Over the years, a number of people have asked me, "Why does your Church publish a newspaper?" One of my answers has always been, Because one role of the Church of Christ, Scientist, is to spread truth, and a good newspaper promotes the purposes of truth. One man kept expressing amazement that the paper was so fair, nonsensational, and broad in its coverage. It did not seem right to launch into a long, and perhaps tedious, theological explanation. But I did tell him that in Christian Science, Truth is one of the Bible-based synonyms for God, and that the more we understand God as Truth, the more authentically truthful we are. I said that this theological fact applied to producing healing, or truthful, journalism. This explanation seemed to satisfy him. It was, of course, the metaphysical basis of the paper that was reaching this man's thought.
As a matter of fact, large segments of the public are hungry for something higher than the unreliability of materialism; they're hungry for Truth and for spiritually based values. The Monitor helps illustrate for the public that when these values, embracing qualities of thought such as forgiveness and humility, intelligence and honesty, are lived, they make human life healthy, morally pure, safe, happy, progressive, mentally vital.
As it is with individuals, so is it with newspapers —the qualities of thought that build and sustain a newspaper communicate themselves. In addition, the more any journalist understands the presence and supreme power of God, and the more he or she is willing to perceive the consequent powerlessness and unreality of evil, the more he or she will uplift the lives of others. This healing view emphatically underlies Monitor journalism.
Those who practice Christian Science need to devote time and energy to holding their thoughts of the Monitor firmly on a metaphysical course. Never has the world had greater need to understand that spiritual qualities alone build and maintain a just and healthy political economy, a moral and vibrant culture, satisfying and wholesome relationships, a virtuous homelife. Morality must triumph in the culture wars now being fought in the United States and other societies. Subscribers to the paper who utilize its flow of information in prayerful ways, and share the paper, will bless humanity.
Fulfillment of the prayerful tasks indicated to a prayerful readership through the Monitor is of paramount importance to mankind. The paper is a God-inspired vehicle for laying out these tasks. And utilizing the Monitor stories as a prime agenda for prayer is a practical way in which we come to see and prove that in His infinite wisdom and goodness, God governs all things harmoniously.
In utilizing the metaphysical method of Christian Science in the healing of society and of nations, we won't leave false mental methods, including the hypnotism of selfish will, unchallenged. To leave them unchallenged would be to allow much suffering that could otherwise be prevented. Mary Baker Eddy writes, "The legislators who are greatly responsible for all the woes of mankind are those leaders of public thought who are mistaken in their methods of humanity." The People's Idea of God, p. 11.
No political standpoint, either liberal or conservative, is adequate to the task of truly healing society of all of its ills—although each may at times have programs worthy of support. The Science on which the Monitor is based is a divine theology, destined to displace all ideologies. But this displacing will require immense work and continuing sacrifice of personal opinions.
God gave the concept of the Monitor to Mrs. Eddy's humble, spiritually receptive thought. It's important to understand and utilize this concept in order to recognize the real implications of its healing journalism. This requires rising above intellectualism, which tends to be marred by pride, ideologies, mere opinion, and lack of vision.
The media today are highly secular, as a number of studies have documented. There is ample room for the newspaper—The Christian Science Monitor—that rises above the secular ideologies that pervade the political, economic, and cultural journalism of today. This is not accomplished through political maneuvering. It is accomplished by following Mrs. Eddy's leadership with respect to the Monitor and to society itself. She once said: "I am asked, 'What are your politics?' I have none, in reality, other than to help support a righteous government; to love God supremely, and my neighbor as myself." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 276.
Mrs. Eddy says elsewhere, "One infinite God, good, unifies men and nations; constitutes the brotherhood of man; ends wars; fulfils the Scripture, 'Love thy neighbor as thyself;' annihilates pagan and Christian idolatry,—whatever is wrong in social, civil, criminal, political, and religious codes; equalizes the sexes; annuls the curse on man, and leaves nothing that can sin, suffer, be punished or destroyed." Science and Health, p. 340. One can only assume that Mrs. Eddy was divinely impelled to found the Monitor in order to forward these ends.
The same healing journalism found in the print Monitor also characterizes its electronic forms— such as Monitor Radio and The Christian Science Monitor on the World Wide Web—which spread it to a larger, worldwide audience. The Monitor's spiritually rooted news product is intended to bless universal humanity. The deeply powerful, reforming impact of its print journalism is echoed in the startlingly quick and wide reach of the broadcast formats. monitor journalism witnesses the signs of the dawning in human consciousness of God's healing ever-presence. Love for God and man is both the end and means in this effort. Certainly God will continue to unfold the needed and appropriate steps in forwarding Monitor journalism for the benefit of humanity.
Christ Jesus was the world's greatest bearer of good news. He said, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." Matt. 4:17. The people he encountered learned a great deal about the peace, health, and abundant good that characterize God's kingdom and that were demonstrated by the Master in practical ways. Today, a perception of the presence of God's kingdom and of the false, transient nature of evil is forwarded by the Monitor as a messenger of the universal Christ, spreading good to all people.
The Monitor assists mankind in awakening to God's healing, purifying ideas. Mortal theories and pride of intellect cannot do this work. The success of the Monitor depends on proof of the coincidence of the divine and the human, by which God's government is demonstrated as supreme in human life. All matter-based systems of healing and improvement lack the power of divine Science, which alone gives lasting evidence that good and harmony are in fact supreme over evil and discord. The Monitor's insights, reporting, and tone reflect a quiet rejection of merely material logic and an acceptance of the primacy of spiritual laws and values. The world's great need for moral purification will not be met until humanity learns to put spiritual values first.
Mrs. Eddy assigned to the paper a spiritual mission when she said the Monitor was "to spread undivided the Science that operates unspent." And she added, "The object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind." Miscellany, p. 353. These words were in the first issue of the paper on November 25, 1908, in the second paragraph of a short lead editorial and were later published, under Mrs. Eddy's instructions, in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany. A second editorial was a letter by Frank Bell, then managing editor of the Harrisburg Telegraph, thanking Mrs. Eddy for the Monitor "in prospect" and expressing an assurance that the paper would demonstrate "the feasibility of clean journalism." He also said he foresaw a time when other papers would follow the Monitor's lead in making "non-sensational" journalism successful.
We can assume that Mrs. Eddy appreciated this editor's support and insights, since she had them included in that very first issue of the paper. But characteristically, she also had something to add! She asked for more than just nonsensational, clean journalism. The first paragraph of her own editorial said this: "The gentleman, Mr. Frank Bell, has caught my thunder; therefore he will not object to the lightning which accompanies it." The spreading of Science was to be journalistic lightning, striking around the world in the cause of Truth.
Monitor journalism helps to reveal who we really are—the sons and daughters of God—and this is the essence of the good news Jesus brought and made. Such news heals and purifies.
The following statements are from a report in The Dallas Morning News of May 20, 1995: "The ranks ... of spiritually receptive 'unchurched' people are growing. ... Yet in spite of the rising exodus from traditional spiritual answers, spiritual hunger has not gone away ..." Here is the Monitor's natural, God-prepared market. Everyone has a perfect, spiritual identity, and in many cases people are ripe in their readiness to perceive and demonstrate more of their native spirituality "Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God," I John 3:1. wrote John in one of his epistles. The Monitor strives to bring out the true sense of man's identity and not to imprint on thought the false belief that man is an animal, evolved from muddy origins, limited to the perceptions of the physical senses, and stuck on earth with only his own vain devices to amuse, or perhaps destroy, him. Such a belief, being devoid of divinity, is worthless and is at the root of all limitation and discord. But it is truly a dream, to be dispelled through our loyalty to the light of Truth.
Monitor journalism helps to reveal who we really are—the sons and daughters of God. Such news heals and purifies.
There is no real Monitor "thunder" of clean journalism without the lightning of God's Science —the laws of God acknowledged and demonstrated as operative and effective here and now. Alert individuals reading and listening to the Monitor help heal the world in innumerable ways, including prayer by those so inclined. And most people do pray in one way or another. Monitor journalism involves and invites active and prayerful thinking. Mrs. Eddy writes in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health: "Belief in a material basis, from which maybe deduced all rationality, is slowly yielding to the idea of a metaphysical basis, looking away from matter to Mind as the cause of every effect. Materialistic hypotheses challenge metaphysics to meet in final combat. In this revolutionary period, like the shepherd-boy with his sling, woman goes forth to battle with Goliath." Science and Health, p. 268. Science and Health also indicates the authentic form and role of rationality: "Spiritual rationality and free thought accompany approaching Science, and cannot be put down. They will emancipate humanity, and supplant unscientific means and so-called laws." Ibid., p. 223 .
Of great importance in linking the paper to the healing mission of the Church is the Monitor's daily religious article. It presents the truths of Christian Science and shows their application to a wide range of daily needs, both individual and collective. These healing articles light the way to an ever higher journalism as thought is prepared to receive Christ, Truth, more directly.
As indicated earlier, many individuals who do not know or accept the theology of Christian Science do appreciate and read the newspaper. But when Mrs. Eddy expressed her wish that all Christian Scientists, and as many others as possible, subscribe to and read the Monitor, See Miscellany, pp. 352-353 . she was indicating its primary supporters—those who are active in her movement. And Christian Scientists can utilize the Monitor, one topic at a time, to advance the demonstration of divine Science, the beneficial law of God, throughout the world—in family life, education, business, finance, social relations, the media, the healing arts, the natural sciences, and so on.
These supporters of the Monitor know that in all healing work they need to exchange in their own thought the material-sense view of a situation for the true, or spiritual, view. That is, they prayerfully acknowledge that God's power is supreme and therefore that the divine activity, or what God is doing, is able to heal and rightly govern human activity. For example, a Christian Scientist praying for the healing of racial strife might know that because God, omnipotence, governs concordantly all the relationships in His creation—and all people are in truth His spiritual offspring—any evidence of racial or familial strife is at base illusion, which can be replaced with harmony.
A very helpful reference to Science, which is to be spread by means of the Monitor, is found in this statement by Mrs. Eddy: "If God does not govern the action of man, it is inharmonious: if He does govern it, the action is Science." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 58. And how does God govern man? Through invariable divine law. The operation of divine law is seen in the exercise of qualities such as love, intelligence, and justice. These express the energy of God's will, the force of Mind, omnipotent good. And they are qualities that characterize Monitor journalism. No quality of God is without its natural, divine energy. We demonstrate the will of God when we fill thought with moral and spiritual qualities, letting their divinely derived energies destroy materialism and unfold divine control, or Science.
Humility, prayer, the denial of mortal selfhood and its unrewarding impulses—these enrich the human affections by calling forth in consciousness what is real about humanity: our spiritual qualities. The Monitor's careful, specific reporting and thoughtful commentary, expressing Godlike qualities and thus the true concept of man as God's likeness, help to spread Science in practical ways, right where the human need is. This journalism helps encourage a dawning in human thought of the recognition that the law of God, the force of good that is God's will, actually governs man, and that God's kingdom is truly here now, and supreme.
Science demonstrated is the essence of divine government, in which all find themselves to be children of God, citizens of His kingdom. Destructive aspects of nationalism and ethnic and tribal identification, so rampant today, will fade out of human experience as true government spreads. We live in an era of unprecedented struggles for human and divine rights. The Monitor offers insights that uplift people's aims and help them to recognize man's spiritual, Godlike identity and the rights of all people. The result of demonstrating God's government ultimately will be a peaceful, prosperous, humanitarian society, welcoming the rule of heaven. Only spiritualization of thought will meet the growing demand for authentic, divine rights, which undergird all worthy human rights. No human philosophy or theology can achieve comparable results. Our object must be to bless mankind spiritually, and the method of doing so is an expanding realization that God alone governs man.
The Monitor is a powerful tool, right along with the other Christian Science periodicals, with which to spread Science undivided to a world so needful of God's divine government.
