"I Don't Want to Be Remembered as a Chair"

What happens when a faith begins to fade away? Well, the four remaining Shakers of Sabbathday Lake are certainly facing that issue square in the face.

The Sabbathday Lake community has survived 225 years, and for the last 16, it has been the only community on the planet, after the one in Canterbury, N.H. shut its doors.

It was never the largest community. After it initially swelled to around two hundred people in its early years, it settled to around one hundred in the 19th century and slowly dwindled in the 20th. Other communities around the country had several hundred members at different times.

But this simple, small community is the one that has persevered.

“I have a firm belief that as long as this is God’s work, God is going to send the hands to keep it going. So, we’re very small at four, but it was a very, very small group that started in America, too. We just have to wait and see, and be faithful,” says Brother Arnold Hadd of the community.

He says that even though so few people are joining the community, he sees a turnaround in the future. “The dwindling numbers are just because people are turning away from religion in general,” he says.

But if the Shakers do become a note in the history books, Hadd seems at peace with that as well. After all, the Shakers, a celibate tradition, have never based their success on numbers. “We believe it is the truth, and whether others see it as the truth or not, we have to live and die by it,” he says.

What is disturbing, however is what the Shakers may be remembered as. The quote I used as a header was said by Sister Mildred Barker, who died in 1990. She saw the beginning of the decline of the Shakers firsthand, from when Shakers stopped taking in orphans in the 1950s and 1960s, to when communities started shutting down firsthand. Judging by the quote, which was relayed to me by a few at the community, the memory of Shakers worried her just as much as the possibility of them disappearing.

Hadd, who is normally quite polite and still uses the Shaker “yay” and “nay” instead of “yes” and “no,” slipped into the vernacular when I asked about this. “It pisses me off,” he said, relating stories of tourists who visit the community, thinking it’s a crafts guild and expecting to buy things. “No one dedicates their life to making furniture. We dedicate ourselves to something greater.”

Imagine if you dedicated your life to a celibate community, somewhat isolated from the rest of the world, where you would do hard manual farm labor. You would pray a few times a day, establish a personal connection with God, and eschew many worldly pleasures for a simple life. You would spend your entire life this way, and when you died, the world remembered you made nice baskets. Even though the Shakers are looking for recognition from a higher power, and not from Earthly brethren, it still must be an incredible thorn in the side.

Loss of the meaning to religious history is terrifyingly common in American History. With a continuing battle to envision the Founding Fathers as religious zealots or impious agnostics, how religion has really shaped this country is lost.

How many people, when they sing “Simple Gifts,” know what it meant to the Shakers? Or even with “Amazing Grace,” how many think of it as a song to convert slaves coming from Africa? Or know that in many colonial towns, churches collected taxes, and if you weren’t a member of that church, you had to pay taxes without voting rights?

We take the meat of religion out of our history to the point that no one really knows where we come from, and we allow people to make that up for us. When no one knows our real religious history, it’s easy for extreme fundamentalists and secularists to shift everything direction, reducing important conversations to a competition for the most convincing speaker.

But it also does a great disservice to those in history who worked so hard for a larger purpose, to make this world better in ways that transcends democracy and empire. They become peons in a soulless game, furniture makers.