[BRIEF NOTE] The Rise of the Shakers
Oct. 24th, 2005 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've been aware of the Shakers for some time. A religious sect descended from the Quakers, known equally for their intense ecstatic worship of God and for their celibacy, they flourished for a time in the 19th century United States until industrialization undermined the economies of their handcrafted goods-exporting communes while their strict religious ethos and their cultural inability to procreation condemning them to declining membership. It wasn't until I read Richard Francis Ann the Word (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), kindly given to me for my birthday by--I believe--![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bitterlawngnome, that I was presented with a picture of the Shakers' origins.
Francis portrays the Shakers' origins as arising equally in the person of Mother Ann Lee, the Shakers' founder, and in a rickety transatlantic British world. Growing up in the slums of industrializing mid-18th century Manchester, married to a man she ultimately wasn't attached to and forced to witness the likely preventable deaths of all four of her children, Ann Lee's already radical Protestant views shifted swiftly towards the more millennarian end of the spectrum, condemning the corrupt political and social worlds. Her flight west across the Atlantic, into the American colonies on the eve of their revolution against Britain and caught up in the legacies of the Great Awakening, helped further the Shakers' narrative of martyrdom by making them suspect both to British authorities and ordinary Americans, decidedly unpopular for their idiosyncratic faith and their suspicious founder even as their willingness to endure persecution made their faith attractive to many colonials.
The Shakers, Francis demonstrates convincingly, could only have emerged in the context of a fragile society that was being transformed utterly. The Shaker faith was almost as attractive to people seeking some sort of stability as it was to people who hoped for radical change. Radical certainty, rooted in keen knowledge of personal suffering, was the key to the Shakers' prominence in their time. Their time isn't ours, but even so I wonder: What may emerge next?
bitterlawngnome, that I was presented with a picture of the Shakers' origins.Francis portrays the Shakers' origins as arising equally in the person of Mother Ann Lee, the Shakers' founder, and in a rickety transatlantic British world. Growing up in the slums of industrializing mid-18th century Manchester, married to a man she ultimately wasn't attached to and forced to witness the likely preventable deaths of all four of her children, Ann Lee's already radical Protestant views shifted swiftly towards the more millennarian end of the spectrum, condemning the corrupt political and social worlds. Her flight west across the Atlantic, into the American colonies on the eve of their revolution against Britain and caught up in the legacies of the Great Awakening, helped further the Shakers' narrative of martyrdom by making them suspect both to British authorities and ordinary Americans, decidedly unpopular for their idiosyncratic faith and their suspicious founder even as their willingness to endure persecution made their faith attractive to many colonials.
The Shakers, Francis demonstrates convincingly, could only have emerged in the context of a fragile society that was being transformed utterly. The Shaker faith was almost as attractive to people seeking some sort of stability as it was to people who hoped for radical change. Radical certainty, rooted in keen knowledge of personal suffering, was the key to the Shakers' prominence in their time. Their time isn't ours, but even so I wonder: What may emerge next?
