Doug Winiarski

And so suddenly you get the emergence of

separate congregational churches.

Many of those separate congregational churches will very quickly morph into separate Baptist churches that will want to restrict the sacrament of baptism only to adult believers that have experienced this event they call the new birth.

And it's among those people that Ann Lee will target as her earliest converts.

And of course, in New England, because there's a close connection between church and state,

To form a separate congregational church is illegal in the 1750s, 20 years before Anne Lee shows up.

So what people are doing when they're breaking away from the congregational establishment is breaking away from their neighbors, diluting the tax base, and sort of running in the face of longstanding colonial laws, saying not only do you need to do all those things, but you need to be celibate and pacifist.

Investor sins to me, you can imagine how combustible that might have been.

So there's a couple of reasons why.

The first is because of Anne Lee's personal charisma and the idea of this millennial expectation.

She capitalizes on those radical New Englanders who are already looking for this kind of spirituality.

Everyone's living in this heightened sense of expectation.

So for a certain small set of New Englanders, they're looking for this kind of

small P Pentecostal spirituality, this continuous ongoing revelation, a kind of spirituality.

Even celibacy isn't a big bar to anyone because if you think you're living in the millennium, literally living in the millennium, human reproduction is kind of the least of the things you need to be worried about.

So for those white hot seeker type people, Ann Lee is delivering them exactly what they're looking for.

But after her death in 1784, Shakerism also goes through a period of organization where it takes the form that we know it today.

Ann Lee, as you were just mentioning, Don, was not educated and didn't write anything down and was almost pure charisma.

So early Shaker worship, there are no records for it.

Much of what we know about American Shakerism in the 1770s and 1780s comes from outsiders who witnessed the Shakers at worship.