Costly media ventures trigger identity crisis.
A year after a dispute broke into public view, a fight over religious identity and heritage continues deeply to divide the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The argument inside Christian Science has attracted public notice because it seemed to center on the expensive failure of the Monitor Channel, an ambitious attempt to transfer the clout of the church’s respected daily newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor, to the world of cable television.
The church was forced to shut down the cable venture last spring after “betting the company,” in the words of one of its senior managers, that the world was ready for the temperate worldview and religious optimism that undergirds Christian Science.
Forced by the controversy to make a fuller accounting of its spending, the church’s administration told members last June that they had spent $325 million on television since 1984.
Yet, television was not the only costly operation. The church also expanded into shortwave radio and a domestic radio news service, Monitor Radio, and began a monthly consumer news magazine, World Monitor. The church has spent $900 million in the past eight years on the daily newspaper and three religious periodicals.
That is an astounding sum for so small a denomination, which has an estimated 150,000 to 175,000 members worldwide. Member dissatisfaction arose with disclosure by a senior church financial official that officials had secretly borrowed from endowment funds and the pension fund in order to brake a slide toward bankruptcy.
At the same time, some of the most respected religious figures in the church broke with the current administration because the church decided to publish a long-suppressed book about church founder Mary Baker Eddy in order to qualify for a $98 million bequest from the author’s relatives.
Among them were the four top editors of the religious periodicals used for the formal study of the religion. The principal issue dividing the editors from the administration was publication of The Destiny of the Mother Church, by Bliss Knapp. The five-member board of directors wanted the religious periodicals to promote the Knapp book, despite statements in it that many Christian Scientists say depart from Eddy’s own teachings.
Knapp’s statements that Eddy was the woman in the Book of Revelation, equal to Jesus, “invested with deific power,” and that she was another Christ drew fire from many leaders.
Church officials counted on the Knapp bequest to cover what was borrowed from the pension and endowment funds. But other potential beneficiaries filed suit in California, arguing that the church had not fulfilled the terms of the bequest by Knapp’s wife and sister-in-law that the book be displayed in “substantially all” the church’s 2,600 reading rooms—the combination libraries and bookstores.
A Los Angeles Superior Court granted the request by the rival beneficiaries—Stanford University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—to delay payment of the $98 million. The case is still in the courts.
The financial crisis has brought little outside scrutiny so far. The Massachusetts attorney general warned church officials to repay endowment funds from which money was borrowed to cover TV losses. The directors responded by taking additional sums from the church pension plan.
The church also has confirmed that it is under investigation by the U.S. Postal Service for violations of nonprofit mailing rates, although a spokesperson said the church believes it has committed no violation.
Throughout the storm, the closest the church has come to a statement of contrition was a November 9 editorial in the Christian Science Sentinel by Richard C. Bergenheim, a director and editor of the Publishing Society. Although some allegations about church officials “were based on false assumptions or ignorance or misapprehension of actual events,” he wrote, the board “has needed to make adjustments in its course, and among the ranks of about 1,300 employees there have unfortunately been occasional errors of behavior or judgment that have required attention.”
Critics who see the heavy losses on television and the unorthodox views of the Knapp book as threatening the purity of their religion still urge a thorough housecleaning at the Boston-based church.
Even after all their losses, directors told members they would not turn their backs on television. “We need to master these tools of the twentieth century if we are to be ready for the work that lies ahead in the twenty-first,” said Bergenheim. “Otherwise, we’re in danger of becoming an artifact of the nineteenth century.”
By James L. Franklin in Boston.
