History & overview · every faith gets one
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.
The founding
A group around James and Jane Wardley broke from the Quakers at Bolton in 1747 and worshipped with shaking and shouting, which got them the name Shaking Quakers. Ann Lee, a blacksmith's daughter who had lost four infant children, joined them and after imprisonment in Manchester in 1770 emerged saying she had received a revelation that the lust of the flesh was the root of all sin and that Christ had appeared in her. She sailed for New York in 1774 with eight followers, settled at Niskayuna in the woods near Albany in 1776, and after the revival at New Lebanon in 1780 the society began to grow. She died on 8 September 1784.
Its founding is bound to Ann Lee — Mother Ann — 1747 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world already under the Second Appearing — the resurrection is a present condition entered by confession and celibacy, not an event still to come.
The divine. God 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..
Death and after. The resurrection begins now, in this life, in the community; the dead continue and were regularly reported as present in worship.