A Ministry Built on a Founder's Own Recovery

Unity was founded at Kansas City in 1889 by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, a married couple who built the movement's teaching directly out of Myrtle's own experience of the practice that became Silent Unity's method. The Encyclopedia of American Religions records that Unity reads much of the Bible as metaphysical allegory rather than as literal history, and that it holds neither original sin nor a substitutionary atonement, teaching instead that God is a principle of good already present in every person rather than a distant judge to be reconciled with. Albanese's history situates Unity within a wider late nineteenth century American current of mind cure and metaphysical religion that also produced Christian Science and, later, Religious Science and Divine Science, movements that shared vocabulary and a confidence in prayer's practical effect while developing distinct institutions and distinct relationships to organised medicine. Unlike Christian Science, which the Encyclopedia of American Religions notes discouraged conventional medical treatment, Unity has not asked its members to forgo medical care, treating prayer and affirmation as a complement to it rather than a substitute, a distinction that has shaped how broadly Silent Unity's ministry has been able to reach beyond Unity's own formal congregations.