Theology: God as Father and Mother

Shaker theology rests on a claim most of Christianity has never made in this form: that the divine nature is dual, father and mother together, and that the second appearing of Christ promised in scripture came not as a return of Jesus but as the spirit working through a woman, Ann Lee, who led the small English sect that became the Shakers before bringing it to America in 1774. This belief in a female embodiment of the Christ spirit is the doctrinal foundation the whole distinctive Shaker social order was built on: if the divine includes the feminine as fully as the masculine, then the community's insistence on equal governance by elders and eldresses, men and women sharing spiritual authority at every level, follows as a consequence of theology rather than existing as a separate social experiment layered on top of an otherwise ordinary Christian belief.

Celibacy completed the pattern, since a community that took no wives or husbands and reproduced only by conversion and adoption had no need of the patriarchal household structures the rest of Christian society took for granted. The movement's popular name, Shakers, was originally a mocking nickname referring to the trembling, dancing and shouting that marked its early worship services, a style of ecstatic devotion the community itself embraced and formalized into structured dances performed as an act of spiritual discipline rather than spontaneous emotion alone.