Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries

3 Godly Marriage and Divine Androgyny: Polygamy and Celibacy

100 three Godly Marriage and Divine Androgyny: Polygamy and Celibacy Of all the potential points of comparison between Mormons and Shakers , the groups’ approaches to marriage are perhaps the most obvious. Gross examination would indicate that the groups employ opposite strategies when it comes to sex and marriage. The Shakers are perhaps best known for their strict enforcement of celibacy, consisting of prohibitions on both sex and marriage; and even today, more than a hundred years after officially discontinuing the practice, Mormons still are closely associated with the practice of plural marriage.1 Although the Mormons and Shakers appear to rest on opposite ends of the spectrum of possible marital arrangements, close inspection yields a more complex situation. The field of cognitive anthropology provides some helpful interpretive tools for this particular comparison. Cognitive anthropologists have argued that the structures underlying an individual’s motives, what they call “schemas,” are hierarchically arranged. At the top of the hierarchy are “master motives,” or goals related to the most fundamental ideas about the purpose of existence.2 Individual and group behaviors may be understood through reference to the master motive. An examination of the schemas employed by the Shakers and Mormons relative to their sexual and marital arrangements reveals that, while the particular behaviors enacted are nearly perfect opposites, the structures motivating those behaviors are nearly identical. The master motive, or the ultimate goal, for the Mormons and the Shakers was to behave in ways that imitated God. In both Shaker and Godly Marriage and Divine Androgyny · 101 Mormon theologies, there was a direct link between behavior that was sanctioned by God and behavior that was imitative of God. It is significant that both the Shakers and the Mormons believed that the correct knowledge of God’s attributes was lost to humankind and could only be restored through direct communication with the divine. The Shakers believed that “God can only be known through the medium of Divine Revelation.” Through correct knowledge of God’s attributes and by doing what God does, one may draw “nearest to him.”3 Compare that approach to Joseph Smith’s teachings about the importance of a correct knowledge of God. In 1835, Smith taught that one must come to a “correct idea of [God’s] character, perfections, and attributes.”4 Later, Smith taught that the object of humanity’s existence was to live “as God” in the presence of God.5 When it came to marriage, mainstream Protestants and Catholics did not posit a link between God’s nature, which they believed to be ultimately mysterious, and the path of behavior for human beings. All Christians, by definition, seek to emulate Christ in some sense, of course. What set Mormons and Shakers apart was their insistence that the marital status of God and Christ represented the ideal marital arrangement for human beings. The Mormons taught that God was married, and from 1843 to 1890, they taught that he was a polygamist. Moreover, Joseph Smith taught that God possessed a “body of flesh and bone as tangible as man’s,” which he would use to create spirit children throughout all eternity. In January 1841, Smith revealed that spirits came to earth for the express purpose of gaining “a body and present[ing] it pure before God in the Celestial Kingdom.” “The great principle of happiness,” Smith continued, “consists in having a body.” Smith added, “[T]he Devil has no body, and herein is his punishment.”6 It is clear that, from the time of Joseph Smith, Mormons viewed the body as a completely positive object, whose desires and appetites had to be tamed and channeled into righteous expressions, but should never be snuffed out. The Shakers, by contrast, held a view of an androgynous God that transcended all physicality. Celibacy for the Shakers represented the symbolic performance of androgyny. The Mormons and Shakers shared structurally identical master motives (to be like God), as well as identical secondary motives (to be like God, one must enact a God-like practice). 102 · Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds The difference between the two systems is found not in the upper levels of the motivational schemas but in the particular theologies, which posited very different ideas about the nature of God. Shaker celibacy and Mormon polygamy, then, reveal fundamental similarities relative to their underlying assumptions about the role of ritual, praxis, and the ultimate destiny of the human soul. The fact...