Shaker Chic

LET ME PUT THIS IN PERSPECTIVE There are seven million Mormons in the United States, but mainstream entertainment rarely takes an interest in their way of life, aside from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and the occasional raunchy Broadway satire.

There are four hundred thousand Amish Americans. They get less airtime than the Mormons, although for some reason there are lots of oafish Amish side characters in sitcoms.

The Puritans went extinct two centuries ago. Media-wise, they have The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, thereby ensuring that “puritanical” remains an insult for buzzkills of every kind.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses, all nine million of them, hardly exist as far as pop culture is concerned. Same with the Mennonites, the Methodists, the River Brethren, the Quakers, the Hutterites, and the Seventh Day Adventists.

But the Shakers? The people with the androgynous God, the brooms and bonnets, the ban on private property, the chairs waifish as nineties supermodels, the lives of sexless simplicity and endless toil? Of the scores of Christian splinter sects in American history, the Shakers may be the only one to get a slew of glowing write-ups in The New York Times.

Make no mistake, dear Brothers and Sisters: The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearance is having what our vulgar world calls “a moment.” I am not a Shaker, but if I were ever to join, I imagine I’d feel funny about all the attention my faith has been getting of late—being wildly acclaimed by the damned seems like sort of a mixed compliment. The fuss began sometime around 2024, maybe in September, when the Times honored the 250th anniversary of the Shakers’ arrival in North America with a long, affectionate profile of the two remaining full members (there’s also a third in training). Last Christmas, moviegoers leery of Avatar: Fire and Ash had the option of celebrating the Savior’s birthday with a ticket to Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, starring Amanda Seyfried as the first Shaker leader (and second Savior). The Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, is getting an $18 million Annabelle Selldorf complex. Shaker furniture is as popular as ever—ICA Philadelphia just debuted a handsome show about Shaker design—and dozens of haute new restaurants borrow from the Believers’ proud legacy of cornbread and pheasant.

Why all the pomp and circumstance for this most pomp-allergic of religions? Of course, 250 is a good round number, but last year Anabaptism turned five hundred and I don’t recall many trend pieces about foot washing. Read any of the recent articles on the subject, however, and you will find some version of the following point: The Shakers are hot, hot, hot right now because our civilization is dying. A radical utopian alternative to Trump’s America is bound to seem more appealing than usual. No doubt there’s something to this theory. But every radical Christian sect proposes some kind of outsider community. Why this one?

The single most penetrating remark anyone has made about 2020s Shaker chic may well have come from the mouth of Brother Arnold Hadd, who worried that his faith’s depiction in the media would amount to “the same garbage regurgitated a hundred million times.” Still, nothing is quite as revealing as garbage. Understand what people will cross the street to avoid, or at least what they will pretend to avoid, and you’re already halfway to understanding who they are.

THE SHAKERS MAY BE THE ONLY millenarian Christians in American history who need sinners like you and me to think they’re cool. Shakers are, in essence, Timothée Chalamet in Lady Bird (2017), alone and mysterious but careful to sit just close enough for strangers to see and swoon.

I mean this neither as insult nor praise; it’s simply part of the deal that Shakers have to care about PR. Their messiah, Ann Lee, was born in Manchester, England, in 1736 and grew up in the factories of the early Industrial Revolution. Later on, she gave birth to four babies, all of whom died in infancy. From tragedy bloomed the central Shaker truth: Lee was the female reincarnation of Jesus, sent to tell her Brothers and Sisters that humankind was not meant to reproduce. The melancholy irony, when you consider some of the recent talk about Shaker utopias, is that these people have never been able to run off to a self-contained world like the Mormons or the Mennonites. They have no heirs, only recruits, and for recruits they have always needed to get in with the society they reject. You will notice, e.g., that Arnold Hadd overcame his worries and talked to the Times. He also did an interview with Eater in which he revealed that his ideal dinner is veal marsala with spaghetti.

The Testament of Ann Lee could not be a better ad for the Shaker way if Brother Arnold had directed it himself. As played by Seyfried, Mother Ann is a creature of pure goodness, without guile or odor—when she has an ethereal vision of Adam and Eve, the pair could almost be hallucinating her. In Hollywood films about ambitious young leaders, there’s usually a dash of skepticism (will power corrupt them? etc.), but if any such ambiguities flavored this tale, I didn’t notice. To put Fastvold in conversation with her partner, the director Brady Corbet: In The Brutalist (2024), the architect László Tóth gets a rich patron and immediately starts bossing around his subordinates; in The Testament of Ann Lee, Ann gets absolute authority over the souls of dozens of followers but never so much as swats a gnat. The biggest compliment one can pay this film may be that, for most of the run time, you wholly forget you are watching the origin story of a club that demonizes sex and separates children from their parents.

Ann is the victim, first, of poverty; then of a sadomasochistic husband played by Christopher Abbott, perfectly cast as a Coraline-eyed creep; then, in this film’s queasiest scene, of eighteenth-century medicine. Seyfried’s calm, otherworldly charisma has always been one of her strengths as a performer; here, though, she’s determined to cover it up with stage blood and artful thespian convulsing—the latest in a long line of stars slaughtering their own glamour at the altar of Serious Acting (see also the normally wonderful Jessie Buckley in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet [2025]). Edmund Kean’s last words notwithstanding, awards committees are more Opus Dei than Shaker, dutifully rewarding whoever screams the loudest. Naturally, Seyfried was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Whatever you might think of this performance, it suits the tale Fastvold is trying to tell. Ann Lee endures so much pain you can’t picture her or her fellow Believers causing any. She travels to Niskayuna, New York, moves through New England to recruit followers, braves the mob that sends her to early martyrdom—it’s all very cut and dry, so that there’s no room left for lingering questions, human motivations beyond the conveniently black or white. People will sometimes talk about films like The Testament of Ann Lee and The Brutalist as though they are grown-up alternatives to multiplex pap, but in point of fact neither offers a view of human nature significantly more nuanced than Ant-Man’s. ’Tis a gift to be simple, I know. But simplistic?

STRANGE AS IT SOUNDS to say of a movie that features BDSM, an apocalyptic solar eclipse, and Tim Blake Nelson, The Testament of Ann Lee ends just as things are getting interesting. Having survived years of bullying, the Shakers lobbied for tolerance in the place where all genuine political change happens in America: the marketplace. Prejudice proved to be no match for entrepreneurialism. A certain washing machine won the Shakers the top prize at a Philadelphia fair, and dozens of their other products became bestsellers (the ban on individual ownership did not stop these people from patenting their inventions). By the 1830s the Society had spread as far as Indiana and was making so much money that some nonbelievers converted for the food.

With good business came good press. Emerson and Thoreau liked the Shakers up to a point, and in an 1857 issue of Harper’s the eminent historian Benson John Lossing gave them a rave. Dickens thought the Shakers “grim,” but Bayard Taylor praised them, as did William Dean Howells, Thomas Merton, and Guy Davenport—probably no other religion has been reviewed so affectionately by so many great American writers.

Read any of these accounts, and eventually you will hear about the Shakers’ awesome, mildly terrifying industry. It’s a funny word, “industry,” referring both to a broad, abstract field of human endeavor and to a personal quality, but for Believers these two senses were one and the same. They rose at dawn and devoted their days to tasks for which individuality didn’t matter. Men blacksmithed and farmed, women sewed and gardened, and everyone who could lift a broom participated in an unending frenzy of cleaning. Goods were assembled from interchangeable parts by interchangeable workers. The superhuman efficiency that made so many visiting writers gasp was, at heart, the capitalist division of labor, glimpsed at a time when it was still novel enough to bother pointing out. Shakers were Taylorists before Frederick Winslow Taylor was born, ergonomic before the concept existed. The key difference between their industry and everybody else’s, as John T. Kirk argued in The Shaker World: Art, Life, Belief (1997), was their resistance to hyperspecialization. In the years when millions of Americans stood at the assembly line cutting wires or tightening bolts or pushing pinheads onto pins, Believers were at least permitted the pleasure of a single, end-to-end task, like table making or house sweeping. They were hard workers but never factory drones. You could say this is because their leaders prioritized dignity and happiness over dreary efficiency. You could also say it’s because hyperspecialization, with its high rate of burnouts and dropouts, isn’t all that efficient and never has been.

The most famous good to emerge from the Shaker system, in any case, was wooden furniture, of which ICA Philadelphia is showing some austerely ravishing examples. Does that sound like an oxymoron? If so, I invite you to go to the museum and nourish—as opposed to feast—your eyes on a Shaker chest of drawers. Spend enough time with an object like this, with its marmalade glow and stacks of unornamented rectangles, and most other kinds of beauty will start to seem overblown, distractions from the hard little miracle of a perfect straight line, a perfect right-angled grid.

The paradox of Shaker craft, the thing that distinguishes it from more robotic minimalisms, is that you never quite get this perfection. There is always a faint, handmade gawkiness to the objects: An elder Believer’s cane wiggles to the floor; a rug beater lopes ever so slightly to the left; the tapered legs of a chair strain up, up, up to the sky like a kid trying to reach the top shelf. You find it in some of the architecture, too—the remains of Great Stone Barn at New Lebanon, for one, with the roof slanting left and the uneven grid of windows sagging right. (Celebrating the Shakers by adding a chilly Selldorf structure to their museum, speaking of which, strikes me as another mixed compliment, like rewarding a competitive hot dog eater with tofu.) Looking at artifacts like these, what you sense isn’t order, exactly, so much as a yearning for order, so deep you have no choice but to pledge your life to it. Almost everything the Shakers made conveys this, which goes some way toward explaining why even one of their spoons can make me want to weep.

And yet neither The Testament of Ann Lee nor ICA Philadelphia’s show is very wood-forward. The few tables and chairs in Fastvold’s film linger just long enough to give us a wink, like the historical foreshadowing on Mad Men, but not long enough to leave much of a mark. The ICA exhibition doesn’t even get around to the tables, etc., until its second half, which, when dealing with Shakers, can only be a conscious choice. The closest thing to an explanation shows up in the wall text in a form of a quotation from Mildred Barker, who presumably spoke for many of her Brothers and Sisters when she insisted, “I don’t want to be remembered as a chair.”

NOR  WOULD I, when you put it like that, though it’s worth stressing that this very woman—an adviser for influential Shaker exhibitions at the Whitney and the Met, as well as a cofounder of The Shaker Quarterly—is one of the reasons everybody does remember those lovely chairs. You will recognize, I think, the same combination of scolding and hyping that Brother Arnold favors when he’s condemning the media in the pages of the Times.

Still, let’s try to take Sister Mildred at her word. Both ICA’s show and Fastvold’s film make a strong case that the quintessential Shaker art, the one the others orbit, is dance. It’s probably a better candidate than furniture—dance was made by and for Shakers, at least, set to Shaker music and practiced in Shaker meetinghouses. (A large percentage of Shaker chairs, by comparison, were sold off to nonbelievers before any actual Shakers sat on them.) It’s there in the name, too: From the start, the Believers shook with the ecstasy of worship, energizing each other and scaring the neighbors.

As the faith spread through the New World, different dances hardened into regional variations. One of these, practiced at a rare Black-led Shaker settlement in the late nineteenth century, inspired the choreographer Reggie Wilson to organize a suite of performances that premiered at Jacob’s Pillow in 2019. Snippets play on a loop at ICA, one of several twenty-first-century artworks in the show making the case for the Shakers’ continued relevance. Wilson hasn’t claimed to be aiming for authenticity, but you can learn the basics of Shaker dance from the footage all the same. The moves are quick and simple and symbolic: You stomp on the earth, you raise your hands to the heavens. The performers don’t touch or take solos. The work, as ever, is divided evenly, so that the beauty comes from a patient accumulation of parts, not the finesse of a particular step or the grace of a particular body.

Other variations were sweatier than this. One 1873 etching, displayed near the Reggie Wilson video, shows a huge roomful of Brothers and Sisters parading around in concentric circles, the males flailing and hooting themselves counterclockwise while the females do the same in the rival direction. The Shakers didn’t have sex, but they had heaps of this—you can all but hear the thwarted grunts, almost smell the bodies brush muskily by. Keep an eye on the lower left side of the image, though: Long benches of Believer elders watch the fun, hands joined over their laps like obedient schoolkids. They may not be dancing, but they’re very much a part of the choreography, maybe even the decisive one. The indoor typhoon roars, but nothing can challenge the authority of the old people. Everything is under control.

Literally every thing. At the time of this etching’s completion, Shakers had been in North America for almost a full century, and a long line of leaders had agreed on a set of rules to regulate every nanosecond and millimeter of Shaker life—the fact that the seated Brothers in the picture hold their right hands over their left ones, to give you some idea, is no accident. By comparison with this, let alone Wilson’s interpretations, the dancing in The Testament of Ann Lee feels almost feral; particular in the early, Manchester-set scenes it threatens to burst through any barrier the Anglican establishment might be foolish enough to place around it. Watching everyone writhe, you’d never imagine Mother Ann’s successors would someday concern themselves with the proper arrangement of thumbs.

It’s not often that I walk out of a movie knowing I have seen something that might be sublime and might be bad but feels genuinely new either way. Biopics whiz through theaters like bullet trains, but The Testament of Ann Lee is, to date, the only one I’m aware of with musical numbers in which actors jerk, twirl, leap, pant, pound their chests, release odd involuntary-sounding noises, and occasionally break the fourth wall. In a way, there is nothing but fourth-wall breaking to be found here: The usual plot machinery falls away, leaving only the spectacle of contemporary people trying their damnedest to seem like eighteenth-century ecstatic worshippers. When I saw The Testament of Ann Lee at BAM, not all the involuntary noises came from the film: For much of the first big number, I couldn’t decide if I was laughing or gasping, not that those are necessarily opposites. The woman sitting next to me was chortling even more than I was, but after the credits rolled she told me she’d adored the movie (apparently the musical sequences reminded her of her yoga studio).

If, like me, you have made up your mind that the dancing in The Testament of Ann Lee is worth celebrating, you’ll need to make peace with its basic silliness. In an interview with Vulture, choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall claims she pushed the actors to forget they were “doing a dance move” and “could very much tell [whether] people were just doing it as a movement or were really in it. The quality is so different.” Now, quality is a subjective thing, but I would venture to say that I can tell, too, and that something like half of the time the performers are fully aware of what century they’re in. When they twirl and chest pound, they do it as polished dancers, not panting Believers. Even when their eyes are shut they don’t look lost in religiosity; they seem to be trying very hard not to wince at the camera buzzing in their faces.

Somehow, you could almost say miraculously, this doesn’t spoil the spectacle. If anything, I’d say it brings Fastvold’s Hollywood imitation closer to the eeriness of the originals. Take another look at that etching, please. Try to imagine you’re one of those people dancing around in the center of the meetinghouse. You’ve done this before; depending on how long ago you fled your old life, you may have done it dozens or hundreds or thousands of times. You know how the floorboards feel when you stomp on them, the distinct smell and scratch of your Brothers and Sisters as they race around is familiar to you already, and the entire time you are inescapably aware that there are benches and benches of elders staring straight at you. You are trying to dance and touch the divine and watch yourself touch the divine all at once, and it makes your brain fizz. Shaker dance, like Shaker furniture, like Shaker everything, was always more about straining toward God than God. Which would make Fastvold and Rowlson-Hall’s musical numbers very Shaker indeed.

THE FIRST AND LAST THING you see in ICA Philadelphia’s show is a blue cardboard replica of a Shaker meetinghouse, made by the artist Amie Cunat in 2025. It’s big enough to walk through and fitted with the usual Shaker amenities, chiefly the wooden pegs from which thousands of Brothers and Sisters have hung their clothes in the last 252 years. There are, needless to say, no actual Shakers within, just nonbelievers, which seems almost too tidy a metaphor. The reason we’re so interested in these people, their dancing especially, may be because we’re desperate for the frictionless ease of a community ruled by love. The bad news is, the Shakers longed for exactly the same thing. The good news is, longing together can be a kind of community, too.

But I think there is one final reason for the recent burst of Shakermania, and tellingly neither The Testament of Ann Lee nor ICA Philadelphia has much to say about it. In the end, the defining fact about the Society of Believers may not be celibacy or beautiful artistry or female leadership. These people prospered so quickly in America, after all, because they were ready to work long hours manufacturing and selling their products. They rested little and took few breaks and swept their homes obsessively because their messiah had insisted there was no dirt in Heaven. The usual tricks capitalism devises in order to squeeze extra productivity out of its workers—wages, extreme division of labor, the promise of social advancement someday—weren’t necessary with this bunch. They believed in industriousness for the sake of industriousness, worshipped it as fervidly as they worshipped God. They were workaholics.

You can only learn so much about a group of people by studying the things that fascinate them. If you really want to know what makes them tick, notice what they pass over in silence, the beliefs scratched so deep in their souls that they barely register as beliefs at all. In other words: Hard labor barely figures in the recent chatter about the Shakers because we barely notice. The manic productivity that once stuck out to Emerson now seems as natural as weather—we’ve all long since adjusted to being perpetually on the clock, to working ourselves ragged in pursuit of some vaguely defined reward, to hating ourselves for not pushing hard enough, to taking no time off and feeling guilty for wanting any, to tut-tutting our peers for their laziness and worrying we’ll be scolded for our own.

Americans are so accustomed to thinking of themselves as an indulgent people that we find it almost impossible to admit we’re also a neurotically busy one. Pleasure itself has been rebranded as a kind of labor, a short sensible breather before the important stuff resumes. (Is there a more subtly terrifying expression in the English language than “recharge?”) As in all workaholic cultures, we’ve convinced ourselves our problem is laziness. The system works fine, so long as—what was that about the same garbage regurgitated a hundred times?—we grow up and do our fair share.

No doubt there were plenty of Shakers who swept and sawed and fretted their ways through life believing much the same. One of the few who appeared to sense the truth was Brother Isaac Newton Youngs, who somehow found the leisure time to compose the following poem in the 1840s. Change a word or two and he could have written it last Thursday:

People talk as though it’s time we learned from the Believers’ little utopia. Don’t they notice how much we have already? Seen one way, there are two or three Shakers left on the planet; seen another, there are millions. Millions of souls too busy for family or romance, sweating and toiling to earn their shining treasure above! At long last, the beautiful dream has come true.