Frank B. Robinson

Frank Bruce Robinson (1886–1948) was a pharmacist and self-taught religious entrepreneur in Moscow, Idaho, who in 1928 founded Psychiana, often called America’s first mail-order religion. Beginning six weeks after the 1929 crash, he advertised in popular magazines and newspapers under the famous headline “I TALKED WITH GOD (yes I did, actually and literally),” offering a subscription series of bi-weekly lessons by mail that promised health, wealth, and happiness through contact with a usable “God-Power.” At its Depression-era peak Psychiana reported large revenues and claimed followers in roughly 60 countries, making Robinson one of the most commercially successful New Thought figures of his era.

Psychiana was a stripped-down, practical New Thought: Robinson rejected church ritual and creed and taught instead that an impersonal Power of the living God could be reached directly by ordinary people through daily mental practice.

He composed more than twenty numbered lessons that students worked through in sequence. After his death in 1948 his family briefly continued the operation before closing it in the early 1950s and donating the archives to the University of Idaho.

Robinson is significant less as an original metaphysician than as a mass-market populariser who put New Thought affirmation technique into millions of mailboxes.