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.
Meet them — context →
The shared center — held across the tradition
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 →
Cosmos & Afterlife
how reality is built, and what follows deathThe nature of 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
After death
The resurrection begins now, in this life, in the community; the dead continue and were regularly reported as present in worship