See Acts 2:38.

Shaker doctrine opposed marriage in favor of a life of total celibacy. For Mother Ann Lee, celibacy was “the key to sinless perfection and salvation.” A late eighteenth-century convert to Shakerism named Reuben Rathbun wrote, “The natural seed of copulation was looked upon as the most unclean and hateful of any thing in the natural creation,” and celibacy was required as the necessary “cross against the flesh.” The Shaker doctrine of celibacy led to an explicit segregation of the sexes and, as one historian has explained, became the “basis of its theology and its communal structuring.” (Garrett, Origins of the Shakers, 152–153, 223, 233–234.)

Garrett, Clarke. Origins of the Shakers: From the Old World to the New World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

See Mark 10:7–9.

JS’s revision of the Bible earlier declared that God created all things, including human beings, “spiritually before they were naturally upon the face of the Earth.” (Old Testament Revision 1, p. 5 [Moses 3:5].)

Unlike the proscription against marriage and sexual relations, the principle of vegetarianism was not in general practice among the Shakers. Still, as early as 1820 there was an attempt on the part of the Ministry, located in New Lebanon, New York, to persuade Shaker communities to adopt vegetarianism, and leaders spoke against the use of meat, particularly pork. This revelation’s statement that it was “not ordained of God” to teach that believers should “abstain from meats that man should not eat the same” is evidence of the principle of vegetarianism being a belief held among the North Union Shakers in 1831. Teachings against the consumption of pork, apparently connected to the biblical prohibition observed by the Israelites, were reportedly not uncommon among Mormons living in the Kirtland area. Levi Hancock recorded that around May 1831, “the Preaching in Kirtland once was against the use of Pork— Once Joseph asked me to help him feed his hogs. I did so I osserved [observed] that the Jews never ate Pork He answered If I eat pork I will know what my hogs eat! And I left to this conclusion there are sometimes extremes in Preaching.” Hancock went on to explain that JS described the Israelite law against pork as a proscription God established for a specific time and place but that “Israel was so bound up with law that they still kept up the old established practice of not eating hog meat Finaly they got so much law they could not keep it themselves.” (Stein, Shaker Experience, 156–158; Puskar-Pasewicz, “Debates over Meatless Diets in Nineteenth-Century Shaker Communities,” 109–120; Hancock, Autobiography, ca. 1896, 22.)

Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Puskar-Pasewicz, Margaret. “Kitchen Sisters and Disagreeable Boys: Debates over Meatless Diets in Nineteeth-Century Shaker Communities.” In Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias, edited by Etta M. Madden and Martha L. Finch, 109–124. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Hancock, Levi. Autobiography, ca. 1854. Photocopy. CHL. MS 8174.

Earlier, in his revision of the Bible, JS modified part of Genesis 9:5 to read “surely blood shall not be shed only for meat to save your lives and the blood of every beast will I require at your hands.” (Old Testament Revision 1, p. 24 [Joseph Smith Translation, Genesis 9:11].)

In 1806, more than twenty years after Ann Lee’s death, Ohio Shakers wrote to the Lead Ministry in New Lebanon, New York, to “request the privilege of opening to the world the first Foundation & Pillar” of their faith—that “Christ’s Second Appearance” had been in the person of Ann Lee. Permission was granted, and the 1808 publication of The Testimony of Christ’s Second Appearing became “the first General Statement of the present faith & principles” of the Believers. No contemporary evidence exists that Lee herself ever unambiguously taught such a doctrine. As their Christology developed, Shakers proclaimed that the “Christ spirit,” the divine anointing, filled Ann Lee in this last dispensation just as it filled Jesus in an earlier dispensation. This was necessary because a dual creation—man and woman—demanded a dual redemption in the form of Jesus and Ann Lee. The second appearing of the Christ spirit in Mother Ann restored “that which was lost by the transgression of the first woman” and “finish[ed] the work of man’s final redemption.” This belief was also rooted in the Shaker view of an androgynous God, with “Christ & Mother as representatives of the Dual principle in Deity.” (Stein, Shaker Experience, 68–72, 260, 326.)

Stein, Stephen J. The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

The copy of this revelation that originated with Ashbel Kitchell has “to rise & be exalted.” (“Mormon Interview,” 11 [D&C 49:23].)

“A Mormon Interview. Copied from Brother Ashbel Kitchell’s Pocket Journel,” 1856. Elisha D. Blakeman copy of Ashbel Kitchell, Reminiscences. Photocopy in editors’ possession. Original at Shaker Museum and Library, Old Chatham, NY. Also available as Lawrence R. Flake, “A Shaker View of a Mormon Mission,” BYU Studies 20, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 94–99.

Shakers rejected the premillennialist idea that great cataclysms would accompany a second advent of Christ and that “the world is to be destroyed by fire.” Instead, Shakers argued that a spiritual fire would purge the wicked, and that they felt “its operation upon our own souls, and have found it to be, in very deed, a consuming fire to lust and pride, and every other corruption of man’s fallen nature.” (Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers, 148–149.)

A Summary View of the Millennial Church, or United Society of Believers, (Commonly Called Shakers.) Comprising the Rise, Progress and Practical Order of the Society; together with the General Principles of Their Faith and Testimony. Albany: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1823.