Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Philippe Chavance has been studying Shaker architecture for over twenty years.While a professor at University of Kentucky Department of Architecture between 1993 and 1998, he worked extensively analyzing the architecture of Pleasant Hill Shaker Village.As a significant contribution to Shaker scholarship, Chavance determined the location of "Holy Sinai's Plain," a site once used by the Pleasant Hill Shakers for outdoor worship, whose location was unknown in modern times.Chavance continues to study both the architecture and the spirituality of the early Shaker West, and his work on the Pleasant Hill Trustee's Office Staircase was recently featured in Kentucky by Design: Decorative Arts and American Culture (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015).Chavance is a practicing architect who builds in both France and the United States.Chavance delivered the keynote address at the CSA 2015 conference at Pleasant Hill Shaker Village, October 2015.Using the conference theme of "Marking the Land: How Intentional Communities Shape Their Physical and Social Landscapes," Chavance's talk examined how Shaker spirituality was made manifest in the architecture of Pleasant Hill.We are pleased to present this essay based on the 2015 conference keynote address.* * * * * In the history of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, or the Shakers, the "opening of the Gospel" in the western states of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana in the early nineteenth century has COMMUNAL SOCIETIES 52 often been viewed as a simple extension of eastern Shakerism, a mere distant addition of a certain number of communities.One decisive point contradicts this elementary view.Due to the Bill of Rights' integration in the US Constitution, granting "rights of conscience" to all and protection for religious minorities, the western Believers developed a renewed relationship with the world, one that was distinct from the former eastern experience.This essay will depict this critical evolution.It will expose how a more open and direct relation with the broader world deeply affected essential aspects of Shaker life and consequently represented a paradigm shift in Shakerism. COMMUNAL SOCIETIES 54first in England and then in America, is portrayed in one of the earliest printed Shaker texts, Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee and the Elders With Her, as a litany of sufferings and persecutions.This text produces much of the founding narrative of the Shakers. 2 At the core of this narrative, the world is hostile, always connoted negatively and antagonized by the Shakers.But whatever the hagiographic dimension of the account is, there is no doubt that the persecutions were real and violent.The reality of religious persecution in early America was undeniable.It was therefore logical and legitimate for the early Shakers, for fear of the world's reaction, to avoid the world or to keep it at a distance.Beginning in America in 1774, Ann Lee and her followers chose to settle in Watervliet, New York, in "an obscure place in the wilderness, remote from the public eye." 3 Later, as recounted in the same text, "The testimony was withdrawn from the world about the year 1785 and was rarely opened to any until about the year 1797." 4 During this twelve-year period of isolation from the world, the early eastern Shakers consolidated their religious practice.The chosen strategy was to act, in terms of presence, according to what the world could accept.It affected all domains of presence, from opening of religious beliefs to building construction.This defensive view produced a progressive unveiling of the Shaker beliefs and restraint in construction.During the earliest years of the Shakers in America, the theology was unveiled step by step.Some of the earliest Shaker apostates report an incremental "initiation" for the newcomers.They would learn the principles and practices and then be gradually introduced to the "divine" nature of Ann Lee. 5 Later, when facing the prospect of an open and full publication of their faith in the western region in 1806, Lucy Wright, the head of the Shaker ministry in New Lebanon, New York, expressed the "considerable" hesitation she and Joseph Meacham experienced 2 Ebenezer Bishop, Testimonies of the Life, Character, Revelations, and Doctrines of Mother Ann Lee and the Elders With Her (Hancock, MA: Talcott & Deming, 1816).Much of the first twenty-two chapters of this volume is devoted to the persecutions suffered by Ann Lee and her early followers.
Source: Communal Societies
Author: Philippe Chavance
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2947612985