Unitarians, Christian Science, and a Newspaper Investigation

The Puritan churches of Boston changed from within. King's Chapel revised its prayer book in 1785 to remove the Trinity, the appointment of a liberal to the Harvard divinity chair in 1805 split the establishment, and by 1819 William Ellery Channing was preaching a sermon that gave the emerging position its name and its programme. Most of the old Congregational churches of eastern Massachusetts became Unitarian, and Transcendentalism grew out of the same soil a generation later when Emerson decided that even that was too much church.

Mary Baker Eddy published Science and Health in 1875 and organised the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston four years later. Its central claim is that sickness is an error of belief and that healing comes through understanding the divine, and its structure is unusual: the Manual she wrote governs the whole denomination, services consist of readings from the Bible and her book by elected readers rather than sermons by clergy, and the Mother Church in Boston is the administrative centre for branches worldwide. The Christian Science Monitor, founded in 1908, became a respected daily paper. The reliance on prayer rather than medicine has produced repeated litigation in the United States, particularly where children have died.

Immigration made Boston an Irish and Italian Catholic city in the nineteenth century. In 2002 the Boston Globe published an investigation of how the archdiocese had handled priests accused of abusing children, which forced the resignation of its cardinal and set off inquiries in many countries.