The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1774-1815 · England, then America
Shakers
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
The Shakers began among a small group of dissenters in Manchester who worshipped with shaking, dancing and ecstatic speech, and were transformed by one of them. Ann Lee, a factory-hand who had buried four infant children and came to believe that celibacy was the way out of the world's fallenness. In 1774 she led eight followers to New York, and the communities that grew after her death in 1784 became one of the most successful communal experiments in American history. Property held in common, men and women living apart but governing jointly, work treated as a form of worship. Their published confession identified Christ's second appearing with Ann Lee herself, which set them apart from the churches around them, and their dancing worship gave them the name their neighbours used. What they built was startlingly beautiful: villages of plain, exact buildings, furniture pared down to its function, and thousands of songs.
Sources
- Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of Our Ever Blessed Mother Ann Lee (Hancock, 1816) (primary) — The society's compiled oral testimony about the founding generation, gathered more than 30 years after Ann Lee's death; women's voices are structurally central to it.
- The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (1808; Youngs), the church covenants (from 1795), the Millennial Laws (primary) — The society's own confession, stating the second-coming claim in their own words.
- The lived community record: village journals and daybooks, membership rolls, hymnody (Millennial Praises, 1813; the gift-song tradition) (primary) — The richest record starts from the 1790s gathering onward; the founding generation itself is documented only retrospectively or by hostile sources.
- Valentine Rathbun, An Account of the Matter, Form, and Manner of a New and Strange Religion (1781); Amos Taylor's narrative (1782); the 1780 Albany imprisonment records (primary) — Ex-member polemic that forms the earliest documentation of Ann Lee's generation - an asymmetry worth noting, since hostile and later accounts dominate the early record.
- Stephen Stein, The Shaker Experience in America (Yale, 1992) (secondary) — Covers both readings of the Shakers: the identification of Mother Ann with Christ's second appearing in their own confession, and the institutional growth under Meacham and Wright after her death.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7: nearest coverage in Ward's 'Evangelical awakenings in the North Atlantic world' chapter, at the radical-prophetic periphery (reference)