From a Book to a Denomination

Holmes founded the Institute of Religious Science to teach and apply the system his book laid out, an organization that developed over subsequent decades into Religious Science International and, after a later merger of separate Religious Science bodies, the United Centers for Spiritual Living, known today as Centers for Spiritual Living. Holmes himself revised and expanded the text during his own lifetime, and later editions reflect that ongoing authorial development rather than a single fixed 1926 text.

Within Religious Science and Science of Mind congregations, the book functions today as the doctrinal foundation studied in ministerial and lay training alike, occupying a role broadly comparable to the one Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures plays for Christian Science, another mind-centered American new religious movement with roots in the same nineteenth century milieu. The two movements remain historically distinct and diverge on real doctrinal points, including the status they give to Jesus and the degree to which each identifies its teaching with orthodox Christianity at all. Ministers trained within Centers for Spiritual Living today study the text alongside later denominational literature that has grown up around it, treating Holmes's original work as the foundation of an ongoing living tradition rather than a closed historical document.