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

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.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Realised eschatology is the whole Shaker system in one move. If the Second Appearing has occurred, then the conditions Jesus described for the resurrection life apply now: no marriage, no private property, no war, no oath, no distinction of rank. The doctrine was set out systematically in The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, published at Lebanon, Ohio, in 1808 and known as the Shaker Bible, largely written by Benjamin Seth Youngs. It also explains the Shaker attitude to the world outside, which was neither hostile nor missionary in the usual sense: the world was the old order continuing, and Shakers separated from it rather than tried to convert it wholesale, gathering converts instead from revivals and from people who came looking.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
T The Messiah — a person, with a job description. Judaism · figure Meet them →
T The Saoshyant. Zoroastrianism · figure Meet them →
M Maitreya — the one to come. Buddhism · figure Meet them →
In Jesus, God became human. Christianity Go deeper →
The grave is not empty waiting. Islam Go deeper →
The promised renewal has come. Ahmadiyya Go deeper →

The conversation

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