This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
New Thought gathers four denominations built on a shared premise, that a person's thought and its alignment with a universal divine principle shape health, circumstance and experience, expressed through four independent lines of founding.
Unity was begun at Kansas City in 1889 by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, after Myrtle Fillmore attributed her recovery from tuberculosis to prayer and affirmation. It teaches that God is a principle of good present in everyone and reads much of the Bible as metaphysical allegory, and its Silent Unity prayer ministry has answered written and telephoned requests continuously since the 1890s.
Religious Science formed around the teaching of Ernest Holmes, whose book The Science of Mind appeared in 1926. It holds that a universal creative Mind responds to directed thought, practised through spiritual mind treatment, an affirmative prayer directed at a condition rather than a petition to a person; its two principal bodies merged in 2011 as Centers for Spiritual Living.
Divine Science is the oldest of the four, formed in the 1880s and 1890s out of the parallel work of Malinda Cramer in San Francisco and the Brooks sisters in Denver. It holds that God is omnipresent and wholly good and that health and sufficiency follow from recognising that presence, and though always a small body, it trained teachers who went on to lead much larger congregations.
Seicho-no-Ie, the House of Growth, is the odd member of the four: a Japanese movement founded in 1930 by Masaharu Taniguchi, set beside Shinto and Buddhist material and ancestor veneration, grouped with New Thought for its resemblance to Taniguchi's own reading of New Thought and Christian Science writers rather than through any organisational descent from the other three.