The Shakers: history and beliefs

¶ … Shakers in America -- a Review of the United Society of Believers

Who were the Shakers? What did they believe in and why did they leave England in the late 18th Century and relocate on the North American shores in the middle of the Revolutionary War? These issues and others regarding the controversial Shakers will be reviewed in this paper.

The University of Virginia has a well-respected archive of historical reference material on religions groups that have appeared in the United States. The Shakers are among the many groups featured and among the more interesting religious organizations to have made its home in the U.S. The Shakers began in 1736 in Manchester, England, as an offshoot of the Quaker community. The preacher that led the Shakers, James Wardley, had reportedly been reading and relating to the teachings of "millennial French Prophets" and he began to share his views on these prophets with his community called "Shaking Quakers" (Virginia.edu).

This group was considered "radical" because they apparently communed with spirits of the dead and that caused them to launch into a period of "impassioned shaking" during their services (Virginia.edu). This bizarre behavior caused people to harass the Shakers; especially susceptible to harassment was Ann Lee, who was married and she claimed that during her long imprisonment she had a "revelation" that she was the "Second Coming of Christ" (Virginia.edu). Because of her charisma, Lee became the leader of the group in 1772. At about this time the Shaking Quakers became just the Shakers.

Lee and her followers were persecuted in England so she and her brother, her niece, her husband and five others moved to the United States, arriving in New York in May, 1774, at the height of the Revolutionary war. (Virginia.edu). It wasn't easy for the Shakers to avoid persecution in their new home because they were English (the war was between the English and the colonists), they were pacifistic when there was a war for colonial survival going on.

What apparently made it easier for the Shakers to avoid harassment was a religious wave of revivalism called "New Light Stir" that swept across New England during the years 1776 and 1783 (Virginia.edu). The Shakers had come converts during this period, but by 1784, their experiment in New England ended, the University of Virginia documents report. However they moved to Kentucky and Ohio under the leadership of Joseph Meacham, who helped the Shakers survive by creating a commercial business making and selling crafts and furniture (Virginia.edu). They also sold self-published books, which were popular in the secular culture at that time.

They actually became a kind of "tourist attraction" according to the research in the University of Virginia in the mid-1800s, when they also reached their peak of popularity. The university research reports that at their greatest size there were an estimated 6,000 in 19 communities. Were they a cult? Or were they a sect? Or were they just another religious organization?

According to the beginning of an article in the New Yorker the Shakers were a sect and not a cult -- but later in the article the writer begins to refer to them as a "cult." But that label aside, the article by Adam Gopnik claims that everything the Shakers touched "…is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity" (Gopnik, 2006, p. 1). While the University of Virginia research article briefly mentioned the crafts that the Shakers created, Gopnik uses some very descriptive language to give credit to the Shakers' craftsmanship. Their objects show "a knowing, creative, shaping simplicity," Gopnik writes, and to look closely at a single Shaker box "is to see an attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bending eccentricity…" (p. 1).

The Shakers produced boxes, ladders and clocks, and they enjoying a "booming market" for their creations and their books, Gopnik explains. Why they did what they did, and why "we think what they did was so lovely" remains "a mystery," the writer explains (p. 1). Gopnik wonders "How did a sect so small make objects so sublime? Did they know what they were doing when they did what they did?" (p. 1). Gopnik explains that Ann Lee was born on Leap Day 1736 and he fills in several gaps in the story left out by the University of Virginia's research materials.

For example, Gopnik explains that Ann Lee was raised with seven siblings in a "hovel" (a crude, open shed) and that she was disgusted with the sound of her father having intercourse with her mother. "…Hearing her father impregnate her mother again and again left her with the revulsion toward sex that distinguished her faith from competing millennial visions" (Gopnik, p. 2). Her prison term resulted from "disrupting the Anglican Sabbath" and while in prison she actually came to believe sex "was the root of all evil," Gopnik goes on.

Lee had lost her four children to various illnesses, which explains some of her bitterness; also, she was raised in a working class world in Manchester, England, and the "constant pregnancy" of women in that environment "was a prime source of suffering" (Gopnik, p. 2). Her objection to sex was based perhaps more on being "anti-pregnancy" than being "anti-pleasure," Gopnik continues (p. 2).

Once they were well settled in on the shores of North America, the Shakers' followers truly believed that Ann Lee was a "reborn Christ…her presence made the Messiah now sexually complete, both man and woman," Gopnik writes. Her pretensions about being a reborn Christ helped her gain followers, but it also caused her to be "wildly controversial," so much so that she was attacked often, and once, Gopnik writes, she was "sexually assaulted…by gangs of local men" (p. 2). Perhaps one of those beatings was the cause of her "sudden death, in 1784," the writer speculates.

Once she was passed on, as was mentioned earlier in this paper, Joseph Meacham became a leader of the Shakers, and along with Lucy Wright, they "spread quickly" and became "American icons" by establishing colonies in the Massachusetts communities of Harvard and Pittsfield, all over New England and in Kentucky. Gopnik explains that at the highest point in their population there may have been 5,000 Shakers (fewer than the University of Virginia research reported). Their "shaking" was part of the attraction that lured new followers, Gopnik points out on page 2. In the evenings their style was to put on an exhibition of "violent dancing and rhapsodic writhing." Once they had established numerous communities of true believers their dancing became "more formalized" which amounted to a "regimented after-dinner trembling" that resembled "line dancing at a sock hop" (Gopnik, p. 2).