Doug Winiarski

Of course, American Pentecostalism is a mid to late 19th century phenomenon.

But for those Protestants who believe in continuous and ongoing revelation, who believe that God has more to share with humanity than what's contained in the scriptures, that there are new revelations to be had in the world.

Many of those Protestants cross over into a world where they expect the things they read about in the Bible among the apostolic Christians, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, glossolalia, speaking in tongues, faith healing, and possession by the Spirit, are things that they ought to expect to happen in their world.

So, Shakerism is fundamentally a gift-oriented form of Protestantism, where gifts of the Holy Spirit and new forms, either old forms like speaking in, like, glossolalia, speaking in tongues, or all sorts of new forms of revelation can emerge.

They are, of course, the believers in Christ's second appearing.

They believe that the Christ Spirit, which first manifested itself in Jesus of Nazareth,

had come again in the form of their leader, Anne Lee.

So the Shakers called themselves believers.

And the thing that they believed was that they were living in the end times, when Christ had already returned again to earth in the form of Anne Lee.

And so they were living with these millennial expectations on an everyday basis, in which charismatic gifts of the Spirit could be poured out upon their people at any time, and they did.

So the gender aspect of Shakerism is, I think, one of the things that attracts many scholars to it.

In the late 18th, at the turn of the 19th century, it was very difficult for women to assume any role of leadership in any Protestant denomination.

All the major denominations in North America, where

We haven't talked about this yet, but in 1774, as a result of a series of persecutions that the early Shaker community was facing in and around Manchester, Ann Lee and a small group of followers emigrate to the British North American colonies, and they arrive in Albany, New York in 1774.

And at that time, all of the either state-supported colonial churches, the Congregationalists, the Anglicans, barred women from holding positions of authority in their communities.

And

almost all the other kinds of sectarian groups that had emerged in America, everything from small German perfectionist groups to radical new light splinter groups in New England, like separate Baptists, and then the Methodists who were just emerging.

Even those groups were skittish about allowing women to preach in public, to testify, to witness, to prophesy.

And so along comes this woman who claims to be

what many people at the time in the 1770s and 80s described her as being the elect lady described in the Book of Revelation, the woman clothed with the sun, a prophetic figure, a person who's going to usher in the new millennium.