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Shaker Spirituality and Theology in the Context of the Second Great Awakening



Heaven on Earth: Shakers, Religious Revival, and Social Reform in America 

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, better known as Shakers, arrived in America in 1774. Under the able leadership of the charismatic Mother Ann Lee (1736-1784), the Shakers established their first separatist Christian communal society outside of Albany, New York. The settlement was intended as a refuge from the extremes of wealth and poverty that these immigrants had known in Manchester, England, the heartland of the Industrial Revolution.



In 1780 New York authorities arrested Mother Lee and several of her followers for “pacifist agitation.” The experience jolted the Shakers out of seclusion. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, Shaker preachers (men and women) took to the road to share the radical tenets of their faith including celibacy, gender equality, and communitarianism. They attracted converts in quick succession and founded new communities at New Lebanon, New York (1787) and Hancock, Massachusetts (1790).



American Shakerism was vital, growing and expansive by the 1830s when approximately six thousand Shakers lived in nineteen communities that stretched from Kentucky to Maine. Sweeping changes to the American economy and society facilitated the growth of the movement. Commercialization, industrialization, urbanization, and migration brought new economic opportunities but also challenged how antebellum Americans understood themselves and their world. Convinced that the nation had lost its moral compass, some sought refuge in separatist utopian communities.

Other Americans found a new direction in the Second Great Awakening and the doctrine of Perfectionism espoused by Charles Grandison Finney. Perfectionism directed Christians to conquer sin – the sins of individuals, of communities, and of the nation. The preponderance of reform movements for temperance, abolition and Sabbatarianism, among other causes, prompted Alexis de Tocqueville to comment that reform, philanthropy, and the perfection of society had become a “kind of profession” in antebellum America.



American Shakerism thrived in this context of economic and social tumult. Shakers strived to create a distinct culture and to reform society. They lived by and advocated for the values commonly associated with the religious and social reformers of the antebellum era: pacifism, racial and gender equality, communitarianism, and spiritualism.



Shaker theology regards God as fully male and female and Shaker women assumed leadership roles within the movement. As religious leaders Shaker women challenged the prevailing standards of femininity in antebellum America as well as the notion of separate spheres for men and women. Similarly, the Shaker model of family questioned the conflation of womanhood with motherhood. Shaker children were raised collectively. Children who entered the community with their biological parents were treated no differently than children who were “adopted” by the community from orphanages and charitable organizations. 

Jenn Dorsey

Shaker films, Videos, and Other References

Sister Mildred Barker (1897-1990) demonstrates the song "With A New Tongue" which is first mentioned in a Sr. Mildred was the recipient of numerous awards, most notably in 1983 a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for outstanding service to Shaker traditional music. 

This piece is from a 1974 production "The Shakers" by Tom Davenport and Frank DeCola. The film was made with assistance from Shaker scholar, Daniel Patterson.

  A short film shot on super-8 in Prince Edward Island featuring choreography and dance by Rebecca Mendoza and poetry by Damian Rogers from her book Paper Radio (ECW Press). Directed by Rebecca Mendoza and Chris Murphy.

Contemporary Dance and Shakers

What fascinates people about the Shakers—members of religious communities that settled in New England in the late 18^th century, proselytized, expanded, and began to wither a hundred or so years later?  We marvel at the austerely beautiful furniture they made, their ingenuity, and the fact that they considered drawing, singing, and dancing gifts from God that were to be practiced freely and diligently—all that and more, but what seems to boggle many contemporary minds is that Shakers were celibate.

Doris Humphrey barely hinted at underlying sexual tensions in her ecstatic 1931 dance The Shakers. The Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen downplayed them in his glorious Borrowed Light (2004). Watching Angel Reapers, which plays at the Joyce Theater through December 11, you get the impression that for its greatly gifted creators, director-choreographer Martha Clarke and playwright Alfred Uhry, Shaker dancing—whether wild or formally patterned—was a sublimation for the erotic physical exertions that the community members denied themselves.

That underlying tug of desire animates some of the drama in Angel Reapers, but it also emerges in much of the dancing that fills this beautifully imagined and constructed theater piece. Under the guidance of music director Arthur Solari, the eleven splendid performers not only sing Shaker hymns a cappella, they stamp out rhythms that build in complexity and contrapuntal textures, whether the actor-dancers are marching over the resonant plank flooring or sitting on straight-backed chairs. With every footfall, you feel these people uniting to assert their control over their bodies and nail illicit urges into the floor. When one man (Patrick Corbin) turns comforting a “brother” into something more sexual, and the two wrestle furiously, several of the “sisters” seated at the back accompany their exertions with a slow, muffled pounding of feet on wood.

Mary Ann Lee, the founder of Shakerism (officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing), is a character in Angel Reapers—as beset by struggle (although not by carnal urges) as any of her followers. Played by Birgit Huppuch, Mother Ann doesn’t come across as the fierce and charismatic leader she’s reputed to have been; there’s a touching moment when she sings alone in a high, clear voice, seeming frailer than the others who whirl about her in two concentric circles. This moment may be her attempt to calm and unite her “children” after a dance in which they stomp and gallop—bent over, their arms flung out behind them, groaning under their breaths—while Christopher Akerlind’s lighting throws their hulking shadows on the back wall.

Jumping Away from Sin. Photo: ©Rob Strong

Whether frenzied or obdurately controlled, the dance rituals practiced by these Shaker avatars are augmented by Akerlind’s shafts-in-darkness effects and Donna Zakowska’s more-or-less authentic costumes. The men’s long, dark coats flap out behind them when they spring into the air; they look like crows attempting to take off. The women’s long skirts bell out as they spin; tranced worshippers fall in a tangle of petticoats.

The performers provide information by reciting the community’s rules or enumerating the “gifts” they receive from God each day (repairing the henhouse counts). Individually, they report their weaknesses and tell their stories. The program gives them names and identities. Sister Agnes Renard from France (Sophie Bortolussi) lost her three-year-old daughter in the crossing to America. Brother William Lee (Peter Musante) bears the burden of being both Mother Ann’s “child” and her blood brother. Sister Susannah Farrington (Lindsay Dietz Marchant) was an abused wife, and Asli Bulbul as Sister Hannah Cogswell (an actual early Shaker and, according to the program, a former convict) could be re-enacting Cogswell’s own past or Sister Susannah’s when she locks her legs around the other woman’s recumbent form and wrenches her around in circles. Whitney V. Hunter plays an escaped slave, Brother Moses, and his wild-legged clogging is one of the evening’s most joyful moments.

Clarke has ingenious ways of making the trances in which believers whirl and faint and crawl like animals morph into the orderly dances typical of later Shaker religious services. But spiritual revelations are few for these believers, and temptations lurk. Andrew Robinson and Gabrielle Malone play a husband and wife separated by their entry into the community. When they meet as if accidentally and he lifts her and whirls her higher and higher, she slaps his face. Isadora Wolfe and Luke Murphy portray orphans adopted into the society; he shows his growing uneasiness and physical strain early on. He takes down her hair, she unbuttons her bodice and straddles him bare-breasted. They leave the community—he speaking words by the historical Valentine Rathbun accusing the Shakers of various abominations.

Asli Bulbul Receiving Heaven's Gift. Photo: ©Rob Strong

I question a couple of Clarke’s and Uhry’s images. One is that of Mother Ann removing her shoes and stockings so that her brother can bathe her feet—an act, I imagine, to stress the image she may have had of herself as Christ-like. Too, it seemed gratuitous near the end ofAngel Reapers to have four of the men back in, wearing only their shoes and socks, and exit after a few moments of toil, still stamping vigorously. The idea that Shakers ever danced naked has been argued about by scholars. Was it just a trumped-up charge in the copious amounts of anti-Shaker rant (which seems likely), or did the rumor have a basis?

The more you read about the Shakers, the more you feel their complexity. Consider their innocent ritual when, handed fine invisible raiment, they marched up to dance on a mountaintop, refreshed with imaginary nectar in unseen cups, or the childlike quality of some of their hymns (“Oh my pretty mother’s home/ Sweeter than the honey in the comb”).  Compare these to their efficient mercantile dealings with villages outside their precincts and the superbly scientific engineering of, say, the icehouse at Hancock Shaker Village.  Contrast the sweet primitivism of their drawings with the elegant simplicity of their furniture.

Angel Reapers does convey the playfulness that occasionally must have offset both decorous behavior and religious hysteria. In the opening scene, one woman’s unsuccessfully repressed giggle gradually incites general hilarity. Later, four women get hold of the corners of a sheet and turn it into a plaything; like the dancers in Doris Humphrey’s Soaring, they make it balloon up and take turns running beneath it before it falls. Who said laundry day was boring?  But Clarke and Uhry couldn’t tell you everything about the Shakers in a piece a little over an hour long, and they decided early on against emphasizing Mother Ann’s own story. Instead, they’ve created a powerful and rhythmically resonant dance-drama out of a struggle between flesh and spirit and the documented rituals that both embodied and quelled that conflict.

Jump for Mother Ann's Love, Dec. 2, 2011, by Deborah Jowitt

The evolution of the Shaker dance

At the steaming height of most summers my parents dragged me away from the air conditioning, into the car and down a country road ten miles to Shakertown. We entered a large tent set in a field where we sat for three hours on thin wooden bleachers, the music of crickets soon overwhelmed by the evening’s theatre. I grabbed a paper fan from the grass as the re-enactment of the story of Mother Ann, a religious visionary from 18^th century England, unfolded in fits of song, drama, and dance.

Avant-garde, revolutionary, even touted as a miracle worker, Mother Ann, an illiterate factory worker from Manchester formed the Shaking Quakers, better known as The Shakers. Their utopian, strictly celibate, and self-sufficient communities grew from a small group that immigrated to America in 1774 into flourishing communities, the southernmost of which was formed where I sat swatting mosquitoes in the humid night air. At their height in 1840 more than six thousand believers lived in nineteen communal villages from New England to Ohio and Kentucky, and there were twenty thousand members over a century.

The most eccentric and defining aspect of the Shakers was their form of dance, the earliest of which was spontaneous. They whirled themselves around, trembling and shaking ecstatically until they fell to the floor in a trance.

In the early 1800s choreography entered the worship service. An anonymous visitor described the preparation:

"At half past seven p.m. on the dancing days, all the members retired to their separate rooms, where they sat in solemn silence, just gazing at the stove, until the silver tones of the small tea-bell gave the signal for them to assemble in the large hall.”

They believed the dance kindled the fire of truth and the shaking warded off evil. As described in an article in The Telescope in 1909, the choreography became ritualistic and stylized.

“A number of singers, probably a dozen or so, both sexes, would take their position in the middle of the room, half of them facing the other half, and begin a kind of song or chant. 
While doing so they would step back and forth in a fashion resembling a double shuffle. If the spirit seemed to move the watchers, they would rise and, two abreast, would begin marching round the singers in the center. Soon the march would turn into a dancing step, the faces would be uplifted, and the hands outstretched, palms upward, with a gesticulation as if the worshipers were grasping for blessing falling down from heaven. This would be continued indefinitely, sometimes the marchers and dancers falling from sheer exhaustion."

All of their hymns, songs and music were composed and written by their members, generally, under ‘divine inspiration’. They developed their own form of music notation known as the "letteral system" using letters of the alphabet rather than conventional notes.

Music Lessons

In 1944 one of those tunes was resurrected and hit the world stage. Aaron Copland said he was thinking neither of Appalachia nor Spring when composing his now iconic ballet. Martha Graham renamed Ballet for Martha by using a line from a Hart Crane poem. Spring represents a body of water, not the season.

O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;

Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends

And northward reaches in that violet wedge

Of Adirondacks

Copland, who was known for using folk music in his ballets, steered away from this habit in Appalachian Spring with the exception, ironically, of one obscure Shaker tune – “Simple Gifts” – which he used as the basis of the finale and which then went on to become the most famous melody of the ballet. "Simple Gifts" was composed by Elder Joseph Brackett and originated in the Shaker community at Alfred, Maine in 1848. It was not a hymn, or song of worship; it was written specifically as a Shaker dance song.

A century after the queer Shaker dances were formalized and the lyrics‘Tis a gift to be simple were penned, the collaboration between Copland and Graham was born and lauded as groundbreaking. One wonders if she studied their movements for the similarity is striking.

Shaker Dance Demonstration

By 1911 that last of the original Shakers were dying. To attend a funeral of a Shaker one would think it was anything but. The funeral was an important religious service in their community and they looked upon death as a joyful occasion. Funerals were attended happily and with smiles. The women wore white along with their strange, tight-fitting bonnets with a frill at the back.

Original blog : Here

Shakers : A Timeline

The Shakers Timeline		Contemporary Events
1736:
On February 29 Ann Lee is born in Manchester, England.		Afghan Nadir Kuli becomes ruler of the Persian Empire; First successful appendectomy performed by Claudius Amyand, in France; Russia and Austria begin their war with Turkey.
1758:
Ann Lee joins the sect known as the Shaking Quakers, so named because they shook when performing a religious dance. In her youth, Lee works in a textile mill.		The first blast furnace is put to use in England for production of iron; the sextant improves navigational accuracy.
1762:
Lee marries. Later, all four of her children die.		Catherine the Great becomes czarina of Russia; Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Social Contract"; Mozart tours Europe as a six-year-old prodigy.
1770:
Lee is imprisoned by the English government during a period of persecution of religious minorities. While in jail Lee has a series of religious visions.		Five colonists are killed in the Boston Massacre; the Townshend Acts are repealed but a tax on tea is maintained; Australia 'discovered' by James Cook when he arrives in New South Wales.
1771:
Lee founds a new religious sect named the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, later known simply as the Shakers. "Mother Ann" announces that God's nature is dual, both male and female, and that to follow Christ's path believers must practice celibacy.		Russia conquers the Crimea, increasing its power in Europe; Spain cedes the Falkland Islands to Britain; Joseph Priestly discovers that plants convert carbon dioxide into oxygen.
1774:
Unwelcome in England, Lee immigrates to America with her husband and a handful of followers. She settles in Watervliet, near Albany, New York.		First Continental Congress drafts "Declaration of Rights and Grievances"; British Parliament passes "intolerable acts" to suppress rebellious activities in Boston; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther.
1780:
During the Revolutionary War Lee refuses to sign an oath of allegiance. This and her pacifistic views lead to her imprisonment for treason.		Britain goes to war with the Dutch in the East Indies; Peruvian Indians rebel against Spanish rule; serfdom is abolished in Hungary and Bohemia.
1784:
Lee dies on September 8 in Watervliet, New York. The church is subsequently led by Elder Joseph Meacham and Eldress Lucy Wright. Under their guidance the Shakers establish the communal patterns of life followed by Shaker communities.		Crimea annexed by Russia; Jacques David paints "Oath of Horati"; Treaty of Paris ratified, formally ending the American Revolutionary War.
1785:
The first Shaker building is built in Harvard, Massachusetts.		Russians settle Aleutian Islands; the power loom mechanizes weaving; the dollar becomes the official currency of America.
1787:
The first Shaker community is founded in New Lebanon, New York. The movement begins to travel westward. Their communities win renown for their industry, craftsmanship and inventiveness. All are based on communally-owned property.		The Constitution of the United States signed; Mozart, "Don Giovanni"; the Northwest Ordinance provides for the Northwest Territory’s ultimate statehood as free states.
1805:
Ministry at New Lebanon sends three missionaries to Kentucky. They travel on foot covering over 1,000 miles in two to three months. They are aided by the genera, the spread of religious revivalism on the American frontier.		Lord Nelson defeats the French and Spanish fleets in the Battle of Trafalgar; Napoleon victorious over Austrian and Russian forces at the Battle of Austerlitz; Egypt is granted independence from the Ottomans.
1811:
In Pleasantville, Kentucky the Shakers build their first flawless building in a new medium – limestone.		Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility; Napoleonic Wars; "Luddites" riot in Britain protesting mechanization and textile manufacturers; Venezuela breaks from Spanish rule.
1840's:
The Shakers reach their zenith with about 6,000 members living in 19 communal villages. Many other visionary and utopian communities begin to flourish during this period of American history as well such as the Oneida Perfectionists, and the Amana Society		Samuel F. B. Morse patents telegraph; potato famine in Ireland; Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven and Other Poems; James Prescot Joule formulates the first law of thermodynamics.
1863:
The Draft Law of 1863 is enacted during the Civil War. Because they are pacifists, the Shakers refuse to fight. An elder travels to Washington to plead with Lincoln. Lincoln grants the Shakers an exemption from service. The Shakers are among the first in America to be granted the status of conscientious objectors.		International Community of the Red Cross founded in Geneva; Abe Lincoln delivers Gettysburg Address; Leo Tolstoy begins writingWar and Peace.
1870's:
The church begins a campaign to find new converts as their membership diminishes. Industrialization brings new methods of production with which the Shakers cannot compete. The economic boom in the North proves enticing to many male members, who leave their communities.		Brooklyn Bridge construction begins; Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone; Tchaikovsky, "Swan Lake."
1890's:
Many Shaker communities begin to fold, one by one.		First modern Olympic games held in Athens, Greece; Spanish American War; Pierre and Marie Curie discover radium and polonium.
1989:
At the time the Ken Burns film The Shakers is made, fewer than 12 Shakers remain in two 200-year-old villages.
2002:
Authentic Shaker furniture is among the most highly prized of American antiques. Many former Shaker communities remain open as museums, such as those in Hancock, Massachusetts and New Lebanon, New York. Shaker architecture, craftsmanship and ingenuity, continue to provide inspiration for designers into the 21st century.

Shakers : A brief History

It is as impossible to fully set forth the power and effects of this new religion as to trace the airy road of the meteor.
-- Valentine Rathbun, 1781

Zaddock Wright lived in Canterbury, New Hampshire, at the start of the Revolutionary War. Unlike his neighbors, he was a royalist and refused to take up arms against the king. According to an early chronicle he fled to Canada “to avoid the dangers to which his political principles exposed him” but was arrested when he returned for his family and thrown into prison in Albany.

Before his incarceration Zaddock Wright had been deeply affected by the religious revival that, like the Revolution, was sweeping across New England. He was “under great exercise of mind concerning the work of God,” and was also “in great tribulation” over his family, his estate, and the Revolution.

At the same time, several cells away, a woman named Ann Lee was being held, accused of treason against the new government. Zaddock knew of her; she was a prophet, the English leader of a tiny radical sect of Christians called the Shakers. Her small group had recently “opened the testimony” on the frontier near Albany and ignited a wildfire of disruption and religious fervor.

Zaddock spoke with Mother Ann, as her followers called her, through the grates of his cell, and informed her of his “embarrassments.” “You will be delivered,” she told him. “Gold will deliver you.” Although this seemed unlikely to Zaddock, the declaration “made a forcible impression upon his feelings.” They spoke at length about the Revolution. Ann Lee taught him to “view the subject from a different light than what he had done, and convinced him that it was the providential work of God to open the way for the Gospel.” Zaddock agreed that it would be impossible for England to win. “The hand of God was in the Revolution,” he wrote, “and America must be separated from the English government and become a land of liberty for the gospel’s sake.”

Within a year, Zaddock was freed from the prison and returned to his family, as Ann Lee predicted. He joined the Shakers and “continued faithfully to the end of his days.”

One afternoon I was at a neighbor’s house when two young women attired in Shaker costumes appeared at the rear door. They said the Shakers always lived according to their profession, were honest and upright, but that they did not wish to live a celibate life any longer. A strange sensation seemed to creep over me, and something like a voice said, 
“Why listen to them? Go to the Shakers. See for yourself who and what they are.”
-- Eldress Antoinette Doolittle, 1824

They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, but because of their ecstatic dancing the world called them the Shakers.

The Shakers were celibate, they did not marry or bear children, yet theirs is the most enduring religious experiment in American history. Seventy-five years before the emancipation of the slaves and one hundred fifty years before women began voting in America, the Shakers were practicing social, sexual, economic, and spiritual equality for all members.

The Shakers were ordinary people who chose to give up their families, property, and worldly ties in order “to know, by daily experience, the peaceable nature of Christ’s kingdom.” In return, they were welcomed into “holy families” where men and women lived as brother and sister, where all property was held in common, and where each participated in the rigorous daily task of transforming the earth into heaven.

Shakerism was founded by an illiterate English factory worker named Ann Lee. Guided by divine visions and signs, she and eight pilgrims came to America in 1774 to spread her gospel in the New World.

At their height in 1840 more than six thousand believers lived in nineteen communal villages from New England to Ohio and Kentucky. Tales of their peaceful and prosperous lives impressed the world’s utopians. But Shaker aspirations were divine, not social or material. As millennialists, they were unified in the belief that Christ had come again, first in the person of Mother Ann and subsequently “in all in whom the Christ consciousness awakens.” It was therefore the duty of each believer to live purely in “the kingdom come” and to strive for perfection in everything he or she did.

Work was the currency of their service. If the world was to be redeemed and restored to God, the Shakers would accomplish it by the dedicated labor of their hands. They believed that God dwelt in the details of their work and in the quality of their craftsmanship. All their devotion, which no longer went to family or home, was put into what they made. Their villages were meticulously constructed and maintained, their workshops were world renowned for reliable goods, and their gardens provided amply for their own needs, with plenty to spare for the poor.

Shakerism is a system which has a distinct genius, a strong organization, a perfect life of its own, through which it would appear to be helping to shape and guide, in no small measure, the spiritual career of the United States.
-- Hepworth Dixon, 1867

For more than two hundred years Shakerism ran alongside American history, sometimes heralding things to come, usually reflecting trends, events, and ideals from a slightly different angle. The Shakers arrived in America on the eve of the Revolution, having left England in pursuit of freedom. They were gathered into order as a practicing religion in 1787, just as the new United States found its form with the drafting of the Constitution. That same year Shaker women were officially given equal rights, and in 1817 the Shakers’ southern societies freed the slaves belonging to members and began buying black believers out of slavery. The Shakers were suddenly appreciated as successful communitarians when Americans became interested in communities, as successful utopians when America hosted a hundred utopian experiments, as spiritualists when American parlors filled with mediums and with voices from other worlds. They invented hundreds of laborsaving devices from the clothespin to the circular saw, which they shared without patents (some of these machines launched brilliant industrial careers for the men who borrowed them), nor were they frightened of useful inventions. The New Hampshire Shakers owned one of the first cars in the state and rigged up electricity in the own village while the state capital building was still burning gas. They were admired and derided, imitated for their successes and ridiculed for their eccentricities. And they are enduringly appreciated for their contribution to American crafts and architecture.

Today, just a few Shakers still live in a single village in Maine. To all appearances these are the last Shakers. But the living Shakers faithfully assert that their religion will never die. Mother Ann predicted that Shakerism would dwindle to as few members as a child could count on one hand, and then overcome all nations. “This is God’s work,” says Sister Mildred Barker, “and what could bring that to an end? Nothing that we humans, that mortals do.”

American-Stories - SHAKERS, Ken Burns