Celibacy required of all members

Ann Lee (1736 to 1784), the English-born founder whom Shakers call Mother Ann, taught that sexual union was the root act of the Fall in Eden and that the return of Christ's spirit, which the Shaker movement holds occurred in her own person and ministry, required followers to renounce sexual relations entirely rather than reform them. The Testimony of Christ's Second Appearing, compiled by Shaker elders after Lee's death from her recorded teaching and the community's early theological development, states celibacy as one of the tradition's foundational testimonies alongside confession of sin, communal ownership of property and separation from the world, treating the four together as the concrete form the restored gospel takes in practice rather than as separate rules. Because Shaker theology holds that Christ's spirit already appeared a second time in Lee's ministry, the community frames its celibate life not as an ascetic discipline aimed at some future reward but as already living within the resurrected order, in which, following a reading of Christ's own statement that the resurrected neither marry nor are given in marriage, marriage as an institution has no further place. Every member entering a Shaker community was required to accept complete sexual abstinence as a condition of membership, applied uniformly rather than reserved for a spiritual elite.

Because Shaker doctrine forbids sexual reproduction among members, the movement could never sustain its population the way an ordinary religious community does, through children raised inside it; every Shaker had to be either a convert who joined as an adult or a child taken in through the community's practice of accepting orphans and indentured children, some of whom later chose to stay and formally join as adults while others left at maturity. Stephen Stein's history of the movement traces how this structural dependence on continuous conversion left Shaker numbers acutely sensitive to the broader currents of American religious enthusiasm: membership peaked at several thousand across nineteen communities in the mid nineteenth century, during a period of active revivalism, then declined steadily as the revivalist climate that had fed conversions cooled and as an increasingly secular and mobile American society offered fewer candidates drawn to a life of celibate communal labor. By the twentieth century the same doctrine that had given the movement its distinct communal economy, since celibate members held no private households or heirs and devoted their labor entirely to the shared community, left it unable to replace elderly members as fast as it lost them, so a doctrine understood by Shakers as living already within the resurrection became, by ordinary demographic mechanics, a direct cause of the movement's near disappearance.