From Shaking to Labouring

The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing began among English Quakers in the middle of the eighteenth century and reached North America in 1774 under Ann Lee. Their neighbours called them Shaking Quakers, then Shakers, for the visible way the Spirit was held to work on the body in their meetings: shaking, trembling, whirling, involuntary shouting, speech in unknown tongues, and falling. In the earliest period none of it was arranged. A meeting was open and what happened in it was understood to be given rather than planned.

From the 1780s onward the community deliberately changed this. The unordered motions were shaped into set exercises with names, taught to the whole society and rehearsed, and a leadership emerged that composed new ones and circulated them between the villages. This was not a retreat from the earlier enthusiasm; the Shakers argued it directly. A gift of the Spirit was to be received and then given order, and a body under the Spirit should be a body doing something well rather than a body out of control. They called the practice labouring, which is the word they used for the dances themselves, and they placed it at the centre of worship rather than at the edge of it, which almost no other Christian body in America did.