Both of these letters—Gary Jones's seemingly reasonable and Stephen Gottschalk's roaring and red-faced—are from ardent Christian Scientists. Jones is the Manager, Committees on Publication, of the Mother Church in Boston, and Gottschalk is a former member of the same committee who was relieved of his duties in 1990 after objecting to the Church's longstanding refusal to allow discussion and criticism of its policies and actions from within the Church. Christian Science is, in Martin Gardner's indisputable description, a "non-Christian, nonscientific cult," and cults are famously known, when attacked, to mount their barricades and fire wildly. Indeed, Scientists have been firing self-defensive cannons since Mark Twain blasted the Church in his 1907 book Christian Science, and McClure's magazine ran a series of critical articles on the Church the same year under the name of Georgine Milmine, a researcher at the magazine whose name was used as an alias for the actual author, the young but already redoubtable Willa Cather. (Caroline Fraser does not, as Gottschalk claims, praise the Cather articles; she simply gives the facts about them. Facts have long rattled Scientists.)

Trying to answer Jones's and Gottschalk's letters is like talking to oneself. However, a few thoughts: Caroline Fraser's calm, brilliant book has upset the Church so much it has taken to calling it "virulent," "mocking," "sarcastic," and "intemperate." And it has moved Gottschalk to call Fraser and me "angry former Christian Scientists, driven by a strong animus against their former faith." The truth, though, is that we peacefully agree with the great V.S. Pritchett, who grew up in Science in England and wrote in his elegant memoir The Cab at the Door: "The occasional healings or even the many tragic failures to heal are not the important aspects of this religion. The real objection is to the impoverishment of mind, the fear of knowledge and living that Christian Science continuously insinuates: the futility of its total argument and its complacency. It operates like a leucotomy that puts the patient into an amiable stupor."

Gary Jones has been working overtime on the barricades since Fraser's book appeared. He first responded to The New York Times Book Review, calling Fraser's book "rancorous." Then he wrote a long rebuttal of Martin Gardner's review in the Los Angeles Times, again calling Fraser's book "rancorous." He mentions, as proof of the efficacy of Christian Science, the supposed healings that appear at the end of Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy's codelike, much-revised primer on Christian Science. The accounts, signed only with initials, have never been medically proven. Christian Scientists also boast about the millions of copies of Science and Health sold in the last one hundred years. I wonder how many of their purchasers have actually read this strange and unreadable book. At the end of his letter, he casually mentions that Christian Science has now cured HIV. He then says that today's Scientists read magazines like The New Yorker, play jazz, are academics, museum members, and soccer moms and dads. In other words, they have become cool middle-class swingers. The Church must have sprung a leak in the last fifty years. When I was growing up in Christian Science, the practitioners I knew had white hair and spoke softly and had pained smiling eyes. Some of them had even had communications of one sort or another with Mary Baker Eddy. They probably listened to the Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts from the old Metropolitan Opera House, but I doubt that they ever even went to the movies.

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