Ann Lee's Gospel of Consecrated Hands

When Ann Lee led her small band of Shaking Quakers from Manchester to New York in 1774, she brought a theology that fused celibacy and shared property into a single discipline: withdrawal from private life meant withdrawal from private ownership as well. The United Society of Believers formalized this in written covenants that bound each member, on joining a Shaker community, to give up personal title to land, tools, income and inheritance in exchange for lifelong maintenance by the community as a whole. Stephen Stein's history of the movement traces how this was never treated as an economic convenience. It was read as the practical form the gospel took once a believer had renounced the fallen, generative order of family and marriage; a shared purse followed necessarily from a shared celibate life, since neither could function if the other were only half kept. Shaker communities built substantial collective enterprises, seed businesses, furniture workshops and herb gardens among them, on exactly this consecrated ground, and their well documented material success became, for outside observers, the clearest proof that communal property could work at scale in America rather than remaining a curiosity confined to scripture.