How a Celibate Religion Outlived Its Own Math
The Shakers banned sex and still grew to six thousand members, then nearly died out, then grew by one in 2025.
On August 25, 2025, a Maine television station reported that the world's Shaker population had risen by 50 percent. The increase was one person: April Baxter, accepted as a sister at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, joining Brother Arnold Hadd and Sister June Carpenter. Three Shakers, sharing the last working community of a denomination that built nineteen villages across the United States and gave the country its first commercial seed industry, the circular saw design, the flat broom, and 'Simple Gifts'.
The community was founded by Ann Lee, a Manchester factory worker who arrived in colonial New York in 1774 with a small band of followers and a doctrine that sex was the original sin. Members confessed past sins, signed their property over to the society, and lived in single-sex dormitories under a rule of strict celibacy. Growth came entirely from converts and from orphans raised in Shaker schools. It was, in growth-rate terms, the worst possible business model for a church.
It worked anyway, for a while. By around 1840 the United Society of Believers had roughly 6,000 members, sold furniture and herbs across the eastern seaboard, and ran villages whose architectural simplicity quietly seeded the design vocabulary later borrowed by Bauhaus and the Eames studio. Then industrial labor markets, secular orphanages, and the slow arithmetic of celibacy did their work. One village closed, then another.
Sabbathday Lake refused to close. Its three members hold the line, take new applicants, and keep singing the songs.
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