For nearly two hundred years, many Americans have held, more or less loosely, to a set of ideas about material reality—namely, that thoughts can affect matter. More specifically, they believe that all kinds of problems, be they physical, economic, spiritual, or social, both originate in and can be remedied by the mind. Today, across digital media, print, and a variety of institutions, religious and supposedly non–, influencers of many stripes encourage you to manifest, to visualize success, to practice affirmations. Mind over matter, positive thinking, asking the universe: a particular grammar of spirituality has become a kind of common sense. But this common sense has its origins in a historical phenomena known as New Thought, which coalesced in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.
New Thought’s origin point is often identified in the “mind-cure” movement popularized by Phineas Quimby, who drew from mesmerism and animal magnetism and taught that bad thoughts caused illness and, thus, that fixing one’s thoughts could heal one’s body. By the time New Thought could be named as a movement—an identifiable set of people, ideas, publications, and practices—it was fractious and multivalent, with fine distinctions, nuanced interpretive differences, and occasionally ugly schisms. Many of its institutions began to fade by the early twentieth century. But, at that same time, its central ideas, often in simplified forms and stripped of overtly “religious” language, slipped into other registers, and thus reached larger and larger audiences.
During the Great Depression, successful and aspirational entrepreneurs celebrated “self-made” “rags-to-riches” stories—and blamed individuals for their failures. In a different economic environment, Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 The Power of Positive Thinking sold over two million copies in its first four years. The ideas seeped into evangelicalism, particularly through the “prosperity gospel,” as well as “new age” spirituality, the self-help industry, certain subfields of cognitive psychology, and, of course, business seminars and multi-level marketing schemes of varying degrees of scamminess.
Now in the 2020s, these New Thought ideas are still rampant. In an iteration of an undergraduate course titled simply “Spirituality,” I asked each student to create a new TikTok account, search for “manifesting” and some other terms associated with New Thought, “like” and “follow” a few posts and people, use the app for an hour each week, and see where the algorithm might lead them. Some ended up amid Pentecostal healers and prosperity-seekers; some discovered neuroscience research offering secular validation to spiritual practices; others received a torrent of business advice and were implored to work on their grindset. Everyone, in one way or another, was instructed to think and grow rich.
The field of American religious history can offer a genealogy of that algorithm, though there are many histories left to write and questions to answer. Beryl Satter’s 1999 Each Mind a Kingdom remains an indispensable treatment of women and gender in the early decades of New Thought, before it became a businessman’s faith. Catherine Albanese has situated New Thought and its splinter groups within a broader American metaphysical tradition. R. Marie Griffith explained New Thought’s centrality to Father Divine’s theology. Kati Curts, who responds to this forum, chronicles Henry Ford’s appreciation of foundational New Thought texts and commitment to mind cure. Vaughn Booker has shown how positive thinking shaped Detroit minister Charleszetta Waddles’s ministry, and Andrew Walker-Cornetta locates positive thinking as a hinge in a bestselling text that shaped Americans’ views of cognitive disability. Ethnographic work, such as Courtney Bender’s, demonstrates that metaphysical religion is very much alive. We could add many more texts to this list, and many more are being written.
In the twenty-first century, most people who encounter the legacies of New Thought do so without knowing it; without formally associating with a New Thought organization or its offshoots. Although, as Susannah Crockford shows in her contribution to this forum, there are exceptions to this rule. New Thought has become, again, a kind of commonsense metaphysics. The Law of Attraction is, after all, not a theory or belief but a Law. Americans just know that this is how the universe works: a positive attitude will improve your health, and vice versa. A 2025 meta-analysis in American Psychologist finds that “even brief, low-cost self-affirmation exercises can yield significant psychological benefits for overall mental health” and that these “benefits are not only immediate but can persist over time.”
You probably have already noticed it: this stuff is everywhere. You encounter it constantly, even if you seldom meet a self-identified New Thought practitioner or pass by a New Thought Church. This is not new. As Patrick Tugwell also notes in this forum, William James made a similar remark in his 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. By the turn of the twentieth century, James observed, “mind-cure principles” had so begun to “pervade the air that one catches their spirit at second-hand.” Over 120 years later, they have not dissipated.
This forum is about how Americans still catch these spirits, second-hand, or third– or fourth-hand, all the time. One goal is to address the lacunae that exist in the historiography, to add more historical and ethnographic research to a pervasive and crucial subject. Another goal, perhaps more difficult to achieve, is to think with New Thought. Particularly because it instills and exploits false hope—in one’s own health and wealth and career autonomy, and capitalizes on the silence that accompanies shameful failure, it is easy to regard the tradition as a grifter’s religion, preached by knaves and believed by fools. This interpretation is not wrong; but it is incomplete. Each of the five pieces in this forum track New Thought’s legacies into rich sites for thinking carefully and provocatively about the secular, science, and the modern subject.
In dialogue with Charles Taylor’s foundational work (including his Immanent Frame essay), Rachel Carbonara offers the concept of the “emanent self,” neither “buffered” from or “porous” to but instead emanating divine energy. Tugwell, in his ethnographic visits to meetings of a support group for real estate professionals, encountered personal-development philosophies in action, even as the believers cared little about the religious genealogies of their knowledge. Crockford’s subjects, at a New Thought church in Arizona, cared very much about their own religion (or spirituality, as they would prefer) and its histories. In spending time with them, and rethinking her own assumptions, Crockford began to suspend cynicism without blunting her critical edge, and to ask anew what these practices and beliefs might do for people. In their contribution, Cody Musselman and Judith Brunton ask and answer the question of just what is the “self” in “self-esteem,” detailing an ultimately successful campaign for governmental endorsement and promotion of self-esteem in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, Madeleine Baker follows the money, showing how the John Templeton Foundation promoted New-Thought-inflected ideas for decades in its quest to legitimate religion scientifically—and why even their critics, at times, acquiesced. This forum begins to describe both why and how the legacies of New Thought pervade the air, how we catch it, and how we are caught by it.
