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Shakers
Christianity
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The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, an American communal movement holding celibacy, common property, confession of sin, pacifism and equality between men and women in government. Its members belong here because of what they taught about God: that the divine is both father and mother, and that the second appearing of Christ came in Ann Lee, a woman. Communities were governed in parallel by elders and eldresses, and the movement's name comes from the shaking of its early ecstatic worship. Numbers reached several thousand in the middle of the nineteenth century and then fell steadily; a single community remains, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.
Facts
Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Practice Status DetailVery nearly extinct. One community remains, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. 1 Trajectory
Membership Over TimeSourced to the subject's own accountMembership has fallen to three living Shakers as of August 2025, all at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, the only active Shaker community left anywhere, after a new member joined that month. 3 Membership Over TimeSourced to the subject's own accountThe Shaker movement reached its documented peak around 1840, with about 5,000 full members across its communities in the northeastern and midwestern United States. 3 Membership Figure As OfSourced to the subject's own account Membership Figure As OfSourced to the subject's own account Basis of the Membership FigureSourced to the subject's own accountScholarly or Demographic Estimate 3 Origins
Place of Origin FounderAnn Lee, in whom the society holds Christ's Second Appearing to have occurred. 1 Belief
Defining Doctrinal PositionThe godhead confessed as both Father and Mother 1 Defining Doctrinal PositionChrist's Second Appearing already fulfilled in the movement's own founding 2 Doctrinal Position DetailChrist's Second Appearing is held to have already occurred in the society's own founding, and celibacy is required of every member. 2 Doctrinal Position DetailThe godhead is confessed as both father and mother, which is the ground of the society's paired government of men and women. 1 Practice
Force and Military ServicePacifist. The society refused to bear arms and sought exemption from military service. 1 Liturgical LanguageAn American communal movement worshipping in English, matching the vernacular already carried by other American Protestant-descended movements. Organisation
GovernanceCongregational: each congregation self-governing 1 Its own record states "Communities were governed in parallel by elders and eldresses", each community self-governing. OrdinationIts own record states communities were "governed in parallel by elders and eldresses". In Other Languages (11 names)
- هزازون
- Shaker (Religion)
- Shakers creyentes
- شیکرها
- שייקרים
- シェーカー (キリスト教)
- 셰이커 (기독교)
- Szejkersi
- Шейкеры
- Shaker (mezhep)
- 震教徒
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Theology: God as Father and Mother
Shaker theology rests on a claim most of Christianity has never made in this form: that the divine nature is dual, father and mother together, and that the second appearing of Christ promised in scripture came not as a return of Jesus but as the spirit working through a woman, Ann Lee, who led the small English sect that became the Shakers before bringing it to America in 1774. This belief in a female embodiment of the Christ spirit is the doctrinal foundation the whole distinctive Shaker social order was built on: if the divine includes the feminine as fully as the masculine, then the community's insistence on equal governance by elders and eldresses, men and women sharing spiritual authority at every level, follows as a consequence of theology rather than existing as a separate social experiment layered on top of an otherwise ordinary Christian belief.
Celibacy completed the pattern, since a community that took no wives or husbands and reproduced only by conversion and adoption had no need of the patriarchal household structures the rest of Christian society took for granted. The movement's popular name, Shakers, was originally a mocking nickname referring to the trembling, dancing and shouting that marked its early worship services, a style of ecstatic devotion the community itself embraced and formalized into structured dances performed as an act of spiritual discipline rather than spontaneous emotion alone.
From Thousands to a Single Community
Shaker membership reached several thousand across as many as nineteen communities at its mid-nineteenth century peak, concentrated in New England and extending west into Ohio and Kentucky, communities that were materially self-sufficient, commercially successful, sold seeds and furniture prized for their plain craftsmanship, and were visited by curious outsiders as a working example of a functioning celibate utopian society. Membership required conversion rather than birth, since children were not born into the community, and the movement's later decline followed directly from that structural fact once the surrounding culture's enthusiasm for joining a celibate communal life faded after the Civil War era.
Numbers fell steadily from the later nineteenth century onward as communities closed one after another and consolidated their remaining members, until a single community, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, remains active today, continuing to accept new members under the same theology and governance the movement held from its founding. Shaker material culture, particularly its furniture, built plain and functional on the theological principle that beauty rests in usefulness rather than ornament, continues to be collected, studied and reproduced today by museums and craftspeople well beyond any specifically religious interest in the community itself, an afterlife the movement's own membership numbers alone would not predict.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Shakers directly: "theology itself needs a source on the Shakers directly, not a music encyclopedia article."
This source names Shakers directly: "The Cane Ridge Revival of August 1801, drawing an estimated twenty thousand people to a Bourbon County meeting house, is generally reckoned the high point of the Second Great Awakening and helped..."
This source names Shakers directly: "Maine's Congregationalist founding churches trace to Massachusetts Bay settlement of the coast in the seventeenth century, and French Canadian migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..."
This source names Shakers directly: "New Hampshire's colonial churches were Congregationalist, planted from Massachusetts in the 1620s and 1630s, and the state disestablished its official church relatively late, in 1819."
This source names Shakers directly: "Kirtland, in northeastern Ohio, was the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints from 1831 to 1838, and the Kirtland Temple built there in 1836 was the first temple the Mormon..."
This source names Shakers directly: "In Greek narrative tradition Poseidon is a son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, swallowed at birth and later freed alongside his siblings in the war against their father."
Became a Shaker eldress after encountering the movement in the early 1840s, and in the 1850s founded a small Shaker family in Philadelphia unusual for being led by and largely composed of Black women.
This source names Shakers directly: "Wikipedia's article on the Shakers, community edited."
This source names Shakers directly: "Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers, published by J."
This source names Shakers directly: "the United Society of Believers, the Shakers, tracing their communities across states including Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire and Ohio."
This source names Shakers directly: "The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, by Benjamin Seth Youngs and first published in 1808, is a foundational primary text of the Shaker movement, presenting the community's theology of..."
This source names Shakers directly: "The birth of the Olympians."
Belongs to Tradition
Branch Of
Derived From
Founded By
Led a small band of followers from Manchester to America in 1774 and founded the community that grew into the Shakers.
Held Differently
Chastity, Virtues The Shakers held chastity as mandatory celibacy for every member without exception, so the community could grow only by conversion and by the adoption of children.
Holds Element
Dance was worship and not an accompaniment to it, ordered into set figures and marched by the whole society, and it is what gave the Believers the name their neighbours called them by.
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
Property was held in common, and the produce of Shaker workshops supported the community and was sold to the world outside.
Celibacy was absolute and was the defining discipline of this body: men and women lived in the same community, in separate quarters, and it grew entirely by conversion and by adoption. It is also why almost none of it survives.
Confession of sin to an elder of one's own sex was required before a person could be received into the community.
Performed
The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing placed the dance at the centre of worship rather than at the edge of it.
Related To
Both are nineteenth-century American communal religious movements built around an unconventional doctrine of marriage, one celibate and one non-monogamous; they are frequently discussed together in the historiography of American utopian communities but share no lineage.
Sources
1. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers
2. The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing
Benjamin Seth Youngs, 1808The Shaker doctrine of the Second Appearing, set out by the society itself in 1808
3. Shakers (Wikipedia)
The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements
James R. Lewis (ed.), Oxford University Press, 2004
The Gift to Be Simple: Songs, Dances and Rituals of the American Shakers
Edward Deming Andrews, J. J. Augustin, 1940
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
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