Church takes to bully pulpit

Church Takes to Bully Pulpit

By Alex Beam, Globe Columnist, 04/02/99

A friend writes: ''USA Weekend, a newspaper supplement magazine distributed primarily on Sunday, has just announced a poll that asks its readers to call and vote on whether or not parents refusing medical treatment in favor of prayer for their children should be subject to criminal prosecution. The Christian Science Church's Committee on Publication, based at the Boston headquarters (with assistants in each church around the world), notified all its assistants with the directive to phone all members of all their churches in the United States to call and vote `no' on the poll. Members were not given a copy of the questionnaire in the paper; they were just told to call and vote no.

''This is interesting, since the church prides itself on taking no political stands or preaching from the pulpit. They should also know better than to try to affect a poll in a national magazine. One can only wonder how they would react if something equally untoward was to happen to them in their paper,'' referring, of course, to The Christian Science Monitor.

Some context: The USA Weekend poll is being conducted to accompany a long feature story on faith healing, according to religion editor Kathy McCleary. The precise poll question is ''Should it be a crime for parents to withhold medical treatment from children for religious reasons?'' The magazine is running the story and poll - to be published April 25 - partly in response to some high-profile cases of infant death in Oregon, which is now considering a bill to criminalize faith healing of small children.

Members of the Christian Science church, which advocates spiritual healing over medical treatment, has had to litigate similar cases over the years, most notably the Massachusetts prosecution of Ginger and David Twitchell, whose infant son died of a medically treatable bowel obstruction in 1986. The cases in Oregon have nothing to do with Christian Science; nonetheless the church opposes state laws that ban faith healing.

Per the USA Weekend poll, I am in receipt of this fax from Gary Jones, manager of the Committee on Publication: ''Pardon our zeal, Alex! Of course we spread the word. But people still dial the phone and follow their own conscience.''

Case in point

How very unsurprising that the San Francisco-based Landmark Education Corp., widely known as the Forum, is still using the embarrassingly stupid and one-sided Harvard Business School case study ''Landmark Education Corporation: Selling a Paradigm Shift'' to hawk its wares. Landmark is a Werner Erhard/est spinoff that has found quite an audience with the self-actualization crowd. Landmark also has clients in corporate America. Even after protests from the B-school about nonacademic use of the case, Landmark still teases the study off the front page of its Web site, http:// www.landmark-education.com.

Since last year, however, Harvard has restricted sale of the case ''to faculty and staff of universities.'' Harvard and Landmark also say that the case does ''not in any way constitute an endorsement or statement of official position, positive or negative, regarding their subject matter'' - a ludicrous disclaimer of a study that uncritically quotes Forum executives comparing themselves to Socrates and Galileo.

The Harvard case has also surfaced in a debate in Grand Rapids, Mich., over whether to hire the Gilmore Group, a consulting firm led by former Landmark manager Elizabeth Gilmore, to help the city conduct a ''cultural transformation'' of its municipal employees. (Gilmore worked for Landmark on a similar contract in Highland Park, Mich.) A city employee who sits on a committee reviewing the proposed contract says the study was distributed ''to give some background information as to what Landmark Education was all about and to show that it was not a cult.''

Gilmore says she doesn't know why the case study was handed out in Grand Rapids, and points out that she hasn't been affiliated with Landmark for the past three years: ''Landmark technology is copyrighted and I'm not using it in any way.''

Alex Beam's e-mail address is beam@globe.com.