Emma Curtis Hopkins and the rise of the positive affirmation

Many famous teachers have taught their readers and listeners how to use positive affirmations to make positive changes in their lives. Some of the best known include Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937), Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952), Shakti Gawain (Creative Visualization, 1978), Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life, 1984), and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret, 2006).

Photo by Edmund B. Lingan. (2026.)  

Long before these celebrities of affirmation, manifestation, and positive thinking appeared on the scene, Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925) offered the affirmation as a spiritual and practical tool for turning desires into lived realities.

Emma Curtis Hopkins Public domain. Wikimedia Commons. 

In 1885, Mary Baker Eddy removed Hopkins from the editorship of the Christian Science Journal because of theological differences. In that same year, Hopkins moved to Chicago, recognizing that the city hosted one of the most vibrant alternative spiritual communities in the United States. By the time she arrived, Hopkins was already gaining national attention as a leader in the emerging New Thought movement, which taught that human beings shape their lives through the power of thought and spiritual consciousness. Hopkins quickly attracted students and eventually became known as the New Thought movement's "Teacher of Teachers." Through her teaching and her various organizations, Hopkins trained a new generation of metaphysical healers who expanded upon her ideas in the U.S. and abroad.

For Hopkins, thought was a divine power that could be used to manifest one’s desires. Expanding beyond the physical and mental healing emphasized by Christian Science, Hopkins proposed that divine thought could bring positive change to any aspect of life.

To accomplish this, Hopkins prescribed a twofold system of "denials" and "affirmations." These carefully crafted statements were intended to eliminate false beliefs preventing people from achieving their full potential and to establish a link to the divine source of thought governing the universe. Hopkins often referred to this source as "God." Because God was entirely Good and constituted the All of existence, Hopkins reasoned that only good things are real. After all, she argued, a God who is truly good would not create evil. Hopkins identified evils such as vice, sickness, depression, poverty, violence, and suffering as illusions sustained by mistaken human beliefs. Hopkins taught her students to use denials to eradicate these false beliefs from their minds.

Hopkins’s denials took the form of statements such as "there is no evil; all is Good" and "there is no sin, sickness, or death." Her students wielded these statements against a legion of phantasmagoric troubles that were to "be denied out of existence by our word." Perhaps because of their essentially negative character, denials never became a prominent feature of the later New Age, Human Potential, and manifestation movements that emerged during the second half of the twentieth century.

Hopkins's affirmations, however, became a permanent and popular fixture within those later scenes. The affirmations that Hopkins wrote were brimming with joyous divinity. Many followed a rhythmic formula of thought, speech, writing, and action. Several examples appear in Hopkins's New Thought tract, The Radiant I AM (ca. early 1890s):

"I make my Self known by speaking, thinking, writing, and living the word of my Self—my I AM."

"I AM the unending, irresistible, beautiful Health of the whole Universe, I, its Center, shed my Health abroad. This is my stopless ministry. I think this—I speak this—I write this—I live this."

"I AM the sufficiency of my universe. It is my decree. The elixir of bounty, of prospering, spreads forth from me. This is my irresistible unending ministry. I think this—I speak this—I write this—I live this."

Through affirmations such as these, Hopkinsian New Thinkers discovered a divine power within themselves that they variously called the "Divine Self," the "God-self," the "Goodself," and the "Radiant I AM." Whatever its name, this inner source of transformation became a counselor that taught awakened individuals how to heal from illness, conduct their affairs wisely, live rightly, and make the most of themselves in the present moment.

Every positive affirmation spoken, written, or repeated today carries a faint echo of Emma Curtis Hopkins's metaphysical imagination