Heavenly Work: The Fleeting Legacy of the Shakers

Ten years have passed since my first visit to Canterbury Shaker Village, but walking again past the apple trees and old wooden buildings, I’m struck by the same feeling. In this small settlement nestled among New Hampshire’s green, rolling hills, a serenity seeps into my bones and muscles, compelling me to walk slowly, deliberately, with reverence. The Shakers believed they were creating and living in a heaven on earth, and that belief feels tangible here, a surviving legacy. But the sentiment also implies a tension—between permanence and transience, between mortal and eternal existence—that is itself ephemeral, difficult to grasp.

Canterbury, now run as a historical museum, is one of nine public preserved communities of the Shakers, known formally as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. The society formed in England in 1747, breaking off from the Quakers (who were themselves radical for their day, believing that every person had direct access to God). After a vision of “divine light” received by a woman named Ann Lee, followers came to view her as the female counterpart to Christ, and they positioned her as their leader. In 1774, Mother Ann, as they called her, and seven other members of the society came to the United States, setting up their first community in New Lebanon, outside of Albany, New York. The nickname “the Shakers” was given by outsiders, or “the world’s people,” as the Shakers called them, and was later adopted by the society itself. It comes from the style of frenetic dancing done in their formal worship services, and remains one of the things they’re most often remembered for today—a physical embodiment of shaking the sin away.

Living in self-sufficient communal villages, dissolving exclusive family ties, and sharing property and goods, the Shakers established nineteen communities across the eastern United States, numbering about six thousand followers at their peak in the 1840s. Canterbury, founded in 1792, was the seventh Shaker village.

As we file into the white clapboard meetinghouse to begin our tour, women through one door, men through another, we’re careful to step over the threshold and not on it. Our tour guide, Michael Pugh, has told us the Shakers would have entered like this. A track of unadorned Shaker singing plays on a loop in the background. Something near the ceiling catches my eye: the baby-blue trim, unchipped and vibrant. As if noticing my gaze, Michael points it out, telling us that it’s the original color, painted in 1792. The Shakers, he explains, believed in doing something well the first time, so the work doesn’t need to be done again.

This idea is practical and hard to argue with—as are many Shaker beliefs, by modern standards: feminism, frugality, pacifism. In the Shakers’ era, these principles were viewed by mainstream society as foreign, or progressively anachronistic. Some of their doctrines can still seem difficult to fathom. The opening scene of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Canterbury Pilgrims” depicts two young Shakers running away in order to pursue their love. The Shakers famously practiced celibacy, a choice still likely to bring to mind scenarios like Hawthorne’s. But considered alongside the Shakers’ other founding principles, it seems less extreme. Celibacy was intertwined with the society’s steadfast commitment to gender equality, and it mirrored the familial, but not exclusive, relationships they imagined to exist in heaven.

“The belief that God is both mother and father is the theological basis for the Shaker belief in the basic equality of the sexes,” writes Christian Becksvoort in The Shaker Legacy: Perspectives on an Enduring Furniture Style. That belief, he goes on, “has important implications for Shaker organizational structure.” The society was one of the first to make gender equality a reality. Though labor was still divided along gender lines, men’s and women’s work, as well as their voices, were given equal weight, and the sexes were equally represented in leadership...