Rise and Fall of the Shakers

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with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/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, worrying.

Fibers are drawn, twisted to thread, and thread becomes cloth. All to the steady precautions of wood and iron and stone. Thumping, spinning, thumping, spinning.

“An ocean away in the woods of Niskeyun in New York. The rhythm continues. But here,”

it is the thumping of feet on wooden floors. The spinning is bodies turning, worshipers, 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,

I'm Don Wilde and 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 Winniarsky, 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 bank Roth prize, and he also edited shakers at the center, manifesting spirits and spectacles in 19th century America. Fascinating. Professor Winniarsky, you accomplished man, welcome to American history it. 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, 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 17th, 40s and 50s, they're emerged a conventacle, a small sort of house church, run by a couple, known as The Wardlies. 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. Mother 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 she disappeared to her and convinced her that the original sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden

was sexual intercourse. Only had had been married to a woman named Abraham standarin, who was also blacksmith, and she had had several children, all of whom had died, either an infancy, or as young children. And that traumatic experience, her early motherhood, combined with her mystical revelatory experiences of seeing Jesus Christ, and him explained to her

those Christians that practice celibacy would ever enter the kingdom of heaven.

Out of her experiences, that the shaker movement was born.

“The 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 wardly 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.

Wardly 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 wordlies, and les 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 shakers and and quakerism. But there's really more

“of a only of sort of family relationship between the two. I think the one point of contact between”

quakerism, and we'll become to be called shakerism, is a notion that Christ is not a person, Jesus of Nazareth, but rather a spirit, the Christ spirit, or shakers, much like the quakers with their idea of the indwelling spirit, the inner light, believe that Christ is a, is not a person but a spirit that enters into a person's body. For centuries before, this has been discussed. It's the monophysites and the duo. This whole conversation and really controversy about whether

Christ actually was brought to the earth as an entity, or he's a man who becomes a God. It's this whole real thing, and boy did it matter a lot more to people than that it does now, that whole conversation. As far as the ecstatic dancing, which will become such a big story of this, am I correct to relate it to Pentecostal behavior that we see, the kind of worshiping that that is done, mostly in the American South? Yes, although there's no, again, much like Quakerism,

it's more of a family resemblance than some sort of directed genealogical connection. 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 added 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 Dips of the Holy Spirit, Glossolalius speaking in tongues, faith healing, and possession by the Spirit are things that they ought to expect to happen in their world. Yeah. So Shaikurism is fundamentally a gift-oriented former Protestantism, where gifts of the Holy Spirit and new forms, either old forms like speaking in like Glossolalius speaking in tongues, or all sorts of new forms of revelation can emerge.

They are, of course, the believers in Christ's second appearance. They believe that the Christ's

spirit, which first manifested itself in Jesus of Nazareth, had come again in the form of their leader Anne Lee. So what the Shaikurism, the Shaikurism 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 in 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. One of the big themes of this conversation is how this early form of Shaikurism runs so counter to how we think of it today. You know, we think of it as so stripped down and simple and quiet, and just as the Quakers were, you know, or are versus how they were perceived in their earlier days. That shift is such an interesting pivot for this group.

The amazing thing to me is that we're here in the early 19th century, even the 18th century,

and we're talking about a female Christ that's quite revolutionary. So the gender aspect of Shaikurism

“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 Shaikur community

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, borrowed 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 skiddish about allowing women to preach in public to testify to witness to prophesied. 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 a son, a prophetic figure, a person who's going to usher in the New Millennium, the idea that of that of a woman speaking in public, often in mixed congregations of men and women, often times offering pretty stern commentary to men,

“which is simply not considered appropriate or even legal in many parts of British North America.”

And so, as a result, and lead in her time in North America experiences a lot of mob violence and persecution. The shakers arrive in Albany, and the American Revolution begins just a couple of years later. Early on during their time in Albany, the shakers are in prison for their pacifist beliefs, shakers are also pacifists. But there's a sense that the shakers are not American, they're not supporting the Patriot cause. So, Anli was jailed in Bikipsi, New York for a period of months.

So, we're, so was her brother William and other members of the community. In the 1780s, Anli launched a series of missionary tours in New England, where she began working among some of the most radical evangelical new-like congregations in New England and gathering and converting some of the most radical Protestants in New England to her new peculiar cell of it faith. And everywhere she went, she experienced mob violence of people thought that she was bewitching people. They

searched her for the witch's mark. She was dragged out of houses. She was beaten. Other members of the English shaker communities were whipped, savagely beaten. So, the idea of a female religious leader draws a lot of attention in all of it very violent and very nice. She's in prison for 30 days or so for disrupting a service. And this is where she has that premonition about celibacy of my correct? So, she was imprisoned in both Manchester and when she gets the British

North American colonies. So, she spends several stints both in jail and in essentially what is the moderate equivalent of a lunatic asylum in Manpeter for. While she's a member of the wordly circle for her radical prophecies and visionary experiences and then her really combative position with regards to more mainstream English churches. The shakers were witnessing for their faith and they were causing a lot of problems in England. Same thing in North America when Anlie arrives in

New England and they open the Gospels as they described it in 1781. She goes on on a long two-year missionary circuit throughout New England. And there, she's cultivating the most radical evangelical

new lights of the first grade awakening and their children and grandchildren. So, the benefit that

Anlie visits are places where evangelical descent in New England had been strongest. And it's among those people sort of more charismatic, more interesting and gives to the Holy Spirit. It continues to ongoing revelation type people that had come out of the the grade awakening revival of the 74ers are most open to her message. But those same communities are communities where in New England, the congregational churches have broken apart as a result of the grade awakening. So, there's kind

of these long-standing scars from the grade awakening that Anlie opens up again and that helps to explain some of the violence she experienced during her time. Why is Anlie recall the great

waking first and second? Were people aware of what was happening in terms of how much activity

theologically was going on in those days? Were they grafting this era or was this something

“that was entitled later? I think what we're really talking about here is the emergence of a new”

way of being religious, the way that we today talk about born again Christians, evangelicalism. This is the moment, at least in New England. And it's a transatlantic phenomenon, the Protestant evangelical awakening of which the so-called first grade awakening in New England is just one small piece. But what early evangelicalism is about is about creating distance between your new religious experience being born again, taking Jesus as your personal savior, what George would feel the

England Puritans had experienced religion previously. 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 first converts. And American shakers and really is a New England

phenomenon. Those original Puritans 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. The long comes George would feel 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 a haven't 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 if there's a close connection between church and state to form a separate congregational church is illegal in the 1750s, 20 years before Ann 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.

“Yeah. Saying, not only do you need to do all those things, but you need to be”

celibate and pacifists and bestiert sins to me, you can imagine how combustible that might have been. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. And to do this in the Puritan Society of New England is extraordinary, a real threat to everything that they hold dear and true, but also it makes sense too because, you know, we're talking about the birth of individualism in this country, in this sense that I'm going to break away from

the Orthodox group and find my own way, which so much informs the American experience. Very few people walking around day think of this as having its roots in religion, but indeed it does. That's what the seven late 17 into the 1800s. That second grade awakening is really about. And that even, you know, moves into mercantilism, the making of money. It's a huge fundamental fact of American history. It's just extraordinary that all this is brought on by a woman at that

time because it would be that much harder for a woman to, to have stood up and said these things.

Never mind a woman from a working class background, you know, who doesn't have a formal education,

yet within decades, a few decades, thousands of people will be following this spiritual tradition, isn't it? It's amazingly persuasive for so many. Why so? What do you think? So there's a couple of reasons why. The first is because of Anlie's personal personal and the idea of this millennial expectation, she capitalizes on 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 peep and to costal spirituality. This continuous ongoing revelation on 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 that though for those white hot, secret type people,”

Anlie is delivering them exactly what they're looking for. But after her death in 1784, Shaikurism also goes through a period of organization where it takes the form that we know it today. Anlie, as you were just mentioning, Dawn was not educated and didn't write anything down and was almost pure charisma. So early Shaikur worship, there are no records for it, much of what we know about American Shaikurism in the 1770s and 1780s comes from outsiders who witnessed

the Shaikurs at worship. It's not until Anlie dies in 1784 and then a group of successors take over

a man named Joseph Leachum who's one of her first American converts emerges as a leader of the

Shaikur movement around 1790 and it's at that point that Shaikurism rose into what the tradition would call gospel order in which they call that charisma of Anlie and they give it institutional form.

are gathered together in particular places that will become the nucleus of the first Shaikur

“Villages. So that's Water of Leat, New York, New Lebanon and Hancock in Western Massachusetts,”

Harvard in Central Massachusetts and then several communities in Connecticut and New Hampshire and Maine. Those become the beginnings of the first Shaikur communities and part of gospel order means organizing Shaikur converts into what they would call families. A Shaikur family is a group of say 25 to 50 or 75 men and women. Many of whom have been previously married who join Shaikur communities and agree to live celibate lives as brothers and sisters so they will all work together.

They'll own their own farm property and they'll live together in a communal dormitory. And then additional things Shaikurs will begin to first begin to tell their histories right down their theology. They'll begin to regularize their worship practices by creating sort of clear forms of what the Shaikurs would call laboring or what we would today call dancing in which lines of Shaikurs would line up in their meeting houses, brothers and sisters opposite

one another and move in carefully choreograph motions to enact their sense of shaking all sin and they'll begin to write down and produce their own music. You can see in all of these things the Shaikurs are beginning to organize and institutional arms. I think we just bury the headline

Shaiking off your sin. That's basically what that name comes from. I suppose the Quakers were

quaking off their sin in a sense. That's similar. You know, I was born into Quakers and I say many times in this show and still practice and so much of this early phase of Shaikurism parallels that of Quakerism. They split of course. I mean, they're far apart. Come into the 19th century as Quakers decide to join the world. I mean, that's basically what happens with

“Quakerism, whereas Shaikurs and won't, and that's what's so key. I want to circle back”

to a few details. The practice of Shaikurism, we've talked about the dancing now, but was it basically a sermon, a minister of some sort, sermonizing, and a congregation listening? So Shaikur worship as it takes form under Joseph Meachum in the years after Anne Lee passes away,

takes place in very uniquely shaped buildings. Shaikur meeting houses that look a lot different than

other meeting houses at the time. Unlike, I say, a congregational meeting house in New England, where the sermon, the minister's sermon, is the set piece and sometimes the Lord suffered and sometimes baptism. But people will gather together in cues that are directly oriented toward a pulpit with a sounding board. The whole goal is to deliver the word of God, to the congregation. Shaikur meeting houses are completely open spaces. They have a unique trust system that runs

“through the rafters that allows the weight in the building to be distributed to the outside walls”

that creates a wide open, essentially like a ballroom, an open floor. There'll be movable benches on the inside of a Shaikur meeting house that can be moved to the sides so that the Shaikurs can gather together in separate groups of men and women and labor or dance and sing. Shaikurs also do have sermons. We might call them more like homilies in which one of the elders or elders might give a message. But really, the central act of Shaikur worship in the 19th century

was singing and dancing. And by the room, they did all of this in front of tourists. So there's a spectacle to Shaikur worship. Every Shaikur meeting house has a set of benches or even risers around the outside, where spectators can come and watch on the Sabbath. The Shaikurs engage in their public meetings and do their thing with worship and dance. 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 depending upon the year, okay, to bring on a community. But what it takes is for all of those Shaikur converts to come together and sign a written covenant, forming a joint interest in which the most of these are families. The original Shaikur converts tend to be married husbands and wives often with several children in tow who convert to Shaikurism. 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 Shaikur communities. For example, at New Lebanon or Enfield Connecticut or Harvard Massachusetts to purchase enough land to create large and prosperous communal villages. Each Shaikur village in its ultimate form will usually comprise something like

between 3 and 5,000 acres or really good farmland. It will be divided between several different Shaikur families depending upon the size of the community. Each family, as we were saying,

religious experience, so they'll be a novisciate order, a gathering order for new converts to kind of learn Shaikur ways. And then as your life as a Shaikur continues, you might move into

the second family or a directional family or the West family on a piece of the property.

And eventually, by the time you reach your mature life as a Shaikur, you'll be looking at the center of the village, what's often called the first family or the church family or the center of

“family. And so that's how kind of Shaikurs 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. Shaikur villages in the 19th century, especially before the American Civil War, are very, very prosperous places. They had some of the highest standards of living of anywhere in the new United States. Lots of food, lots of technology. Shaikurs are not like the omnisch. They are old. They are very pro-technology. And there's a lot of stories about Shaikurs

and their ingenuity supposedly developed the closed pan and the circular saw. But, you know,

for farm families in early 19th century America, you sort of calculated your weight on the size of your of the barn that's on your farm. And you can imagine for a society of sometimes 100 to 500 people, Shaikur great barns, many wood survived today at various Shaikur museums around the country. We're some of the most, the largest and most technologically sophisticated agricultural buildings in the country at the time. So Shaikurs were wealthy, really wealthy,

by early 19th century standards. Doug, a lot of people confuse Shaikurs with omnisch. And by the way, Quakers are also confused by omnisch with the omnisch. It's a popular misconception. How do you compare

“the two? The omnisch are, of course, Pennsylvania-based outside Philadelphia with German roots, right?”

And, or anti-technology and their anti-baptists, their adult baptism practices, or what set them apart from what they would call the world of the world's people. The Shaikurs, of course, we're out of the English tradition, they're an evangelical group, they are a celibate omnisch or not. And they are also very pro-technology as we've been talking about. So the Shaikurs have no concerns with labor-saving devices. In fact, they're all in favor of innovations and technology of any form.

There you go. Let it be said, no similarity whatsoever, cultural or technological or theological. No. One last theological question. And then we'll move on to the notion of a utopianism. Is this a Bible-based practice? Are they following Christian ideals or is this in worship of their own

and lead? So it's a mix of both. So the Shaikurs, 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 Shaikurs recognize that the Bible, they did not believe the Bible was infallible, they recognized that the writers of the Bible, the gospel writers, other really Christian writers, were fallible, they were

“human, their 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 week which we've talked about with the idea that of the Christ's spirit that Christ could come again this time in female form. And the Shaikurs will in the 19th century, their theology will emerge to suggest that and lead completes the work of salvation that's begun with Jesus Nazareth. So Jesus begins the process of teaching people the road to salvation and lead with her adoption of celibacy completes

that process. They also believe that God is dual as well. So that God has both a male aspect and a female aspect, they call that female aspect, fully mother wisdom. So the Shaikurs recognize that there is more to be learned about the Christian tradition than what's contained in the Bible. And that explains the works of their theology. It is so fascinating to me that American history is really created by this kind of pluralistic idea of things. These challenges of norms all over

the place at this period of time, especially. And yet we so nostalgicly look back to when things were simple and people went to church. Now they went to church and they challenged the very nature of church. All over the place, I'm not just talking with the Shaikurs, the Quakers, you name it. They were all over the place, the Mormons. Everything at this time is certainly burned over area of New York, which we need to talk about. It 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. But 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. To democracy, individualism, capitalism,

all of them. The idea that you can have an individual religious experience and you can seek out people that have that same experience is one thing. The idea that you can shake off your established religion and choose your own. The idea that there are different religious traditions to choose from, different denominations. These are all the hallmarks of modern American religion. The emergence of a competitive religious marketplace of religious traditions and Anli is an aggressive

marketer of her faith. And she capitalizes on basically spiritual shoppers. People who are looking

for something new, something that capitalizes on their own individual faith experiences. So in some ways, the idea of Shaikurism is something that goes very closely related with those developments of modern America, individualism, capitalist market, economy, and political democracy. The Shaikurs

“sort of capitalizes on all of them. Like so many new religions, their persecution involved, right?”

What did the Shaikurs face in the United States? They faced both physical violence and legal actions. So we saw earlier that Anli experienced a lot of mob violence, so did her earliest English followers. But remember, the Shaikurs are breaking apart families. So that is to say, when husbands

and wives join the Shaikurs, they have to dissolve their marriage, essentially. They don't get

divorced. They just simply live together as separate brothers and sisters. But in situations where one but not both of a couple joins the Shaikurs, that's where a lot of legal troubles come in. So there are a fair number of Shaikur divorce cases. Many of them are very acrimonious. In which, for example, a husband would join the Shaikurs and leave the wife behind and then take all of his family's assets with them. It results in a series of legal battles that result in some very

“stiff, state laws that target the Shaikurs in which legislatures attempt to create avenues for”

women who have been abandoned by their husbands who have joined a separate religious group like

the Shaikurs to deem back their legal rights that they wouldn't have otherwise as married women,

rights over child custody, rights over control of property. And those laws directly attack the Shaikurs. So the Shaikurs are one of the few religious groups in the United States, including the more of, and we go put the Mormons in that same area that experienced legal action by state legislatures that directly targets their particular and peculiar faith practices. And at the same time, you have this notion carried over from Europe of this utopian community. And this was a very

specific thing that we could work at all out. We still hear about it today. In many ways, the United States becomes a laboratory of this where we throw off political tyranny and suddenly become this

“much more organic place where we're going to learn these new ways of living. The Shaikurs are”

right on top of that, aren't they? One of the things that happens after the American Revolution in the generations that follow in the early United States of the 19th century as the United States expands by dispossessing Native Americans and urbanizes and industrializes is that people feel certain atomization of their lives. They feel suddenly that those, those, the things that that in the colonial era that farmed family is sort of falling apart. And so what the ironies is,

is that all of these white-hot seekers who have stepped out of their inherited religious traditions that converted to Shaikurism, suddenly find themselves in religious communities where what they really want most is to combine and unite and be associated with like-minded people. And they're very much willing to give up their personal freedoms to live in a tightly organized religious community. So the surplus community is one of the big tropes in early 19th-century American religious

history. And we find it in all the utopian experiments that are going out at the same time, the Brook Farms, the fruit lands, the foyerist balances, right? And then all the sectarian groups, the rapites and the harmonites, these are all forms of sort of a combination of work and religion in which people are living in real-tight communities because that sense of community gives them a sense of purpose and mission in a rapidly changing America.

I'll be back with more American history after this short break. It's very simple when you come right down to what you mentioned, these farm families, once you have factories beginning in the cities, especially in New England, you have kids that are saying, I'm not going to do this farming thing. My own father was a was a non-farming quaker in the turn of the 20th centuries and no thanks. And that breaks up the

families, of course. And that happens on a widespread basis. And that is directly affecting the feeling of America at the time and religion is stepping into that breach. The Shaikur movement peaks in

So at its peak, Shaikurism has about roughly two dozen Shaikur villages. There's kind of a second

act on which Shaikurism expands to the west. So it begins as a New England phenomenon because of the second-grade awakening revivals in Kentucky, Ohio in the early 1800s. There are now half dozen communal villages in Kentucky, Ohio and as far west as Indiana. Shaikurism will eventually set up satellite communities, Philadelphia, Florida, and Michigan. But at its high water mark in

“about the 1840s, I think scholars would say somewhere between 4 and 6,000 people.”

Okay. You know, if you look at the census records for 1840 or so, probably. But overall, if you consider all of the people that spent time in a Shaikur community in the 19th century, probably talking as many as about 25,000 people. At one arm, you know, for a couple of years, maybe just a couple months, have spent time living and worshiping in a Shaikur community. Yes. Well, they had to be attracted to that prosperity that was going on in those communities.

I'm sure for a lot of people that was amazing. What is the era of manifestations? What does that

refer to? So that high water mark period of the 1840s is also a period of real religious renewal among the Shaikurs. That scholars, that the Shaikurs themselves called the new era were the period of mother's work. Scholars say called the era of manifestations.

“It comes at a time when, when Anly's first converts, those those young husbands and wives”

that had joined the Shaikur movement in the 1780s and 90s are aging and dying. And their children that they may have brought into with them may or may not have spent their lives as Shaikurs. They are also now kind of in their 50s or 60s at the time. So Shaikurs must reach to demographic moment where it needs to turn itself over and attract a new group of believers.

Because, as a fellow of a community, they're not going to grow their own followers. They're going

to need to gather those people out of what they would call the world's people. In that time period in the 1840s, the Shaikurs go through a dramatic period of about a decade in which they receive an inordinate number of new revelations in which gifted young Shaikurs that they called instruments received communications from the spirit world. And it's stunning. Shaikurs began talking again to the spirit of mother Anly or the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.

They would speak to angels. They speak to the celebrated dead. George Washington, the Marquilla Fiat, to come to start a coming to Shaikur villages with new messages and new revelations. Over the greatest outpouring of supernatural phenomena in American history. During the 1840s, the Shaikurs wrote down tens of thousands of pages, dream narratives, new revelations. They've developed new rituals. They wrote down thousands of new songs and hymns.

They developed new dancing rituals. And probably the thing that many listeners will know the most, it produced many works of stunning spirit drawings, drawings, describing works of art in which Shaikur instruments essentially channeled what they saw in the spirit world and put it down in ink, ink, and in paper. And many of these things turn up in museum exhibitions all the time. They're fascinating works of art. Yeah. How does this how is

Shaikurism affected by the civil war? On what side did they fall and or are they involved in this at all given their pacifism? So the the Shaikurs famously petitioned Abraham Lincoln to not serve in the war because they are, you know, committed pacifists. At the same time, Shaikurs also had for the time relatively advanced ideas about race. So they were anti-slivery, although not necessarily abolitionists. That is to say, they have post-livery there were black

Shaikurs from the very beginning. Some of the earliest converts in at what of lead in near Albany, New York were black Shaikurs. Some of those Western Shaikur villages that have got established in Ohio and Kentucky took on black members, sometimes Shaikurs actually purchase the amount of patient of enslaved people in Kentucky. And so during the Civil War, a couple things happened in the Shaikur. Those those Kentucky communities on the front lines of the Civil War.

And they experienced a lot of difficulties, especially South Union Shaikur Village and South Side, Kentucky. Union Confederate armies marched through the Shaikur villages. Shaikur buildings were used as hospitals. They're forced to to feed and clothe and help, you know,

“both armies as they, you know, as the tide of war changes. I think in the long term,”

the impact of the Civil War on the Shaikurs is a negative one. Because in some ways, the Civil War completes, you know, at least it's quickly advances the industrialization of the United States. So many things change the emergence of one foods and transportation infrastructure.

made Shaikur villages, these reserves for people where you could live a high standard of living

if you're willing to conform and unite with Shaikur principles, you could be sure that your family

“would be fed, loath, and taking care of. That world I think is easier to find in after the American”

Civil War. And as a result, the allure of Shaikurism, I think the allure of communalism as a whole, kind of declines after the American Civil War and during the guild of age. And I think Shaikurism, I think, winds up then most of its members wind up melting away. So after the American Civil War starting in about 1850, we see a really sharp decline in the membership of all the different Shaikur villages. By the end of the 19th century, by the turn of the 20th century, most of the

Bruce Shaikur villages are beginning to shutter their doors and sell their properties. Yeah, well, it's what happens to America in the 1800s. You really find that religion is replaced by money making. As a as mercantilism becomes its own kind of religion. And I don't mean that

glibbly. I mean, religion was always about self-improvement about finding unity with God in order

to improve your life and find purpose in your life. Suddenly, money making becomes that force of nature, if you will, in America. And it's slowly but surely to this day, in very day, replaces that kind of spiritualism with another purpose. It's fascinating. Let's, I guess, mark those civil wars kind of the peak or beginning of the decline of Shaikurism. Again, the running joke is while you can't build a movement if people can't make new members, you know, being the

celibacy. But in fact, that celibacy has a kind of a very noble feeling. Quakers practice the same thing is better fact in the fact that they, they're a lot of execs, but it's about not proselytizing. The idea is people need to find this movement on their own in order for the

“movement to build in its strongest form. That's kind of what this is all about, isn't it?”

Well, I mean, it's often the knocking and shakers in that it's difficult to sustain a movement

based on celibacy, but as the Catholic Church and its monastic communities, how well they've fared over the last two thousand years. And you'll probably see that it can be done. Today, Shaikurism survives at Sabbath Day Lake in Southern Maine. One of the original Shaikur villages that was formed during the 1790s, where Brother Arnold Hod and Citrogen Carpenter and Citrate April is brand new. Is a brand new initiate member still maintain the traditions? And what

Brother Arnold often says is that Shaikurism is a living tradition. He actually doesn't see the tradition as being in decline. It continues to do its work in some ways regardless of of the numbers. And if you look at the at Sabbath Day Lake, if you were to go and visit Sabbath Day Lake today, you would see dozens and dozens of non- Shaikur members who are fascinated by the Shaikurs want to devote their time and volunteer, help on the farm, worship every Sunday with Brother Arnold.

They love singing the music. So in some ways Shaikurism is very much alive and well in our world today. Just last year, marked the 25th anniversary of Anli's arrival in North America, Saturday Lake sponsored a conference in which both Maine senators were there. The postal service issued a series of stamps. Yeah. There were three days of lectures and discussions really well attended. And Brother Arnold held forth on what's next for Shaikurism. He sees it as an

ongoing and a living tradition. So he pushes back really hard against that narrative that the Shaikurs are in decline. And point of fact, Shaikurism owns pride of place as being the oldest and longest-lived sectarian movement in American history. And the only one that's really,

“I think we could say, has done better than the Shaikurs has been the Church of Jesus Christ of”

Latterty Saints, the Mormons. But of course, Mormonism has morphed into something that they're no longer. They've moved long past their sectarian roots with Joseph Smith. There are now a full-fledged global church. So I mean, I think they're in a different sort of category of classification. Shaikurs are unique in every order. Every one of the big churches of Christianity and elsewhere have and certainly Judaism have gone through their own revelations. And that split has then,

you know, reunites down the road in most cases, that did not happen with Shaikurism. And that has a lot to do with it, doesn't it? They stuck to their guns on what they believed. For the most part, yes, although in the late 19th and 20th century, I think there are changes in Shaikurism that are carried down to today. So Shaikurs no longer engage in dancing to a tend to Shaikur meeting. It's going to look a little bit more like your Quaker quietism,

in which people will sit and wait for the leading of the spirit. They'll be scripture reading and singing. So the Shaikurs have given up on that. They remain celibate. But there's a kind of, I think in the academic civil war, many Shaikur communities made a lot of concessions to a consumerist American economy. You can see it in their architecture, the simpleness and the

drive in automobiles and they put organs in there in their meeting houses. So they began to sort of

pull a little more mainstream. A look a lot more like late 19th century American Protestant

“Denomination. And I think part of that is helped to buoy the church in a time when things were”

changing so dramatically that the numbers were going down so quickly. I have to understand, I mean, most people recognize Shaikurism as an aesthetic, a kind of style, especially to do with Shaikur tables in furniture. How conscious were the Shaikurs in creating that style? Or is that just something that kind of evolved and then was later on labeled? So early on, the Shaikurs developed something they called the millennial laws. This was part of the institutionalization of Shaikurs in the

19th century that governed everything from the kind of ink you could use, the colors you could use, the way the village is to be laid out. What kind of clothing you could wear, how much you could read, all that kind of stuff. So the Shaikurs were very clear in terms of governing its members and in terms of issues of style. But in the 20th century, Shaikurism was rediscovered as a style by an art collector in early scholar, a guy named Edward Deming Andrews, who in the 1930s began

“collecting Shaikur Antiques as many of those Shaikur communities were closing in upstate New York”

and Western Massachusetts. Andrews went around collecting Shaikur chairs and tables. And there were a series of exhibitions of Shaikur art at major New York galleries like the Whitney Museum in New York, where Shaikur clean lines, and especially their visionary art of the era of manifestations, became thought to be elements of a new kind of modernist aesthetic that was taking hold in America in the early 20th century. And that's where the sort of Shaikur sheep emerges. And so ever since

Edward Deming Andrews came along in the 1920s and 30s, there's been a strong market for Shaikur Antiques and collecting Shaikur pageants, singing Shaikur songs, one scholar calls it Shaikur Fever in the 19th century. And it goes hand-in-hand with other things that are going on in American history at the time. But colonial revival, the emergence of colonial Williamsburg, the emergence of living history museums, Shaikur villages were thought to be those kinds of places

where Americans could get in touch with their early roots. But in a way that seems strangely modern to them. Yes, exactly. Well, I worked for a group called Pomponucic Mills. I opened as part of their early stores up in Vermont, and indeed one of their major influences is still Shaikur designs. And you can see that all over the place. It's very fascinating.

“Is there any future of Shaikurism do you think will it rise again at all?”

Well, as I said before, there's a new Shaikur member at Sabente Lake. And I think as long as as people are fascinated with the Shaikur's alternative spirituality, with the idea of a kind of aesthetic life, a life set apart from the, from the busyness and the commercialism and the consumerism of American life. As long as there are people that are fascinated by that impulse, that humanitarian impulse in American history, the Shaikurs will do just fine.

Keep in mind that the Shaikurs were never a large group. I mean, 25,000 sounds like a lot of people

over the course of the 19th century. And a couple of dozen villages scattered from Maine to Indiana sounds like a lot. But in truth, you know, the Shaikurs have always been a tiny minority. They've always been that alternative voice, call an Americans back to their, to alternative values. Ah, it is a racial justice, gender equality. All of those things are what Brother Underwood called the life of the Christ spirit, right? And as long as people are interested in that,

they will be shakers. For a pacifist organization, they punched way above their weight. Douglas Winniarsky is a professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Darkness Falls upon the land of light, experiencing religious wakeings in 18th century New England, which was much awarded. Doug, where can people find more about you and what kind of work is coming up? Your listeners can find me on the way at Douglas Winniarsky.com.

They can find lots of my articles and essays on Shaikurs in there. I'm working on a new book that's about to come out with University of Massachusetts Press. It's a book about, it's a collection of essays written with a group of colleagues on the era of manifestations that period of intense spiritualistic activity. Well, I hope we have you back to talk about just that. Nice to meet you. Thank you very much. Thanks so much John. This is great. Appreciate it. Take care.

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