Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries
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Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds: Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries
280Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253355409 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/22/2010 |
| Series: | Religion in North America |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds
Conflicting Visions, Contested Boundaries
By Stephen C. Taysom
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2011 Stephen C. TaysomAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35540-9
CHAPTER 1
The Shakers in the World: Walls and Bridges
Villages are one of the most widely recognized expressions of Shaker life. Despite the massive archival material that the nineteenth-century Shakers left behind, the most dominant traces, at least in terms of connecting with twenty-first-century Americans, are their villages. Any exploration of the creation and maintenance of physical boundaries by the Shakers must deal with these villages. It is fairly simple to note that the Shakers constructed their villages in ways that reflected their theological and social systems. Shaker villages were true symbols in the Geertzian mode inasmuch as they represented "tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas, attitudes, judgments, longings [and] beliefs."
It is obvious that the Shakers built villages that served as boundaries. But why did the Shakers remain heavily involved with the culture outside of their villages, despite their fiery rhetoric of physical separation? It is well known that they conducted commercial business with the world by selling products made and grown within the villages, and they also invited outsiders into their villages. I seek to provide an explanation for this disparity between rhetoric and action based on the idea that the Shakers believed in two "worlds": the one they believed was totally evil, incredibly dangerous, and dominated by supernatural forces, which I call the culturally postulated world, and the world that they experienced in their everyday lives, which I call the experienced world.
To say that the Shaker community postulated a world is simply to suggest that they held beliefs about the ultimate nature of the world which were unique to their community and which were not shared by persons outside of that community. The Shakers imagined this world more than they discovered it, and they used these postulations to great rhetorical effect. These two worlds, the experienced and the culturally postulated, worked dialectically for the Shakers, and in order to grasp the apparent contradiction between the Shakers' rationale of withdrawal and their practice of engagement with the world, one must understand this dialectic.
How did the Shakers creatively adapt their practices of withdrawal, which they had perfected in the East, to the very different circumstances in the West? One way to understand the importance of the physical boundaries provided by the villages is to look at how the Shakers functioned without them. In the West, between the time they arrived in 1805 and the time that they had bona fide villages built, the Shakers existed in a state that Victor Turner called "spontaneous communitas." How and why did spontaneous communitas differ from the normative communitas that existed in the established Shaker villages? How did this impact the Shaker attempts at physical boundary maintenance?
In the process of making my general arguments, I will offer a critique of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's ideas about the nature of Shaker withdrawal from the world, and I will discuss the ordering of chaos as the chief goal of the Shaker physical boundaries. Furthermore, I will argue that physical boundaries were designed chiefly to counter exogenous, or outside, threats.
Culturally Postulated Worlds and Experienced Worlds: The Dynamics of Selective Withdrawal
During the earliest years of the Shaker movement, the adherents devised no intentionally constructed communal living system. Ann Lee and those who accompanied her from England to New York lived together in Niskeyuna for a time, but their living arrangements were communal only in the sense that they lived in the same settlement, and they lacked any theological rationale for the arrangements. During the epic Shaker missionary journey through New York and New England from May 1781 until September 1783, missionaries encountered a group that would join the Shaker movement en masse, a group that adhered to a sort of communal living arrangement, at least in the sense that they centered their religious lives in one location: the Square House in Harvard, Massachusetts. When Ann Lee and her entourage arrived at Harvard in the early summer of 1781, this group was in a liminal state, having lost their charismatic leader, Shadrach Ireland, a few years before the Shaker missionaries arrived. Ireland's followers were well prepared to hear the Shaker gospel because they already believed in celibacy and perfectionism. The conversion of Ireland's followers represented an important milestone in early Shaker history because it provided a core group of converts already living in a communal setting, which could act as an anchor and, perhaps, as a template for future Shaker communal endeavors after the missionaries left New England and returned to New York.
Lee died shortly after returning from the missionary journey without instituting any official efforts toward communal living. The years immediately following Lee's death were dominated by James Whittaker, a capable and energetic English Shaker, who successfully shepherded the sect through the difficult loss of its charismatic founder. Whittaker died in 1787 without doing much to organize and systematize the rather inchoate ritual and theological legacy left by Lee. That task fell to Whittaker's successor, American Shaker Joseph Meacham. Meacham is properly considered to be the chief architect of Shakerism as it subsequently emerged as a movement of considerable size during the nineteenth century. It is entirely appropriate to view Meacham as the genius behind the Shaker village system.
Writing in 1823, Shakers Calvin Green and Seth Y. Wells described the period before the organization of the village system: "While the believers, as a people, remained in their respective natural families, scattered about in different places, possessing respectively the temporal interest inherited by natural heirship, or acquired by their own labors in their respective callings, there could not be much order among them, excepting the common order of nature." For the believers to move forward in their individual and collective spiritual quests, according to Green and Wells, "it was necessary that they should be brought into nearer connection together, and thereby be enabled to serve God in a more united capacity, as members of the body of Christ in a church relation." By 1828 at least, the Shakers had come to understand the organization of villages as one weapon in the war being waged against the sinful nature of unregenerate humankind, which dominated the culturally postulated world the Shakers imagined around them. Green and Wells repeatedly referred to the "natural" circumstances of life outside of the villages and the distinct lack of any order other than the contemptible "order of nature." The Shakers were constantly admonished to put aside all that was part of the "natural, generative order" and turn instead to the purified and appropriately ordered world provided by the Shaker gospel. The association between chaos, the natural state, and life outside of the ordered Shaker village was not lost on the coreligionists of Green and Wells. In 1818, John Dunlavy, in his response to Reformed theology, argued:
As clear line of distinction ... as there is between Christ and the world, so clear is the same line of distinction between his Church and the world. ... This discriminating line is so manifest so the world can see it, and discern the people of God from the world, and know that they are not of them nor of their order; that they have put off the old man with his deeds, and have forsaken the world for Christ's sake.
As the Shakers gradually incorporated their villages, they drafted covenants which reflected the deep unease expressed by Dunlavy. The language of the covenants from the various villages is generally formulaic and always asserts the principle of "mutual protection" as high on the list of priorities of the villages. Compare, for example, the language used in an 1828 covenant from Sodus Bay, New York, and the text of a similar covenant drawn up at New Lebanon in 1826. The first declared that the Shakers formed themselves "into a united body for our mutual protection, support and improvement." The second document traced the formation of the village system to the search "for the mutual protection, support, comfort and happiness of each other, as brethren and sisters in the gospel." Article 8 of the 1826 covenant drawn up by New Lebanon's East Family amplified the theme of refuge from the world while arguing that life in the village system served to collect and redistribute spiritual power as well as material goods. In the words of the covenant, the "sole object, purpose and design of our uniting in covenant relations, as a family or body of people in gospel union was from the beginning, and still is, faithfully and honestly to receive, improve and diffuse the manifold gifts of God, both of a spiritual and temporal nature." Both spiritual and material communalisms were thus practiced at God's command.
According to the 1827 covenant penned by the leaders of the South Family at Enfield, the decision to organize villages stemmed from "the light and revelation of God," who had ordained the "order and form of a Family and religious Fraternity in gospel relation" as the ideal domestic arrangement. Such a text must be read as an indication that the Shakers saw the creation and maintenance of their villages as primarily a religious, rather than an economic or social, act. The same document argued that the system of communal living enabled the Shakers "to be more useful to ourselves and each other in all things pertaining to our travel in the gospel" and was a prerequisite for the movement if it wished to "receive and more perfectly ... improve the manifold gifts of God," to which they, as God's chosen people, were entitled.
By the 1840s, the Shakers had begun linking the form of government and social relations within the villages with the situation that prevailed in the garden of Eden before the Fall. An 1841 covenant from Tyringham, Massachusetts, sketched the path from Eden to the fallen world and back again by way of the Shaker village. "When man by transgression lost his primitive rectitude," the introduction to the covenant asserts, "he then lost his true interest, both to God and his fellow creatures." As a result of the Fall, humans became "selfish and partial [and] ... turned to exalt and build up [themselves] at the expense of the peace and happiness of [the] species, and the loss of union to [their] creator." Moving outward from such a premise, the only way to rectify the problems caused by the Fall of humankind would be to institute a system in which each person subjugated individual will to the greater good of the community "interest." Indeed, according to the Tyringham covenant, "the object and design of the consecrated and united interest of the Church, and the covenant relation of this institution, are to regain the unity of that relation to God and that social order and connection with each other which mankind lost at the beginning." Such perfect government appeared briefly during the time of Christ and the apostles, but the "falling away" of the true religious teachings and practices in antiquity resulted in the "destruction" of the true order. The opening of the final dispensation, presided over by Ann Lee, brought a restoration and "revival ... of the true nature of order of the church," meaning, of course, the village system and its attendant governmental structures.
Both the Enfield and Tyringham covenants also convey a certain defensiveness, indicating that village life had as its object "mutual support and protection ... from the attacks of unlawful aggression." The chief purpose of the village was "to gather and protect the Believers." Defensive language points up the very real sense in which the Shakers regarded the outside world, culturally postulated or not, as physically and spiritually dangerous. Shaker Elisha Allen puzzled in a letter to apostate Enoch Pease about why Pease would leave the safety of village life when Pease "knew very well that our fathers and our mothers made their escape from that manner of life which you seem so inclined to pursue.
Clearly, then, manuscript evidence from the nineteenth century provides ample evidence that the Shakers saw the creation of physical boundaries, in the form of a village system complete with family units, deacons and deaconesses, elders and eldresses, and trustees, as a rejection of the surrounding culture. Theologically, the Shakers imagined the village as a portal to the pristine prelapsarian world of Eden. The construction and expansion of this system reinforced the notion that the world was a dangerous place and a refuge was required if the believers hoped to find respite from the travails of "Babylon." Scholars have long noted, however, that a chasm existed between rhetoric and practice with regard to the Shakers' retreat away from the world and into their villages.
To see the Shaker village system simply as an attempt to withdraw from the world is to miss a significant, but subtle, facet of this withdrawal. The Shakers were really involved with two "outside worlds." The first was the world that they wrote about in their tracts and railed against in their sermons, a culturally postulated world of absolute danger and absolute evil, filled with devils and sin. It was a world dominated by "enemies" and wickedness. The second world was the mundane one in which the Shakers conducted business and interacted with those outside of their village sphere. In most cases cataloged by the Shakers, however, the threats were amorphous. In other words, the constructed world was generally spoken of in terms of categories, such as enemies, natural man, wickedness, evil, and so forth. The Shakers constantly warned about these categories of danger, but they rarely made reference to specific persons or things. The following description of the postulated world, written in 1848, captures the essence of the Shaker approach.
Our hearts are pained whenever we look abroad upon the earth, and view ... the wretchedness and sin, which the love of pleasure, the promptings of vain ambition, the burning lusts of sensuality, the frivolities of empty, fluctuating, foolish fashion, and all the numerous train of evils which covetousness and pride have stamped upon the human family.
The Shakers, according to the author, were "hated of all men [and] all the people of the world," but found respite in the knowledge that they "belong to a better country, even a heavenly [one]."
Several things are important about the way in which this author framed his description of the world. First, the author employed absolutist rhetoric. The Shakers were hated by all people, and wherever the Shakers looked, they beheld the evil and wickedness which had "stamped" itself upon the entire human family. Only a constructed world, not an experienced one, could possibly be described in such absolutes. Second, the author listed categories of "evils" rather than specific issues or persons. This tendency reflects an attempt to create community identity by fashioning a rhetorical foil against which to contrast the community generating the rhetoric, in this case an absolutely evil realm which was the functional opposite of the Shaker world in every important respect. Finally, the rhetoric of absolute separation flows freely in the text. The Shakers found themselves "so isolated from the world that the world knows us not," according to the letter, and it goes so far as to suggest that the Shakers did not exist in that world at all but, rather, lived in a heavenly "country."
Obviously, the Shakers occupied space and time in the world shared by everyone else. Such rhetoric indicates that the Shakers saw themselves as existing in two worlds simultaneously. With one of these worlds the Shakers were obliged to engage, and they developed appropriate methods for managing their interactions with that world. The other world, their culturally postulated world, could not be tampered with.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shakers, Mormons, and Religious Worlds by Stephen C. Taysom. Copyright © 2011 Stephen C. Taysom. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsForeword by Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. SteinAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The Shakers in the World: Walls and Bridges2. Imagination and Reality in the Mormon Zion: Cities, Temples, and Bodies3. Godly Marriage and Divine Androgyny: Polygamy and Celibacy4. Boundaries in Crisis: The Shaker Era of Manifestations and the Mormon ReformationConclusionNotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
Taysom (Cleveland State Univ.) compares the efforts of 19th-century Mormons and Shakers to define 'their communal identities over and against the religious, political, economic, and social elements of the larger culture of which they were a part.' This is well-worked terrain: the two groups are mentioned in the same breath quite often, and the significance of boundary maintenance to new groups is an essential subject for scholars of new religious movements. Taysom's contribution is to distinguish between the kinds of tension sought and maintained by the Mormons and the Shakers. He offers some interesting arguments about the two groups separately—a reevaluation of the concept of 'Zion,' as Mormons applied it to settlements in Missouri, Illinois, and the Great Basin is particularly notable . . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates; general readers. —Choice
Taysom (Cleveland State Univ.) compares the efforts of 19th-century Mormons and Shakers to define 'their communal identities over and against the religious, political, economic, and social elements of the larger culture of which they were a part.' This is well-worked terrain: the two groups are mentioned in the same breath quite often, and the significance of boundary maintenance to new groups is an essential subject for scholars of new religious movements. Taysom's contribution is to distinguish between the kinds of tension sought and maintained by the Mormons and the Shakers. He offers some interesting arguments about the two groups separately—a reevaluation of the concept of 'Zion,' as Mormons applied it to settlements in Missouri, Illinois, and the Great Basin is particularly notable . . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates; general readers. —Choice