Doug Winiarski

So Shakerism is an 18th century sectarian movement that grows out of the evangelical ferment in Great Britain associated with the rise of the Methodist movement in and around the city of Manchester.

In Manchester in the 1740s and 50s, there emerged a conventicle, a small sort of house church

run by a couple known as the Wardleys.

They gathered together a series of followers and engaged in charismatic and ecstatic forms of worship, in which the Holy Spirit would descend upon the congregation, would animate their bodies, and the community would sing and dance, possessed by the Holy Spirit.

Among their earliest followers was a young mill worker, a woman named Anne Lee, the son of a local blacksmith.

And she experienced a series of visions during the 1770s in which Jesus appeared to her and convinced her that the original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was sexual intercourse.

Only it had been married to a woman named Abraham Standorin, who was also a blacksmith, and she had had several children, all of whom had died either in infancy or as young children.

And that traumatic experience...

her early motherhood combined with her mystical revelatory experiences of seeing Jesus Christ and him explaining to her that the original sin of Adam and Eve was sexual intercourse led her to the idea that only those Christians that practice celibacy would ever enter the kingdom of heaven.

And it is out of her experiences that the Shaker movement was born.

That does square with much of what we know.

And the fact of the matter is that we don't know a ton about Shakerism at its earliest moment.

We know some of the key players, the Wardleys, Anne Lee's brother William, and then a handful of other English early converts to this so-called Shaking Quaker movement that emerges.

And many people think that there's a connection between Shakerism and

and Quakerism, but they're really more of a family relationship between the two.

I think the one point of contact between Quakerism and what would come to be called Shakerism is the notion that Christ is not a person.

Jesus of Nazareth, but rather a spirit, the Christ spirit.

The Shakers, much like the Quakers with their idea of the indwelling spirit, the inner light, believe that Christ is not a person but a spirit that enters into a person's body.

Yes.

Although there's no, again, much like Quakerism, it's more of a family resemblance than some sort of directed genealogical connection.