Chosen Land – Matthew Avery Sutton

To escape relentless police harassment, Dowie eventually founded an interracial theocratic commune outside Chicago, where he ruled with near-absolute authority—until his own followers overthrew him. Unsurprisingly, Dowie was unable to offer Torrey the comfort or peace the grieving father so desperately sought. Most faith healers tried to link their ideas with relatively mainstream protestant beliefs, but a few pushed further afield. Like Ellen G. White, Mary Baker Eddy struggled with poor health through much of her life, and she found the Congregationalism of her childhood insufficient for meeting real-world needs.

She sought different types of cures, but nothing proved effective until she encountered Phineas P. Quimby. Quimby claimed clairvoyant powers, which allowed him to identify and diagnose the diseases of strangers. He also healed through mesmerism, putting his patients into trances. Over time he determined that real healing lay in the power of suggestion, creating in patients a positive mental attitude.

He offered them a mental cure for their physical ailments. Eddy believed that Quimby had healed her. She worked with him for a few years, adopting many of his ideas, which she blended with Christianity. But in 1866, shortly after Quimby died, Eddy slipped on some ice and suffered serious injury.

“I then withdrew from society about three years,” she recalled, “to ponder my mission, to search the Scriptures, to find the Science of Mind.” She focused on the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s healings, which led her to what she called “Christian Science.”8 Eddy published a series of books laying out her new version of Christianity, which integrated the ideas of Quimby with those of Christian healers. Eddy did not believe that her ideas reflected a move away from the true faith but instead signified a proper rediscovery of it.

Jesus, she contended, taught “the Principle and rule of spiritual Science and Metaphysical Healing—in a word, Christian Science.” Disease did not exist but resulted from mental misunderstandings. True believers needed to war against the idea of matter, to ascend above it to truth and principle. “Spirit,” she wrote, “I called the reality; and matter, the unreality.” She taught Christian Scientists to reject their senses and seek the divine outside of them. The properly trained mind could overcome disease.

Copyright © 2026 by Matthew Avery Sutton Cover design by Ann Kirchner Cover image © YangYin via Getty Images Cover copyright © 2026 by Hachette Book Group, Inc. Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected].

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Print book interior design by Bart Dawson. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sutton, Matthew Avery, 1975- author Title: Chosen land : how Christianity made America and Americans remade Christianity / Matthew Avery Sutton. Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2026. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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