Turning from Conversion: Shakers, Anti-Shakers, and the Battle for Public Opinion

The Shakers, a small ecstatic religious group, found themselves at the center of controversy in the early nineteenth century when a number of apostates published accounts accusing the sect of all variety of malfeasance. This forced the Shakers to publish responses, and the resultant public battle had a number of interesting features. In this article I examine how these attacks mask a general national anxiety regarding religious identity. Anti-Shakers sought to vilify the group by employing captivity and conversion narratives to a nineteenth century audience weaned on such tales. However by manipulating established tropes, these antiShakers over-played their hand, and the Shakers proved remarkably adept at reversing the terms of the argument.

[1]  D. Bromley.  The Politics of Religious Apostasy: The Role of Apostates in the Transformation of Religious Movements , 1998 .

[2]  A. Douglas.  The Feminization of American Culture , 1977 .

[3]  Christopher Castiglia.  Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst , 1996 .

[4]  Priscilla J. Brewer.  Shaker Communities, Shaker Lives , 1986 .

[5]  Karsten Kumoll.  »From the Native's Point of View«? , 2005 .

[6]  A. Burstein.  Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image , 1999 .

[7]  V. Turner.  The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual , 1967 .

[8]  S. Juster.  Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England , 1994 .

[9]  Adam Jortner.  The Political Threat of a Female Christ: Ann Lee, Morality, and Religious Freedom in the United States, 1780–1819 , 2009 .

[10]  J. S. Fluhman.  A Peculiar People: Anti-Mormonism and the Making of Religion in Nineteenth-Century America , 2012 .

[11]  Pamela J. Nickless,et al.  Mother's First-Born Daughters: Early Shaker Writings on Women and Religion. , 1994 .

[12]  M. Farland,et al.  The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America , 1991 .

[13]  Jay Fliegelman,et al.  Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance , 1993 .

[14]  李幼升,et al.  Ph , 1989 .

[15]  Patricia F. Caldwell.  The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression , 1987 .

[16]  Bruce Tucker,et al.  Radical Sects of Revolutionary New England , 1982 .

[17]  Virginia Lieson Brereton.  From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present , 1991 .

[18]  Amanda Porterfield.  Conceived in Doubt: Religion and Politics in the New American Nation , 2012 .

[19]  F. Foster.  Written by herself , 1993 .