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.
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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.
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