Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [47]
In actuality, the last thing Holmes wanted was to start a religion. From his early days on the metaphysical speaking circuit in the 1910s until his death in Los Angeles in 1960, Holmes mounted a plaintive resistance against enthusiasts who transformed his mind-power philosophy into a network of churches replete with textbooks, rule-making bodies, and enough factional splits and infighting to fill a New Thought version of I, Claudius. At the founding ceremonies of an ornate church in Los Angeles months before his death, Holmes looked out over the crowd and said, “This church was not my idea.”
Whatever the reluctance of its founder, the Science of Mind movement, known more formally as the United Church of Religious Science, became the last—and in some ways the most influential—of all New Thought denominations. Other ministries had come earlier and claimed more members, such as the Unity School of Christianity based in Kansas City, Missouri. But none had a figurehead like Ernest Holmes. Not only did Holmes devise a fully fleshed-out theology, but he also inspired the most formative self-help philosophy of the twentieth century: the “power of positive thinking” of author–minister Norman Vincent Peale. In the end, Holmes proved a mighty catalyst, though his fame would trail far behind his influence.
The Problem of Evil
Born in 1887 in a dingy Maine farmhouse and never formally educated, the young Holmes devoured works on religious philosophy, physics, and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. He grew particularly enamored of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which stoked Holmes’s belief in the creative potential of the human mind.
Moving from New England to Venice, California, the vibrant Holmes and his brother and intellectual partner, Fenwicke, began filling lecture halls as early as 1916 with their metaphysical lectures. California was experiencing boom times, and its residents, migrants from all parts of the nation, were ready to take in new ideas. Roundish and twinkle-eyed, Holmes exuded an unlikely charisma—as well as a shrewd command of different spiritual philosophies and religious systems. He spoke with clarity and total confidence, rarely using notes. “As a speaker, a lecturer,” Norman Vincent Peale recalled, “he was able to put together spontaneously a talk as airtight as a lawyer’s brief, no loopholes, no perceived errors. It all held together.”
The young metaphysician’s following grew as he performed “treatments”—or mind-power healings—on guests at the office where he worked as a purchasing agent for the city of Venice. After travels to New York and other cities, where Holmes tested his message among different listeners, he molded his ideas into a philosophy called Religious Science. (This proved an ill-fated choice of words that in later decades served to confuse his movement with the more visible and entirely unrelated religion of Scientology.)
Holmes’s command of Scripture and Yankee foursquare style seemed, at least in his person, to nudge New Thought away from its fixation on personal gain. The greater struggle for Holmes, in his writings and lectures, was to consistently wed what was fundamentally a success-driven philosophy to a Christian ethic. Like his contemporaries, Holmes believed that the human mind was at one with what is called God and that it possessed the same creative power. As such, he reasoned, this power was intrinsically good. “Evil,” Holmes wrote in his 1929 The Bible in Light of Religious Science, “… has no reality behind it or actual law to come to its support.” It was similar in approach to the Unity writer H. Emilie Cady, who claimed, “Apparent