Origins in a Healing Testimony

Unity traces its origin to a specific claimed healing: Myrtle Fillmore, suffering from tuberculosis in Kansas City in 1886, attributed her recovery to a practice of prayer and affirmation she developed after hearing a lecture on divine healing, rather than to conventional medical treatment, and she and her husband Charles built an entire teaching and organization outward from that single experience over the following decades.

The theology that resulted reads much of the Bible as metaphysical allegory rather than as literal history, treats God as a universal principle of good present within every person rather than a separate being to be petitioned from outside, and explicitly rejects both original sin and a substitutionary theory of atonement, positions that place Unity within the wider New Thought family of American religious movements alongside Religious Science and Divine Science rather than within either Protestant evangelicalism or liberal mainline Christianity. Charles Fillmore brought organizational and business capacity to the partnership, running the publishing and administrative side of what became a substantial operation, while Myrtle's own healing testimony remained the story the movement continued to tell about its own beginning, retold in Unity literature well beyond her lifetime.