The average Sunday in the sanctuary at Mile Hi Church, just west of Denver, is at first glance indistinguishable from a service at an evangelical megachurch. Onstage, a rock band plays under pastel stage lights. Congregants wander past the control booth, where a black-clad techie fiddles with the sound board. They hug friends, ask about kids and weekend plans, and find a spot in the theater-style auditorium. On either side of the stage, two giant LED screens advertise upcoming events. Then the house lights drop, small talk turns to singing, and all eyes move to the screens to follow the lyrics and watch for the larger-than-life image of a smiling, headset-wearing preacher.
But this is not an evangelical megachurch. Mile Hi is the largest of about four hundred Centers for Spiritual Living—congregations that teach Science of Mind, a philosophy developed in the 1920s by New England mystic Ernest Holmes. Science of Mind draws on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalism and the mental healing doctrines of Mary Baker Eddy, among other nineteenth-century spiritual pioneers. It offers a vision of humanity as part of one universal divine Mind, a conscious energy field that follows laws of cause and effect. More than seven hundred people come to Mile Hi Church each week to connect with the “Mind in which we all live and move and have our being,” in Holmes’s words (cribbing from St. Paul).“I would not use the word ‘worship’ to describe a Mile Hi service,” said aLuna Chen, who has been at Mile Hi for nearly two decades. “You go to services for upliftment and community.”
At Mile Hi, in place of Christian iconography, interfaith banners adorn the walls. One combines images of the Buddha, a menorah, and a yin-yang with Krishna, Mary, and the Christ child. On the way in, visitors pass a bookstore stocked with the Tao Te Ching, Teresa of Avila’s meditations, and Emerson’s essays. They grab flyers for upcoming classes like “Existential Metapsychiatry.” And instead of playing “Goodness of God” or “Amazing Grace,” the band warms up the room with Katy Perry’s hit “Firework”: “You just gotta ignite the light / And let it shine / Just own the night / Like the Fourth of July.”
It is a space designed to welcome both spiritual explorers determined to visit every gateway to truth, and refugees from traditional organized religion. (Many congregants are both.) Michelle Medrano, who alongside another senior minister leads Mile Hi, got kicked out of catechism class at her family’s Catholic church when she was thirteen. “I was asking questions,” she said. “I had strong intuitive beliefs about Jesus. I was arguing with the teacher that when Jesus had that temper tantrum in the temple, he was human and showed anger. He had some doubt at the end of his life. He was human and spiritual like the rest of us. The teacher rejected that.”
The following year, Medrano’s mother took her and her siblings “out of a dangerous violent marriage,” she told me. “The church started telling her we weren’t welcome.” Seeking a worldview that clicked for them, they began to read books about spirituality. When a friend recommended Mile Hi, they went to a weeknight service and heard the minister preaching that “Jesus is the great example, not the great exception,” Medrano recalled. “I turned to my mom and said, ‘I’m home.’”
After training to be a Science of Mind minister through courses offered at the church, she led a congregation in Scottsdale, Ariz., for seventeen years, then came back to Mile Hi. Like many Science of Mind ministers, she goes by an honorific and her first name. “Dr. Michelle” projects a blend of expertise and easygoing friendliness—the vibe you probably want if you’re seeking a knowledgeable guide to the transcendent who does not remind you too much of the priest at your childhood church. (“Dr.” is an honorary title bestowed on some ministers for service to the broader Centers for Spiritual Living community. The highest degree offered by CSL’s Holmes Institute is a master’s in consciousness studies, which includes coursework in subjects like “Spirituality and the Brain,” “Wisdom of Kabbalah,” and “Paradigms of Consciousness.”)
On the sunny August morning when I attended Mile Hi, Medrano was onstage, preaching about “the courage to grow.” Her colorful shawl glittered under the lights. “Humanity is suffering the most from a lack of spiritual self-esteem,” she said. Many of us, she suggested, grew up in families or churches that told us to “stay in your place” or “don’t think too much of yourself.” This is why “we always want to be normal” instead of claiming our “unique, authentic, God-expressed self.”
In her half-hour sermon, Medrano wove together references to Buddhist monasticism, Moses’ encounter with God on Mount Sinai, St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” and nuggets from the spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, who recently suspended her campaign for president. Later I asked her how an ordinary individual should navigate this stew of ideas. If we can’t trust any institution or authority to adjudicate, how can we tell what belongs in the “golden thread of truth,” as Science of Mind practitioners like to say?
“We all have layers of messages, cultural upbringing, family upbringing, and socio-economic messages, and it can be difficult to discern that pure sense of what is mine to do,” Medrano explained. “But the more I learn to meditate, push back, heal my unhealed past, get past that critical voice, and get past that woundology that we have, that voice can become clear to me.” Ultimately, she said, “we are all channels of that divine presence, which has given us the freedom to express ourselves and create the life we want.”
I had asked about truth, but Medrano answered in terms of self-expression and “what is mine to do”—perhaps because in American culture they have become the same thing. Increasingly, Americans prefer seeking their personal truth at home, in their pajamas. According to a recent Gallup poll, only three in ten say they go to church “every week or nearly every week,” down about ten percentage points since the early 2000s. Yet the human need for a sense of belonging and cosmic meaning is not going away. Some of that desire has flowed into politics: in today’s culture wars, many Americans have transferred their apocalyptic visions and purity crusades to social media and self-regarding yard signs.
Increasingly, Americans prefer seeking their personal truth at home, in their pajamas.
Mile Hi members have found a different way: not traditional worship, not Sunday couch-lounging, and not political holy war (although like many churchgoers nowadays, they sometimes struggle to navigate partisan division within the congregation). Their beliefs can strike observers as strange or “woo-woo.” But in fact, their gospel of D.I.Y. spiritual exploration and positive thinking is not so much an alien doctrine as a supercharged version of a pervasive American spiritual style. That faith transcends political divides and declining interest in institutions, but it may also hasten the country’s slide into conflict and fragmentation. I flew to Denver to see whether Mile Highers are emissaries from the future of organized religion, prophets of its doom, or both.
Ernest Holmes, the Science of Mind founder, was born on a farm in Maine in 1887. Even as a teenager, “he sought knowledge from every source and turned it over in his mind, accepting and rejecting it at will,” wrote his brother and biographer, Fenwicke Holmes. “He never had any use for authority as such and always claimed that if he had to have a hell he would make his own.” When he stumbled upon a relative’s volume of Emerson’s essays, “he read all day and late into the night…. He returned the next day to read more. It was at that moment that life really began for Ernest Holmes.” While studying theater and public speaking in Boston, he discovered Mary Baker Eddy and was intrigued by the Christian Science approach to healing prayer. On a visit home, he claimed to heal his mother of heart trouble. “I changed my own consciousness about her and in some way it reached her,” Holmes explained. “I didn’t know then how it happened but it did.”
In 1912, Holmes moved to California and began preaching his ideas to small groups. Growing interest led to a national speaking tour, and then to the Institute of Religious Science (later incorporated as the Church of Religious Science, and now known as Centers for Spiritual Living). He taught that with the right kind of thinking—particularly affirmative prayer—we can change ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
“Thousands today are using the silent power of Mind to heal their bodies and bring prosperity into their affairs; and the Law is always working in accordance with the belief of those seeking to use it,” Holmes wrote in his 1927 book Science of Mind. Centers for Spiritual Living still use his book to train prayer practitioners, people of “high spiritual consciousness” who are licensed by the CSL parent organization. They follow a five-step prayer method, the Spiritual Mind Treatment, to help others—whether in conversations after church, during walk-in appointments at their congregation’s prayer center, or in private practice as a life coach or spiritual counselor.
The treatment begins by acknowledging “the infinite Spirit of God” and God’s unity with “my real spiritual self.” Then it guides reflection on “how you will feel when you receive what you want,” advising a person to “build mental pictures and intensify the thrill and confidence of knowing that I have mastery over all my apparent problems.” Last comes a call to release my desire “to the infinite power and intelligence of God’s law.” Practitioners sometimes supplement this prayer method with practices from other religious traditions, such as Buddhist meditation, Hindu chakra alignment, Reiki, Qigong, or crystal healing. They may borrow ideas from Christianity, Judaism or (more rarely) Islam. They frequently quote their founder, but “no one puts Ernest on a pedestal like a Buddha or a Jesus,” aLuna Chen told me. “Most people see him as an awakened person who synthesized.”
Centers for Spiritual Living belong to the amorphous tradition known as New Thought, whose hazy origins include European occult dabblings, Christian and Jewish mysticism, and Franz Mesmer’s theories of telepathic healing and the transfer of energy between bodies. The tradition gained an important anchor with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s musings on the Over-Soul, “the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.” Like Holmes himself, many Science of Mind practitioners recall their first encounter with Emerson’s writings as a milestone in their understanding of the universe. Josh Reeves, who co-leads Mile Hi with Michelle Medrano, called himself “fundamentally Emersonian … the core Emersonian principle is: be a nonconformist.” He laughed. “Join our church! Be a nonconformist.”
Over the past generation, as Americans have moved away from attending church, they have also lost confidence in government, universities, and the mainstream media—in any authority that once had standing to tell them what to think and do. You can view this situation as a hellscape of lonely cynics thumbing their phones. Or you can celebrate our era as a time when it is finally okay to “trust thyself,” as Emerson wrote in “Self-Reliance, “for every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
I had asked about truth, but Medrano answered in terms of self-expression and “what is mine to do”—perhaps because in American culture they have become, effectively, the same thing.
New Thought is the spiritual tradition of radical self-reliance. It has flourished in Emerson’s country, infusing Christianity through positive-thinking preachers like Norman Vincent Peale. In the 1960s, it drew new vigor from the rise of humanistic psychology, which stressed “self-actualization” and cast every human as “a person in the process of creating himself, a person who creates meaning in life, a person who embodies a dimension of subjective freedom,” as psychologist Carl Rogers wrote in 1964.
The 2024 presidential election has displayed New Thought’s bipartisan appeal. Bestselling author Marianne Williamson, who began her career as a leader in a church similar to Centers for Spiritual Living, ran for the Democratic nomination on a platform combining LGBTQ rights, abortion access, and universal healthcare with “a holistic, integrated approach to help all Americans meet their full potential.” Donald Trump, who grew up attending Peale’s church in New York City, may have learned a thing or two there about altering facts by simply thinking they are otherwise. “Form a picture in your mind of circumstances as they should be … believe in it, pray about it, work at it, and you can actualize it,” Peale wrote in The Power of Positive Thinking (published in 1952, and still in print).
Science of Mind, one small branch of this spiritual family tree, has no built-in politics. But the increasing tendency of Americans to self-segregate along political lines, as well as an evolving outreach strategy, has tugged the organization to the left. About two decades ago, when the global organization changed its name from the Church of Religious Science to Centers for Spiritual Living, “it was a step to being a much more liberal church,” Josh Reeves said. “It was a recognition that their target market was cultural creatives, liberal folks who like to shop at Trader Joe’s and vote for John Kerry, who consider themselves spiritual but not religious.” The current head of Centers for Spiritual Living, Spiritual Director Soni Cantrell-Smith, has helped lead a turn to “sacred activism,” which includes a greater focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. “New Thought is shifting,” she told me. “It used to be about me, me, me, but it’s moving from me to we. It’s more about the collective consciousness.”
But practitioners are not of one mind about what that means, and Emersonian individualism sits uneasily alongside progressive identity politics. Both Reeves and Medrano want Mile Hi to remain a “great purple church,” as Reeves put it. “What’s problematic is when identity becomes an alternative to individuality and uniqueness,” he said. “It’s a tension between some liberalism and Science of Mind.” And while some conservative congregants have complained about a strain of left-leaning activism in Mile Hi preaching, others have said “they’re leaving because they have a huge dislike of Trump, and they’re angry we’re not calling him out,” Medrano told me. Over the past few years, Mile Hi has also seen members lose interest in the church’s identity-based affinity groups. “Right before the pandemic, we had a falling away of a lot of our demographic groups. They got tired of being separated out,” she said. “We saw it in LGBTQ, men’s and women’s groups, Latino groups.”
A libertarian streak runs through the Mile Hi community. The church’s core values are personal freedom and unfettered self-expression—intensified by the culture of the Mountain West and a frontier of limitless self-improvement. “Sometimes the easiest way to explain it to people is to say we’re kind of like Oprah, a little metaphysical, a little positive thinking,” Reeves told me.
“Positive thinking” does not mean that “you can think an affirmative thought and it’s going to immediately change your life,” he said. Like any religious belief, the power of affirmative prayer is vulnerable to exaggeration and misinterpretation, and “requires discernment.” Reeves echoed the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy and recent studies that correlate “positive ideation” with improved health outcomes—but in more metaphysical terms. “It’s not a single thought that sets the creative medium into motion,” he said, “but the totality and consistency of your thinking that’s part of what we’d call co-creation with Divine Mind.”
Most Americans interested in New Thought pursue these ideas and practices on their own. They browse the spirituality and self-help sections at the bookstore, listen to podcasts on how to “manifest” the life they want, and sign up for sessions with a spiritual coach. One of the few fixed doctrines in this eclectic and flexible tradition is that only you, as an individual, can discern the universe’s plan for your life. You don’t need a church or a minister to do it. It’s not surprising, then, that most Centers for Spiritual Living are small. The majority have fewer than one hundred members, and they skew older and female. A 2021 survey found that 82 percent of subscribers to the organization’s main publication, Science of Mind Magazine, are women; their average age is 66.
Mile Hi has six thousand members and an average weekly attendance of 750. It’s “definitely the largest” Center for Spiritual Living, said Soni Cantrell-Smith. Indeed, Mile Hi is larger than about 94 percent of all American churches of any denomination. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Sunday attendance approached 1,200; like every organization that relies on in-person gatherings, Mile Hi is still recovering from the pandemic.
Members explain Mile Hi’s size by citing factors that would help any congregation thrive: earlier ministers who attracted visitors with dynamic preaching, and also planned for their own succession; a growing population in the Denver suburbs; a popular preschool and other children’s programs. While many CSL ministers discover their vocation late in life, even in retirement, Mile Hi has benefited from young leadership. And the music is catchy.
Mile Hi’s success may also be a sign that in this dechurched, unaffiliated, authenticity-obsessed culture, a “fundamentally Emersonian” church is no longer a contradiction in terms. “God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions,” Emerson wrote in his essay “Worship.” In the 1985 book Habits of the Heart, the sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues captured an echo of this impulse from one of their informants, a nurse named Sheila Larson who described her faith as “Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”
The key mark of what scholars call “secularization” is not a declining belief in the supernatural. Surveys suggest that a majority of Americans pray on a regular basis, and a whopping 87 percent say they accept at least one “New Age” belief, like karma, telepathy, or the ability to “manifest” one’s desires. Rather, what makes us secular is that so many of us are like Sheila. We feel free to be our own arbiters of ultimate concerns. But it’s an uneasy freedom. We are still looking for someone to guide us.
After the Sunday service ended, I headed to one of the church’s other buildings. Its unexpected angles and curves gleamed white, like a 1960s prototype of a lunar outpost. I followed the signs to a workshop on Shamanic Journeys led by Gregory Merritt, a former software engineer. Merritt found his way to Mile Hi after years exploring what he called “the spiritual sampler plate,” ranging from yoga and Christian mysticism to Native American medicinal ceremonies and the personal growth workshops of the Esalen Institute. Today, he wore a burgundy shirt with a teepee on it and a leather pouch necklace containing crystals to “give me energy power when I’m teaching,” he explained.
As about thirty of us waited for the workshop to start—Merritt was trying to round up instruments for the drum circle—I chatted with a young dad in a closely trimmed beard and floral-print collared shirt. He told me that he and his partner loved Mile Hi’s children’s programming. I asked him about the hazards of self-delusion in positive thinking. During a recent period of financial hardship, he said, Mile Hi teachings did not paper over his family’s struggles with promises of easy riches. Rather, they taught him to “widen the aperture on what counts as abundance” and to be grateful for things in life besides material wealth.
A cart full of handheld drums arrived. Merritt called us to attention. He explained that the rhythmic beat of our drum circle would send us into a trance, beginning a journey to the spirit world where we would have a decent chance of meeting an animal spirit guide. “We’ll see what happens,” he shrugged. A few hands went up. “Is a ‘spirit animal’ and a ‘power animal’ one and the same thing?” Yes, Merritt said. “Can you have more than one?” Don’t get ahead of yourself, he suggested.
We feel free to be our own arbiters of ultimate concerns. But it’s an uneasy freedom. We are still looking for someone to guide us.
It is tempting to caricature New Thought as sacralized navel-gazing that provides an excuse to remake venerable traditions in your own image. But at the same time, Mile Highers vibrate with an outward-facing curiosity that is increasingly rare in our culture: a desire to learn, ask guileless questions, and seek new experiences without worrying about whether they will look foolish, tick the right political boxes, or get a flattering selfie to post on social media.
Merritt called us to stand for the opening prayer. We faced each cardinal direction and honored the relevant guardian animal (the eagle, for example, is the keeper of the east winds). “Now, we’ll allow Mother Earth and Father Sky to purify and activate our chakras,” Merritt said.
When I asked him later how he developed the ritual, he smiled and called it “ancient-based spirituality à la Gregory,” a mix of indigenous and Eastern practices that he had learned over the years. “I love taking things from different traditions and merging them together,” he said. “That’s one reason I’m so big on Mile Hi. Sunday, you might hear a Hindu quote, Buddha, Jesus, and our founder. There’s this desire to explore truth spoken in many different ways.” Merritt has no patience for progressive hand-wringing about cultural appropriation. “The bottom line is that I don’t represent myself as something I’m not. The Native Americans have not cornered the market on the earth, its power, its presence,” he said. “I feel I’ve earned the right to do this through my thirty years of workshops.”
As people around the room readied their instruments, Merritt explained that our drumbeat would open a porthole to the spirit realm, allowing us to leave our bodies and connect with whatever spirit awaited us. He warned us to manage our expectations. “It’s always cool if you have powerful visuals, but that doesn’t always happen,” especially if you have never journeyed before, he said. He advised first-timers to “go into the underworld, like Alice in Wonderland,” and seek their spirit animal there—but don’t assume that your guide is the first creature you meet. “When you get there, ask, ‘Are you my guide?’” he instructed us. “They might say yes; they might giggle; they might scamper off.” He commenced drumming. His colleague, a slim blond woman, stood to play a row of singing bowls. We closed our eyes.
Fifteen minutes into the session, I was obliged to leave for the airport—before participants came out of their trances and shared what they had seen. But I asked Merritt later how he could tell whether any of it was real. Wouldn’t participants feel tempted to interpret ordinary daydreams as supernatural encounters? “It’s certainly possible that someone new might manufacture an experience,” he admitted. “But I know it’s authentic because I coach people. You’ve got to do something to get to the underworld, to kickstart it, but hopefully, when it takes on a life of its own, you know.” He looked me in the eye. “That white buffalo was right in my face, and I got on its back.”
“The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth,” Emerson wrote. “We know truth when we see it, let the skeptic and scoffer say what they choose.” This liberating claim is also a hazardous one—a version of the same call to “do your own research” and “trust your instincts” that feeds conspiracy thinking and suspicion of institutions on both the right and left. It also runs counter to a core principle of the ancient religions that Science of Mind seeks to honor: spiritual growth sometimes means submitting to ideas and practices that are bigger and older than you, adapting yourself to them rather than the other way around.
When Ernest Holmes founded Science of Mind, he created a spiritual Swiss Army knife, a set of ideas that can carve and combine any religious practice, ritual, or scientific theory to help an individual make sense of the world. He turned religion into a tool well adapted to our own era’s obsession with personal authenticity and aversion to institutional authority—our inclination to sacralize the lyrics of Katy Perry.
Science of Mind, at its best, pulls people free of self-destructive thinking, challenges both right-wing and left-wing identity politics, and introduces seekers to traditions they never would have found on their own. But if it “ignites the light” within us, its emphasis on radical autonomy can also prevent ancient traditions from illuminating the blind spots of 21st-century American culture—and showing us that there is more to freedom than making up our own rules. If there is one universal truth out there, it is true regardless of our personal tastes and instincts.