Doug Winiarski

They've moved long past their sectarian roots with Joseph Smith.

They're now a full-fledged global church.

So I mean, I think they're in a different sort of category of classification.

Shakers are unique in that regard.

For the most part, yes.

Although in the late 19th and 20th century, I think there are changes in Shakerism that are carried down to today.

So Shakers no longer engage in dancing.

To attend a Shaker meeting, it's going to look a little bit more like your Quaker quietism, in which people will sit and wait for the readings of the spirit.

There'll be scripture reading and singing.

So the Shakers have given up on that.

They remain celibate.

But there's a kind of a – I think after the Civil War, many Shaker communities made a lot of concessions to a consumerist American economy.

You can see it in their architecture.

The simpleness and the plainness of their architecture gives way to sort of more Victorian styles.

You can see Shakers driving automobiles and they put organs in their meeting houses.

So they began to sort of go a little more mainstream, look a lot more like a late 19th century American Protestant denomination.

And I think part of that has helped to buoy the church in a time when things were changing so dramatically that the numbers were going down so quickly.

So early on, the Shakers developed something they called the millennial laws.

This was part of the institutionalization of Shakers in the 19th century that governed everything from the kind of paint you could use, the colors you could use, the way the villages would be laid out, what kind of clothing you could wear, how much you could read, all that kind of stuff.

So the Shakers were very clear in terms of governing its members and in terms of issues of style.