The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing): beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

Celibate, communal, and convinced the Second Coming already arrived — in a woman.

A society founded on the preaching of Ann Lee, an illiterate Manchester factory worker who arrived in New York in 1774 with eight followers. They held everything in common, gave up marriage and sex entirely, worshipped by dancing in ordered ranks, put women and men in equal parallel authority, and built furniture and buildings of such austerity that the world that would not join them has been collecting the chairs ever since. At its peak, eighteen or nineteen communities; today, one, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

Why it is filed this way

The Shakers are a millenarian communal society that came out of the Quakers and the English revivalist underground rather than out of any Protestant denomination, and their doctrine of the Second Appearing places them outside orthodox Christianity. They are filed under Protestantism for descent, not for agreement.

Nineteen communities at the height of the 1840s; the last of them but one had closed by 1961, and the Parent Ministry at Canterbury, New Hampshire, declared the covenant closed to new members in 1965. Sabbathday Lake in New Gloucester, Maine, rejected that decision and has continued to receive members. Sister Frances Carr died on 2 January 2017 leaving two. As of August 2025 there were three: Brother Arnold Hadd, Sister June Carpenter, and Sister April Baxter, who entered in the spring of 2025 and was then in her novice year. Whether the society is ending is a question outsiders ask far more often than Shakers do.

DeitiesGod is understood as dual, Father and Mother, and the Christ Spirit appeared first in Jesus and a second time in Ann Lee. Shakers are explicit that Ann Lee was not divine and did not claim to be; she was the woman in whom the Christ Spirit made its second appearing.

Founded1747 CE · Manchester, England, then Niskayuna, New York

FounderAnn Lee — Mother Ann

AfterlifeThe resurrection begins now, in this life, in the community; the dead continue and were regularly reported as present in worship

TextsThe Bible · Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee (1816) · The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing (1808)

The map

The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1517 CE Protestantism 1747 CE The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

The Second Coming already happened, and the church has been living in it since. Shakers hold that the Christ Spirit appeared a second time in Ann Lee, which means the millennium is not awaited but inhabited. Everything else follows: if this is the resurrection life, then people neither marry nor are given in marriage, and the community is heaven's order tried out on earth. Go deeper — context →

God is Father and Mother, and so is the leadership. Because the divine is understood as dual, every level of Shaker government was doubled: two elders and two eldresses, two trustees of each, with women holding authority over women and men over men and neither over the other. This was in place from the 1780s, a century before American women could vote. Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

A Ann Lee — Mother Ann, who buried four children and then said the flesh was the root of it. Illiterate, married against her will to a blacksmith, she lost all four of her children in infancy and after imprisonment in Manchester in 1770 preached that the lust of the flesh was the original sin. She was beaten by mobs in New England, and Shakers insist to this day that she never claimed to be Christ. Domain The Second Appearing of the Christ Spirit; celibacy; the founding of the American societiesStanding Not God and not worshipped — the Shakers are precise about this and outsiders have got it wrong for 250 years Meet them — context →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

They danced, in ranks, and sold tickets to nobody. The worship was the shaking, the whirling and then, from the 1780s, ordered dances in formation — the square order shuffle, the circular march — with singing and no instruments. Outsiders came in crowds to watch, which the Shakers permitted and disliked. When Weekly — the Sunday meeting, and formerly on weekday evenings tooWho The whole family of the community, and in the nineteenth century the public, who came to watch Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Judaism — 11 shared ideas, a different faith Islam — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Zoroastrianism — 10 shared ideas, a different faith Branch The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

1 cited texts

Elder Joseph Brackett, Simple Gifts, Alfred, Maine, 1848 where it is cited →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.