The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)

Denomination·Founded 1747 CE·Three members at Sabbathday Lake, New Gloucester, Maine, as of August 2025 — the only Shakers in the world. Membership at the peak in the 1840s is usually put between four and six thousand across eighteen or nineteen communities from Maine to Kentucky; the figures are estimates and the sources differ.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)

Branch

How to Live

the ethic — what it asks of a life
Celibacy, for everybody, forever. Not an ascetic elite inside a wider church but the condition of membership: married couples who joined lived as brother and sister in separate quarters. It is why the society grew only by conversion and by taking in orphans, and why it ran out. Go deeper — context →
Built on Hatchable