The Last Shakers Still Open Their Meeting House on Sundays

Every other Shaker village in the country has closed. Canterbury in New Hampshire held on until its last members died in the 1990s, Pleasant Hill in Kentucky ended in 1910, and dozens of smaller communities folded decades before that, the inevitable result of a theology that required celibacy of its members and therefore depended entirely on conversion rather than birth to survive. Sabbathday Lake, founded in New Gloucester in 1783, is the sole exception, still an active religious community today with a handful of members who continue to accept new converts despite two centuries of the same demographic pressure that emptied every sister village. The community still farms its own land, runs a working museum and library documenting Shaker craft and belief, and holds Sunday worship in the same meeting house their society built in the eighteenth century, open to visitors rather than closed off as a historical curiosity, a distinction that matters because Sabbathday Lake understands itself as a living congregation rather than a preserved one.

Maine's Congregationalist founding churches trace to seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay settlement of the coast, and French Canadian migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries built a substantial Catholic population in mill towns like Lewiston and Biddeford. Nothing in Particular leads the state today at twenty five percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study, well ahead of Catholic identification at fourteen.