather than its bizarre beliefs) kept it firmly out of the mainstream. A religious dictatorship with harsh internal discipline is, as Stark has it, in too high a tension with freedom-loving America. Even assuredly non-dictatorial hierarchical religions have raised American suspicions of monarchy: John F. Kennedy, when running as a presidential candidate, felt the need to promise Americans that he wouldn’t be a puppet of the pope. In 2007, Republican candidate Mitt Romney had to do the same regarding the prophet in Salt Lake.

The most caustic contemporary critic of Eddy, Mark Twain, illustrated the un-American dictatorial control she (as ‘pastor emeritus’) wielded over the church, in his mordant polemic on the faith. Even total control over the existing church was not enough to quell Eddy’s paranoia, so she created rules to prevent any popular schismatic ever emerging in the church. To this day, the Church retains her ban on any preaching in Christian Science churches (lest a popular preacher gain a personal following), allowing only for verbatim readings from the Bible and Science and Health (and even readers are rotated out periodically, lest one with a good narrative voice attract a following). The result is boredom; even Stark, constrained by scholarly neutrality, finds the accurate description of Scientist worship to be ‘tepid and fixed’.  Other rules are designed to stop those who teach practitioners (the faith healers) from assembling their own congregations, eliminating the one remaining route to independent charismatic authority.

The result is that, since Eddy’s death in 1910 ended her authoritarian control (for she allowed no successor), Christian Science has been respectably boring, with none of the intriguing and repulsive authoritarians that keep other faiths out of the mainstream. Eddy’s canonical absolutism had the inadvertent effect of leaving her church dull, free of sermons or charismatic faith healers, and thus too boring to be seen as a cult. The absence of the fear attached to authoritarian cults and charismatic preachers gave Scientists the benefit of the doubt, allowing them to smoothly navigate around small matters like manslaughter charges against parents.

Yet, the ban on a charismatic leader, on any ministry (lay or otherwise) developing doctrine, was also Christian Science’s doom. Few new people were drawn to the faith, whose mainstream advertising was at best limited to Eddy quotes hidden in the back of the otherwise secular, respected Christian Science Monitor. The mainstay of converts – educated women, excluded from professions, wanting to become practitioners – dried up once the law ended sex disabilities (meaning they could become real doctors).

Existing adherents failed to pass on the faith, either. The retention rate – the percentage of those raised in the church who stay members as adults – of Christian Science is abysmal and has been for generations. The world (in which Scientists thoroughly participate) demonstrates the virtue of medicine, while Scientists literally cannot have preachers who make spiritual counterarguments to the reality of illness. The lack of any firm structure of church discipline, thanks to the weakness of the institutions, meant there are no consequences for members who pursue medical treatment (and then finding it works, drift away from the faith).

Eddy’s changes also removed any sense among disaffected Scientists that they could be cultural Scientists (in contrast to cultural Jews, who might pass on the faith regardless of belief), because the rules against Church socialising (designed to stop a local preacher gaining a following) leave congregations with what Stark calls ‘weak internal networks’ – people don’t know their fellow church attendees. Thus, once belief in faith healing went, there was little to stay around for.

Thus, a faith consisting of relatively wealthy, relatively highly educated, thoroughly patriotic Americans, which was (after 1910) free of authoritarianism, and respectably dull in worship, could easily fit into the most elite circles of American life, with laws changed in its favour. Its beliefs may have been bizarre, but elite Americans to this day take on bizarre beliefs (think of the embrace of anti-vaccination ideology in wealthy enclaves) without ostracisation.

Today, Christian Science continues to decline precipitously, with no hope of recovery. Its remarkable history shows that, in America, orthodoxy of belief is less important than compatibility with the civic religion and ethnic, cultural, and economic assimilation. Even acknowledging these limiting dimensions, religious tolerance in America is genuinely praiseworthy. The country is better because she put a thoroughly decent man (and Scientist) like Webster in high office, with no (unconstitutional) religious test holding him back. The harder point is determining the limits of this tolerance – like exemptions to laws on child neglect. As religious intolerance grows and anti-vaccination partisans (many religious) agitate for special exemptions, studying the case of Christian Science can illustrate how to strike the right balance.