COLUMN ONE : Christian Science in Bad Health : Sect is in poor financial state from failed expansion efforts. Attempt to keep a bequest by publishing ‘heretical’ biography of its founder only made things worse.

In a recent episode of the TV comedy “Northern Exposure,” hypochondriac Eve shocked her fiance, Adam, by telling him she was a Christian Scientist.

“Christian Scientist!” Adam blurted in disbelief. “You’re the poster child for the American Medical Assn.!”

“I’m a reformed Christian Scientist,” Eve said.

The writers were striving for absurdity: Christian Science, a small, insular religion that believes in physical healing through prayer rather than medical treatment, is still run in strict adherence to the unorthodox 19th-Century ideals of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. It is the last place you would look for a reform movement.

Yet during the last year, leaders of Christian Science and some of its most distinguished members have been locked in an increasingly bitter war over money, ethics and spirituality.

The Boston-based church is in an uproar over allegations that leaders nearly bankrupted it with an expensive cable television venture and then sought to claim a huge bequest from two church members by publishing a book long regarded as heresy.

The debate threatens the future of one of the West’s few genuinely new religions. And it illustrates the quandary that has long vexed other denominations seeking to make themselves more relevant to the modern world: How does religion sell itself without selling out its principles? Many mainline denominations, most recently the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Methodist Church, are struggling to address changing sexual attitudes while remaining faithful to church teachings.

A growing number of the estimated 150,000 Christian Scientists, more than a third of whom live in California, are outraged at their church’s leadership for spending $235 million since the mid-1980s on a variety of primarily secular television ventures intended to bring worldwide attention to the church. The effort was a financial disaster, eating up most of the church’s $130-million reserve fund and $100-million pension fund and forcing the church last month to shut down the jewel of its media holdings, the 24-hour Monitor Channel.

Even more troubling to many critics was the church’s decision last year to publish a long-rejected 1947 biography of Eddy that placed her on the same level as Jesus Christ--an admiring comparison that Eddy had discouraged. A huge amount of money critical to the church’s financial survival was at stake: The wills of the author’s wife and sister-in-law pledged more than $90 million to the church if it published the book by May, 1993.

The church’s literate, affluent and generally graying membership, which has been shrinking since the 1930s, finds the allegations of moral betrayal almost unfathomable.

“This has been like an earthquake,” said a Laguna Hills woman who has made her living for nearly half a century as a Christian Science “practitioner,” praying with church members who are physically ill or emotionally troubled. Like many church members, who are uncomfortable with any publicity, she spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“It goes to the very heart of the religion,” said Brooks Wilder of San Diego, who resigned in 1988 as the church’s chief counsel because of what he felt were poor financial management decisions. “To those of us who are critics, it appears the (church’s board of) directors are not acting in accord with the religion. It’s a very gut-wrenching kind of thing.”

During the last three months, numerous Christian Scientists who are critical of their church have quit key jobs in the Mother Church in Boston in protest, or have been fired. The two top church leaders most closely identified with the broadcasting expansion have quit. Scores of Christian Science’s 1,884 branch churches in the United States have refused to carry the Eddy biography in their reading rooms, saying that to do so would violate the rules she wrote.

One group of Christian Scientists, led by New York federal Judge Thomas Griesa--the judge who sentenced hotel queen Leona Helmsley to prison this spring--is demanding that the church make a full public accounting of its finances.

Another group of critics, led by Christian Science teacher and lecturer Margaret Rennie of Denver, whose husband once served on the church’s board of directors, is leading a separate campaign accusing the board of violating Eddy’s church manual.

The board’s budget-busting investment in cable television and its newfound willingness to publish the Eddy biography has created devastating “schisms in our church” that risk “the possible loss of Christian Science,” Rennie wrote in April in a letter, accompanied by 342 pages of documents, to Christian Science’s 250 teachers and each of its branch churches.

The church’s leaders contend that critics are overreacting. They say the broadcasting venture was a good-faith effort to modernize the church’s relationship with the world, much as Eddy did with the Monitor newspaper, whose circulation has faded in recent years.

Leaders deny that they are publishing the biography of Eddy to stave off financial disaster. The book is simply part of a series of new biographies intended to broaden the church’s view of its founder, they say.

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Church officials promise to make a full financial accounting at the church’s annual meeting in Boston on Monday.

“This uproar is intellectualism, a lot of hullabaloo over nothing,” said Howard Johnson, a La Jolla Christian Science teacher who this month assumes the prestigious post of “first reader” of the Mother Church in Boston, responsible for Bible reading during church services. “Five years from now it will be a footnote.”

Some religion scholars see the fight as a potential death spasm for a religion whose abhorrence of medical treatment has little attraction in late 20th-Century America.

Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science denomination in 1879 in Massachusetts after years of Bible study. Her inspiration, she said, was her sudden recovery from an injury while reading about Jesus’ healing of a palsied man.

Eddy’s “science” was the theory that the true nature of reality was spiritual--that the material world was an illusion, that disease was rooted in the mind. Christian Scientists, she declared, would practice “primitive Christianity,” literally following Jesus’ command that his disciples practice spiritual healing.

Members were--and remain--distinctly apart from other Christian denominations. Christian Scientists believe that spiritual healing operates with fixed laws and is available regardless of misdeeds a person may have committed, views a substantial number of Christians reject. A University of Akron study last year found a quarter of “mainline” Christians believed that God punishes evil with illness; none of the 44 Christian Scientists interviewed in the study agreed with that view.

By 1892, Eddy reorganized the church in its present form, with a powerful, self-perpetuating board of directors whose members choose their successors--a structure that today leaves church critics with no direct power to change the church.

In an era in which medicine was often a crude science, and in which most Protestant sects had yet to emphasize spiritual healing, Christian Science filled a void, becoming the fastest-growing American denomination. By the late 1930s it had nearly 300,000 members and was spreading to scores of other countries. The Christian Science Monitor, founded by Eddy in 1908 and staffed primarily by members of the religion, became a respected news organization.

By the 1960s, however, membership in the church was plummeting, the number of full-time practitioners was decreasing (there are only 3,000 today, compared to 11,000 in 1950) and the Monitor was losing millions of dollars each year. Medicine was making striking advances, and Christian Science was--and continues to be--plagued by occasional tragedies in which children die of treatable illness when their Christian Science parents shun doctors in favor of prayer.

In the mid-1980s the church’s leaders, convinced that the church needed to present itself in a modern style to a broader audience, hired a business consultant, John Hoagland Jr., a Christian Scientist who had once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. Under Hoagland and church board Chairman Harvey Wood, the church bought a Boston television station and launched a cable news program on the national Discovery Channel and a glossy monthly magazine. The size of the Monitor newspaper was substantially cut, triggering an exodus of top editors.

When the 24-hour Monitor Channel debuted in May, 1991, devoted to news and public affairs shows, church critics were already complaining that Christian Science’s priorities were out of sync with Eddy’s mission of spiritual healing.

“We’ve gotten to the point in the last few years where Christian Science has become a would-be media empire that happened to have a small church attached to it,” said a third-generation Christian Scientist from La Canada Flintridge who works as a television producer. “We went down the wrong path. . . . It’s one reason why religion’s getting watered down.”

It was against this backdrop of discontent that the church last August published the controversial biography of Eddy, “Destiny of the Mother Church,” by the late Bliss Knapp, whose family roots extended back to the founding of the religion.

Knapp’s father, Ira, a New Hampshire farmer, was the first chairman of the church’s board of directors. At Eddy’s encouragement, Bliss attended Harvard. Eddy later appointed him a traveling church lecturer.

Knapp retired in the 1930s in Massachusetts to write the story of his family and Eddy’s influence. What he produced held Eddy in a more reverential light than standard church teaching.

Eddy was not merely the creator of a new way of looking at the world, Knapp wrote. She, as much as Jesus, was “created to rule over the heavenly kingdom.” It was an opinion that most Christian Science scholars still regard as sacrilegious. The book, privately published, was rejected for publication by church directors in 1948.

Knapp died 10 years later, having tried continually to persuade the church to publish his book. His wife, Eloise, heir to a California banking fortune, died in 1973. She and her sister, Bella Mabury--who attended a Christian Science church on Adams Boulevard in Los Angeles and died in 1964--left their estates to the Mother Church. They set a condition: The church would have to publish the Knapp book as authorized church literature. Otherwise, the money would be divided between Stanford University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The church’s decision to publish the book triggered a firestorm of protest.

Lee Johnson, who had been the church’s archivist for 30 years, sent a seven-page letter to all church reading rooms criticizing publication of the book. He said the board of directors had violated the church manual prohibition against endorsing literature that is “not correct” in interpreting Christian Science.

“This has been a tragedy,” Johnson said in an interview.

The book was “clearly published out of desperate financial need,” said Judith Frutig, a Newport Beach church member and a former Christian Science Monitor bureau chief. “The fact that they’d (church directors) take that desperate step is a wonderful example of what’s gone wrong. By publishing it, the directors are saying they’ll change the doctrine to satisfy the church’s financial needs.”

Church leaders responded by mailing a 50-page defense to tens of thousands of members, defending publication as merely part of a series of books about Eddy.

“The biography series . . . is asking individual Christian Scientists to do their own thinking,” said Rob Gilbert, the head of the church’s Southern California publications committee.

The church’s attempt to obtain the bequest from the estates of Knapp’s wife and sister-in-law was blocked in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Stanford and the art museum contended last February that the church had failed to publish the book in compliance with the will. They argued that the book was not being displayed in all reading rooms, as required of “authorized” literature. A probate judge last week postponed a ruling on the case until August.

In a burst of protest that began in February, 18 of 21 members of the church’s religious publications resigned to protest the church’s large investment in secular television and its publication of the Knapp book. The Boston Globe published a series of revelations detailing how unanticipated broadcasting expenditures had forced the church to borrow heavily from pension funds and restricted accounts. Board Chairman Wood and Monitor Channel Chairman Hoagland quit. The church announced that it was shutting down the Monitor Channel and laying off 400 channel employees. Church officials vowed to cut the church’s operating budget by nearly half, to $70 million.

Still the criticism continued. R. Crosby Kemper, chairman of the board of United Missouri Bank, last month wrote a letter to church directors calling on them to quit and condemning them for “shooting dice with the assets of the church and changing the church’s mission from a religious one to a secular one.”

“Mrs. Eddy would have been horrified,” wrote Kemper, who said he had donated more than $1 million to the church.

Lex Hixton, a New York author of several books on religion, said he admires the challenge to the church leadership.

“This kind of reaction among serious members is something Mrs. Eddy herself would have led if she were around,” said Hixton, who is not a Christian Scientist.

But Hixton said Christian Science, a sedate, introspective religion whose services are limited to readings from the Bible and Eddy’s book on science and health, may have a rocky future.

“Christian Science is insular. It cuts itself off from most Christianity, theologically as well as socially,” Hixton said. “It has placed itself apart from all the other churches. It is a Christianity based on a kind of metaphysical knowledge--there’s no Communion service, no liturgy. It’s an open question whether it has enough of the rich Christian heritage of ritual and dogma, in the best sense of the word, to remain viable over the centuries, or whether it’s just become too rarefied.”

Times staff writer Penelope McMillan contributed to this story.