Verna Hall and the Making of American Christian (Scientist) Nationalism

Verna Hall was a Journal-listed practitioner of Christian Science, a professional healer in Mary Baker Eddy’s tradition. In 1954, she was ready to take on a new patient: the United States of America. After disillusioning employment in one of California’s New Deal welfare agencies, Hall came to see America as an ailing nation. She sought the remedy in two places. The first was the Church of Christ Scientist where she learned from her Cold Warrior teacher Mildred LeBlond that nations could be healed just like individuals with small-government capitalism as the solution to communism’s creeping influence. The second was the San Francisco Public Library where Hall pored over collections of primary sources from America’s founding era. The United States, she concluded, had been founded on the Christian (specifically Christian Scientist) principles of individualism and self-government. These principles had reigned from the Revolution through the rise of Christian Science, but the Progressive Era had begun America’s decline. So, in 1954, she delivered a large treatise, Liberty’s Crusade, outlining this conservative Christian history to the Board of the Church of Christ Scientist, but she was rebuked as a political extremist. Rejected by her own Church, Hall found a receptive audience in American evangelicalism. Her two-volume Christian History of the Constitution of the United States, promoted through her Foundation for American Christian Education, became a popular reader and Christian school textbook in the 1960s and 70s, and many conservative evangelical activists credited Hall for their commitment to making America a Christian nation...again, according to the cottage industry of Christian histories for which Hall paved the way. This paper analyzes the historical and theological roots of Hall’s Christian (Science) nationalism, the constitutional and biblical rhetoric that attracted evangelical followers, and the application of Hall’s American Christian nationalism in global missionary contexts.