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The Tragedy of Desire: Christian Science in Theodore Dreiser’s The “Genius”

In 1918, Upton Sinclair published The Profits of Religion, an impassioned screed against organized religions that he perceived as fleecing the poor and the ignorant. Though virtually every religious group with a presence in the U.S. is placed on notice, the author reserves a special sort of criticism for Christian Science—the mental healing movement led Mary Baker Eddy to argue that the body and therefore all physical infirmities were not real— calling it “the most characteristic of American religious contributions.”1 Invoking a number of extant stereotypes about the gender, education, and socio-economic condition of Eddy’s followers, Sinclair attributes the movement’s widespread popularity during the early-twentieth century to rank ignorance: “Just as Billy Sunday is the price we pay for failing to educate our base-ball players, so Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy is the price we pay for failing to educate our farmer’s daughters.”2 A few months following the appearance of Sinclair’s book, Stephen Alison—a Christian Scientist, socialist, and co-editor of the New Orleans Christian Scientist 3—published a rebuttal and deputized another famous author, journalist, and social justice advocate into his argument: