Origin Mid-nineteenth-century United States, formalized in Religious Science and Unity congregations of the early twentieth century
Prayer and invocation in New Thought are described here rather than quoted at length, an editorial choice rather than a restriction. The movement's foundational texts, such as Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health (1875), have long been in the public domain, and its central technique, affirmative prayer, is openly taught and described by every major New Thought body. One current publication, Unity's Daily Word devotional, is separately copyrighted by its publisher like any modern periodical, which is not evidence that the tradition's prayer wording generally is closed.
Facts
Provenance
First DocumentedSourced to the subject's own accountKnown across Religious Science, Divine Science and Unity as affirmative prayer or "treatment": practitioners assert spiritual truth about a desired outcome rather than petitioning or beseeching, on the premise that thought operates by a fixed spiritual law comparable to a law of physics. Ernest Holmes founded Religious Science (Science of Mind) on this basis in the 1920s. 1 Origins
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own accountMid-nineteenth-century United States, formalized in Religious Science and Unity congregations of the early twentieth century 1 Use
What It Is Used ForSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
Affirmative Prayer as a Distinct Genre
This entry records that New Thought, a loosely organized American religious and philosophical movement developing from the nineteenth century onward through figures including Phineas Quimby and later institutionalized in denominations such as Unity, Religious Science and the Church of Divine Science, developed a distinctive style of affirmative prayer, treating prayer less as petition addressed to an external deity and more as a disciplined practice of aligning one's own thought and consciousness with an already present divine reality or law, without reproducing specific New Thought prayer texts here. This affirmative approach, encapsulated in the common New Thought phrase that thoughts are things and consciousness shapes experience, distinguishes New Thought prayer practice structurally from the petitionary prayer found in most other traditions catalogued in this atlas, and it has influenced considerably wider popular American religious and self-help culture well beyond the specific denominations that formally organize around New Thought theology.
Ernest Holmes's Religious Science in particular drew explicitly on both Quimby's original mental healing ideas and on comparative study of world religions, presenting affirmative prayer as a universal spiritual principle he believed could be found, in some form, across many different religious traditions rather than as a uniquely Christian innovation.
Several Denominations, One Shared Approach to Prayer
New Thought is not a single unified church but a family of related, formally organized denominations, including Unity, founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Religious Science, founded by Ernest Holmes, and others, each maintaining its own specific published prayer materials, ministerial training and institutional structure, meaning specific affirmative prayer texts vary by denomination even though the underlying theological approach to prayer as consciousness-alignment rather than petition remains broadly shared across them.
New Thought's influence extends considerably beyond its own formally organized denominations into the broader American positive thinking and prosperity gospel traditions, a wider cultural influence scholars of American religion trace directly to New Thought's original theological innovations even where the specific New Thought denominational label is no longer explicitly invoked. Given the genuine denominational diversity involved and each denomination's own published, separately authored prayer materials, this entry limits itself to describing the shared affirmative approach New Thought traditions generally share rather than presenting any single denomination's specific prayer texts as representative of the movement as a whole.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
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