Utopian Communities

C HAPTER T WO U TOPIAN C OMMUNITIES R ELIGION, DEMOCRACY, AND S OCIALISM THE FIRST HALF-CENTURY OF THE LIFE of the new nation witnessed an extraordinary development of hopeful experiments and ideas. Idealists like Thomas Owen founded utopian socialist communities while religious enthusi- asts like Mother Ann Lee came to the United States seeking a place to start experiments like her Shaker communities. The combination of space that allowed people to develop their own communities relatively undisturbed and a philosophy that emphasized liberty, even the liberty to be eccentric, made the United States fertile ground for many radical experiments. Throughout the nineteenth century, various communitarian experiments were tried. Some were very short lived while others lasted for several generations, and a few continued into the twenty-first century. While there was a brief upsurge of in- terest in these early communal experiments by the participants in latter-day communes of the 1960s and 1970s, for the most part this story is a forgotten chapter in the nation’s history.1 M OTHER A NN L EE AND THE S HAKERS Shakers may be one of the most romanticized of American religious communitarian movements, although at times it is hard to know the focus of the roman- ticism. Today the communitarian impulse is not the only thing that Shakers are known for. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is probably far from the top of the list. Mildred Barker, leader of the Shaker Community at J. W. Fraser, A History of Hope © James W. Fraser 2004 28 A HISTORY OF HOPE Sabbath Day Lake, Maine, who died in 1990, reflected, “I almost expect to be remembered as a chair or a table.”2 While Shaker furniture has grown in popu- larity, the kind of beloved community created by the Shakers that produced both the physical beauty of their furniture and the spiritual beauty of their worship and community life recedes farther and farther from view. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, called Shakers, dates back to the spiritual ferment that took place in France in the century before the French Revolution. A group of spiritualists attacked the Catholic Church as a false religion. Like other Protestants of the time, they called for reformation. And like other Protestants in France, they were not welcomed by the authorities. Some were silenced, others fled to England where they linked up with some dissident Quakers, especially in the emerging industrial center of Manchester.3 The Shakers—sometimes called the Shaking Quakers in the early days because of the enthusiasm and ecstasy in their worship—were one of the prod- ucts of this merger of reform-minded French spiritualists and English Quak- ers. From these Shaking Quakers Ann Lee—known among the Shakers as Mother Ann Lee—gathered a small group of supporters in England, immi- grated with them to the United States, and founded the first Shaker communities here. As with many charismatic religious leaders and founders, much of Lee’s life and early teaching remains a mystery. She was born in Manchester, En- gland, in 1736 and was influenced by “inspirationists” from France and the English Quakers. She was married and had four children all of whom died in infancy. By her mid-thirties her spiritualism had led her and her fellow believers to disrupt the worship services of the Established Church of England, which she saw as a dead ritual that diverted people from true spirituality. As a result she was arrested several times for disrupting the worship of other de- nominations.4 In 1770, while in jail on these charges, she had a powerful mys- tical experience. It convinced her of two things: that she was receiving a very special revelation from God that she was to share and that made her a special prophetic leader; and that human sexuality was the key to all sin—from Adam and Eve to the present—and celibacy was the only way to live a godly life. (Psychologists have had a field day wondering if the loss of four infants had played a role in her new rejection of sex, but there is really no way to know.) Lee was jailed several more times in England because of her continued preaching and practice of her beliefs. Indeed, she did much more than just preach. Like many a prophetic voice, she condemned the established churches to their faces, entering worship where, as one report noted, she “willfully and contemptuously in the time of divine service, disturb[ed] the UTOPIAN COMMUNITIES 29 congregation then assembled at morning prayer.” For that particular offense she was jailed for two days.5 Lee came to America in 1774 and eventually inspired the creation of celibate colonies that shared the pacifism and communitarianism of which she spoke. Ann Lee’s pacifism led to her being jailed by New York in 1780 on charges of undermining the American Revolution. In the first years after their arrival, the small Shaker community was content to live their own lives and did not seem much interested in seeking converts. However, after her release from jail in December 1780, Lee and two of her followers crisscrossed New York and New England founding “families” of Shakers. This famous missionary journey, which lasted from May 1781 to September 1783, established Lee’s mythic leadership. She suffered abuse from the unconvinced in many towns, but she also made many converts to her own version of the Christian faith. Lee died the following year, in September 1784, but the authority of her teachings was well established by that time.6 As Stephen Stein has noted in his carefully researched study of the Shakers, it is hard to know exactly what Lee did teach. One source that Stein uses is a 1780 publication from Valentine Rathbun, a Baptist minister who was deeply hostile to the Shakers. According to Rathbun, who viewed the movement as a “new scheme . the spirit of witchcraft,” Shakers had several key characteristics. They believed that marriage was sinful, they viewed Ann Lee as “the mother,” and some seemed to believe that she had “the fullness of the God Head” and was “the queen of heaven, Christ’s wife.” Many of the earliest Shak- ers also shared their meals and lodging and were clearly an intimate, although celibate, community. Perhaps most interesting, their worship was ecstatic. “Their actions in worship is according to the dictates of the spirit that governs them,” Rathbun reported. Shaker worship did not involve the traditional prayer or preaching. Instead their worship reflected their understanding of the new “spiritual dispensation,” including, as Stein notes, “shaking and singing, hopping and turning . and running, groaning and laughing. The believers viewed all these actions as manifestations of divine power and union with God.”7 That one of the Shakers’ harshest critics should describe their early lives in ways so similar to the actual practice of their later communities leads one to conclude that these characteristics were all established quite early in Shaker life. While Lee and her closest followers had lived together in a small community just outside of Albany, New York, at the time of her death Shakers were scattered in many homes and villages across New England. Almost im- mediately after her death in 1784, however, Shakers began the process of sell- ing their homes and moving into a small number of tightly organized Shaker communities. In part this was a response to the hostility of neighbors who 30 A HISTORY OF HOPE took a dim view of their approach to marriage, their unique form of worship, and their harsh critique of established churches. Lee’s successors urged the Shakers to share all of their possessions and “have all things in common,” as had the earliest Christian communities. The core of the first Shaker community in New Lebanon, New York, was established when they built their first meeting house in 1785. Soon thereafter, a lively Shaker village sprung up around it.8 The Shaker community at New Lebanon thrived, as did the whole movement, and within a decade after Lee’s death there were ten communities with over 2,000 members. The revivals of the early nineteenth century added to the Shakers’ membership and they became one of the largest and most successful of the nineteenth-century communitarian movements. Early in the nineteenth century, the Shaker Community began the diffi- cult process of writing their own history and defining their basic beliefs. At its core, Shakerism is a faith based on ecstatic worship and ordered community life, with both open to the continued leading of the Holy Spirit. As a result, Shakers have always been distrustful of written statements of their theological beliefs. Nevertheless, the growth of the Shaker community, the geographical dispersion of their communities, and the hostility of their neighbors led Shak- ers to feel the need to clarify some of their most basic beliefs. In 1814 members of the church family signed an amended covenant de- signed not only to clarify some of their beliefs but also to assure continuity in the leadership, as the generations after Lee sought a clear basis for their own authority. After some initial reluctance because of their fears of being misun- derstood by others, they publicly asserted that “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ did make his second appearance, by his Spirit, first in Ann Lee, whom we acknowledge to be the first Mother of all souls in the work of regeneration, and the first spiritual head of the Church of Christ then in the body.” They then continued their statement tracing the authority of the current leadership to Lee and her successors.

Load more