Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is the 1700s in Manchester, England, a northern city whose population has doubled, then doubled again in little more than a century, transforming from modest market town into the beating heart of the British industrial world. Here, within the red brick walls of a textile mill, the senses are overwhelmed.
The mechanized motion of power looms, carding engines, spinning frames, all fills the air, clattering, whirring. Fibers are drawn, twisted to thread, and thread becomes cloth, all to the steady percussions of wood and iron and stone. Thumping, spinning, thumping, spinning. an ocean away in the woods of Niskayuna, New York, the rhythm continues.
But here it is the thumping of feet on wooden floors. The spinning is bodies turning, worshippers circling, all caught up in an ecstatic dance of devotion. To trace these rhythms and movements from factory floor to forest clearing, from England to America, is to follow the extraordinary rise of the shaker movement. Hello all, welcome to this episode of American History Hit.
I'm Don Wildman, glad you're listening. In the early life of the American Republic, as the new nation crossed from the 18th into the 19th century, an extraordinary wave of spiritual searching swept the land. It would later be called the Second Great Awakening and echoed the first one in the previous century.
Out of this fervor emerged new sects, expanding Protestant denominations, and a remarkable array of reform movements and utopian experiments, many of them first taking root in the colony then state of New York. Among them was one community whose influence proved unusually powerful and sustained. They were known as the Shakers.
On this episode today, we trace their origins, their astonishing rise, and their long, quiet fading from American life. And we'll do this with historian Doug Winiarski, professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of Richmond, the Tenacious Spiders.
His research explores the extraordinary religious ferment of early America, having authored the award-winning Darkness Falls on the Land of Light, experiencing religious awakenings in 18th century New England, which won the Bancroft Prize. And he also edited Shakers at the Center, manifesting spirits and spectacles in 19th century America. Fascinating. Professor Winiarski, you accomplished man.
Welcome to American History Hit. Thanks for having me. We've all heard of the furniture. Many of us sit upon it. The elegant lines of a shaker table, the chairs, the architecture.
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Chapter 2: What is the origin of the Shaker movement?
But that all grows out of something much larger, a sweeping religious movement that rose in the 18th and 19th centuries, which once built communities across America with membership in the thousands. What exactly was shakerism and who were the first to practice it?
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.
Headline right up front there. I mean, that's what everybody sort of knows about Shakers, but I didn't realize it was so central to the original founders of that idea. Let me back up just a little bit.
The Wardley Society in England, understanding all of this is happening against the backdrop of rising industrialism in England, all of the pressures of urbanization and this new kind of society is being built at the time. Religion enters into that, just as it does later on with American society. Worldly society believes that Christ's spirit could appear again in a new human vessel. Not unusual.
Radical confession of sin. Equality of men and women in spiritual leadership, which is very important to the discussion today. And a coming millennial kingdom of God. Those are the ingredients that I have here on my list. Does that kind of cover it?
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
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Chapter 3: What role did the Second Great Awakening play in Shakerism?
The idea that one could have a transformative single moment in which you could point to that at a particular time or a particular day and say, you were born again, is a radically new idea. And it creates all sorts of new kinds of religious communities among people that claim to have had that experience.
So, well, in New England, the place where Ann Lee will make her first converts, and American Shakerism really is a New England phenomenon. Those original Puritan churches were almost always the only game in town in the 17th century. Everyone in town was required by law to attend meeting and attend their congregational church and pay taxes to that congregational minister.
Along comes George Whitefield in the 1740s and tells people they need to have a new birth experience. Once they do, they might want to turn around and say, why am I worshiping with these people who have not had a new birth experience? Why am I going to meeting with a minister who can't testify to having had that experience?
Perhaps I belong over here with these people, sometimes even in a different town. 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.
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Chapter 4: Who were the key figures in early Shakerism?
And these communities that started, at what point were they established that people would know to go there to see these kinds of spectacles?
So that begins around 1790, give or take, depending upon the year, depending on the community. But what it takes is for all of those Shaker converts to come together and sign a written covenant. Forming a joint interest in which most of these are families, the original Shaker converts tend to be married husbands and wives, often with several children in tow, who convert to Shakerism.
And when they do so, they need to surrender their property to the community and sign the covenant and agree to live celibate lives as brothers and sisters and have their children raised communally by the village.
So that takes place around 1790 or so, and that creates the financial base for shaker communities, for example, at New Lebanon or Enfield, Connecticut or Harvard, Massachusetts, to purchase enough land to create large and prosperous communal villages. Mm-hmm. Shaker Village, in its ultimate form, will usually comprise something like between 3,000 and 5,000 acres of really good farmland.
It'll be divided between several different Shaker families, depending upon the size of the community. Each family, as we were saying before, maybe about 100 to sometimes 200 people. Those families are ranked in terms of their religious experience. So there'll be a novitiate order, a gathering order for new converts to kind of learn Shaker ways.
And then as your life as a Shaker continues, you might move into... the second family or a directional family, the East family or the West family on a piece of the property. And eventually by the time you reach your mature life as a shaker, you'll be living at the center of the village and what's often called the first family or the church family or the center family.
And so that's how kind of Shakers were organized. And each of these families will have its own farmland. They'll have their own herds of livestock and horses and sheep. They'll have their own mill complexes. Shaker villages in the 19th century, especially before the American Civil War, are very, very prosperous places.
They have some of the highest standards of living of anywhere in the new United States. Lots of food, lots of technology. Shakers are not like the Amish. They are very pro-technology. And there's a lot of stories about shakers and their ingenuity that supposedly developed the clothespin and the circular saw.
But for farm families in early 19th century America, you sort of calculated your weight on the size of the barn on your farm. And you can imagine for a society of sometimes 100 to 500 people, shaker grapes.
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Chapter 5: How did Anne Lee influence the Shaker beliefs?
So it's a mix of both, right? So the Shakers, as we were saying before, is the first American sectarian group, really, that's formed on the principle of continuous and ongoing revelation. So it's not that the Bible doesn't count. It's that the Bible is incomplete. The Shakers recognized that the Bible, they did not believe the Bible was infallible.
They recognized that the writers of the Bible, the gospel writers, other early Christian writers, were fallible. They were human. There are errors in translation. So they understood the Bible as being important. But they saw their movement as going beyond the Bible and in several different ways.
One, which we've talked about with the idea of the Christ spirit, that Christ could come again, this time in female form. And the Shakers will, in the 19th century, their theology will emerge to suggest that Anne Lee completes the work of salvation that's begun with Jesus of Nazareth. So Jesus begins the process of teaching people the road to salvation.
Anne Lee, with her doctrine of celibacy, completes that process.
Mm-hmm.
They also believe that God is dual as well, so that God has both a male aspect and the female aspect. They call that female aspect Holy Mother Wisdom. So the Shakers recognize that there is more to be learned about the Christian tradition than what's contained in the Bible, and that explains the quirks of their theology.
It is so fascinating to me that American history is really created by this kind of pluralistic idea of things, you know, these challenges of norms all over the place at this period of time, especially. And yet we so nostalgically look back to when things were simple and people went to church. No, they went to church and they challenged the very nature of church. All over the place.
I'm not just talking about the Shakers, the Quakers, you name it. They were all over the place. The Mormons, everything at this time, this certainly burned over area of New York, which we need to talk about, was an extraordinary revolution in not only religious practice, but also society itself. And that's really the fertile ground of American history when you get right down to it.
At the time, of course, we're coming out of the revolution. And so this whole throwing off of tyranny and suddenly the freedom of expressing ourselves as a nation feeds into this religious ferment.
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