The youngest Shaker in the world is 67 years old, and his name is Arnold. He lives alongside Sister June, 86, in a magnificent brick building designed to sleep about 70 — the dwelling house of the last active Shaker village in the world, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine. Together they constitute one of the longest-running utopian experiments in America.
It’s a triumph, as utopian experiments aren’t known for their durability, though the impulse — to start afresh apart from the mess of mainstream society, to reinvent society with like-minded people — has always been strong here. Out of the many that America has fostered, this is one of the most abiding. Out of the tens of thousands of Shakers who have lived out their faith in the last quarter-millennium, these two remain.
Brother Arnold Hadd and Sister June Carpenter live in an active village that is also a museum — they are inhabitants and custodians and exhibit all at once. Sabbathday Lake is a tidy, elegant configuration of buildings anchored by the brick dwelling house, constructed when the brethren numbered around 200. The Shakers maintain a small farm, with a herd of 70 sheep and four cows, and they sell herbs and teas harvested from their garden as well as furniture, beeswax candles and other “fancy goods.” Curious members of the public drive through even when Sabbathday Lake is closed to visitors, and pop out of their cars to wander up and down the dirt driveway, squinting at the Meeting House. Brother Arnold — Shakers go by their title and first name only — frequently comes out to greet people who show up, though he no longer offers tours. One weekend, two teenagers knocked on the kitchen door to ask if they could hunt turkey in the Shakers’ woods. He told them to go ahead.
These days, Brother Arnold gets up early and spends an hour alone in the kitchen, cooking and enjoying the chance to be by himself before the day’s inevitable bustle. He is a strong, tall man, big enough to pick up a sheep and hold it still for shearing, but his features are delicate: light eyes, a close white beard and a small mouth. Because of Sister June’s age and health, her role in the community is a private one, and it is Brother Arnold who serves as the head of the religion, the village leader, the farmer, gardener, shepherd, printer, housekeeper, cook, baker, author, editor, historian, spokesman and elder. This, he admits, is not what he imagined when he became a Shaker at age 21. He never wanted to lead a religion. When he arrived, he’d never dealt with sheep.
When I entered the dwelling house one Friday last year, Brother Arnold was preparing the noon meal, which staff members, visitors and volunteers often join. People assembled in the dining room after a bell clanged at 11:50. Michael Graham, a bright-eyed, athletic man in his 50s who directs the nonprofit that helps run Sabbathday Lake, traded jokes with Leonard Brooks, who worked for years as the director of the village’s museum and library before retiring. Sister June, petite and shy with a bowl cut, entered with her walker and settled at her usual seat. Members of the gardening staff came in, as did two neighbors who were helping with chores. As the last platters of food emerged from the kitchen, the men and women parted to opposite sides of the room, standing behind straight-backed chairs at twin rectangular tables. Brother Arnold arrived last at the table, an apron still wrapped around his middle, and silence fell over the room. He grasped the back of his chair and bowed his head. A moment passed, and then two, and then the room filled with his bright “Amen!” Everyone picked up their plates.
The Shakers have been breaking bread in this manner since before the Revolutionary War. In 1774 a blacksmith’s daughter named Ann Lee led a small group of refugees from Manchester, England, where they had been jailed and beaten for following her heretical teachings: that God was both male and female, a Father-God and Mother-God. She taught that true virtue required sacrificing individual desires for the collective good, including total celibacy. She preached pacifism and the equality of the sexes and races. (Black Americans were welcomed as early as 1790, and communities purchased freedom for their enslaved members.) Her followers lived together in largely self-sufficient communal villages, everyone a brother and sister to one another.
To join, prospective Shakers had to divest themselves of their worldly attachments — property, marriages, debts — and dissolve their families: Husbands would live with the brothers, wives with the sisters, and children would be raised separately by the brethren assigned to child care. Shakers believe their calling is to manifest the kingdom of God on Earth, and their Millennial Laws, first drawn up in the 1820s, specified that every detail of their built environment should express that vocation. They organized their lives around the belief that work is a vehicle for the divine: When early Shakers planed wood for a barn, or designed that barn, or sheared sheep, or rolled out a pie crust, they understood themselves to be worshiping. Every day, through their labor, the flawed world in which they lived could be made more whole.
Though it’s hard to get a precise count, at Shakerism’s height in the 19th century, the community numbered roughly 5,000. Over its history, 19 Shaker communities spread out from New England as far west as Indiana and south into Kentucky and Florida. Now some of the most tangible products of their philosophy — the furniture — are more well known than the religion itself. Their chairs are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; knockoff replicas are sold in big-box stores. The traditional Shaker “aesthetic” is so popular that The New York Times’s Style section ran a 2022 feature on the influence of Shaker design on contemporary “tastemakers.” When I mentioned to a friend that I was writing about the Shakers, she replied, “Are those the furniture Christians?”
The Shakers are understandably tart about the way the outside world reduces their faith to consumer goods and the past tense. It was ever thus: The first time a newspaper published that the Shakers were on the verge of extinction was almost two centuries ago, not long after they first took root in New York. People have been lamenting Brother Arnold’s — and the faith’s — inevitable death to his face since he was in his 20s. Journalists have persistently described him as “the Last Shaker,” a premise he rejects. So it made sense that when I first contacted Brother Arnold for permission to visit and write about Sabbathday Lake, in 2016, he politely declined. When I asked again in 2022, he remained reluctant. Sabbathday Lake was busy: As the community approached the 250th anniversary of its founding, Michael Graham and Brother Arnold were making plans for a celebratory conference titled, somewhat defiantly, “God’s Work Will Stand: The Shakers’ Ongoing Testimony.” In Brother Arnold’s view, there was too much going on to waste time with another article bound to be “the same garbage regurgitated a hundred million times.” But Graham felt there was too much going on not to trumpet living Shakerism. At Graham’s urging, he relented.
As the ranks of the Shakers have shrunk, their connection to the “world” — what they call everything non-Shaker — has strengthened. Where being a Shaker once meant leaving the world behind to fortify moral clarity, today it means a growing partnership between Shakers and what Brother Arnold described to me as a strong “outer family.” But community is hard, he told me — the hardest part of this life, even harder than celibacy. Once, when I supposed aloud that Shakerism intrigues people because they imagine that they want “a simple life,” Brother Arnold snorted. “The communal life has never been simple!” The Shakers may have centuries of experience with the challenges of collective survival, but like many communities, they are now grappling with what their future might look like. Their existential struggle is a familiar one: How does a community or a culture adapt for sustainability without compromising its foundation?
Brother Arnold first visited a Shaker village — the site at Hancock, Mass., by then a historic museum — on a tour with his parents and two siblings as a teenager. They lived in Springfield, Mass., where Brother Arnold was enthusiastically involved in his Methodist Church alongside the rest of his family, though he craved something more full throated than a religion that was only practiced, as he saw it, on Sunday mornings. His father, a banker, intended for Arnold to be an accountant, which Arnold found preposterous: He couldn’t stand math. “I was supposed to fulfill his desire and to be a successful capitalist,” he snorted. He was a “hotheaded” teenager attracted to the religious fervor of the 1970s — like the Jesus movement, a youthful West Coast evangelicalism — and its intersections with social-justice movements.
The way that the Shakers put their commitment to faith, pacifism and equality at the center of everything they did appealed to him. He soon began visiting Sabbathday Lake, the only active Shaker community accepting new members, after high school. Established in 1783, Sabbathday Lake was the 11th Shaker community. Its inhabitants later named it Chosen Land, and when the weather is warm, the land does seem touched by a good light. The almost 2,000 acres span apple orchards, a serene bog full of blueberries and loons and beaver lodges, forest trails, pastures for sheep and cattle, an abundant herb garden and much of the land surrounding Sabbathday Lake itself.
The ’70s were a thriving time there: Leadership was shared by Sister Mildred Barker, an accomplished scholar and musician who led the community for almost 50 years, and Brother Ted Johnson, an energetic man then in his 40s who was reviving the community’s herb business and farm. They reopened Sunday’s worship meetings to the public, ran a periodical called Shaker Quarterly and made plans to expand their membership. “There was a joy in the life here, and in the people,” Brother Arnold said, though the village was poor. Some winters, they didn’t have enough money for heat.
The self-abnegation required of this level of communal Christianity necessitated some internal rearranging. Shakerism’s core spiritual task seems, at times, unimaginably hard: Subordinating your own dreams, preferences and even personality to the interests of the group and the pursuit of Christlike virtue. Over and over, for the rest of your life. Brother Arnold nearly quit in his first year over an argument with an older sister who wrongly accused him of some minor, long-forgotten transgression. “I’m just 21, living with people in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. You can’t talk back to them. I had no redress, so I just had to take it. Helpless.” He smiled. “I didn’t really think that that was right.” He appealed to Brother Ted, who told him that it didn’t matter if Arnold was right; he needed to get ahold of his wounded ego. Brother Arnold fumed while he worked, debating whether to leave. Eventually, he calmed down. Brother Ted was right. “If you’re here, you’re supposed to be here as a vessel of love,” he told me. “You’re not supposed to be here to be yourself. You’re supposed to be here to be better than yourself.”
No one manages this all the time, which is partly why Shakers believe that this spiritual work lasts their entire lives and beyond. Mother Lucy Wright, a leader from the 19th century, said that a Shaker will labor to the end of their life, and then keep laboring. For an emotional young man, this was tricky, and periodically over the decades he questioned the vocation, or felt worn out, unsupported or angry. He has had to continually labor to transcend his own limits and preferences, in both mundane ways (he’s sick and tired of cooking) and enormous ones (being the public face of a consistently misrepresented faith does not always appeal). But the submission of self to the group and to God feels fundamentally worthwhile to him.
Brother Arnold would have preferred a less prominent role in the community’s affairs, had he been given the choice. Some Shakers had the temperament for public relations: Sister Frances Carr, who joined the Shakers as a child in 1937 and died in 2017, thrived in an ambassadorial role. Brother Ted was a visionary advocate for the faith, but died young, leading the community to choose Brother Arnold as a church elder alongside Sister Mildred when he was still in his 20s. Now, having cared for the family he joined in the ’70s as one by one they aged and died, he is the only Shaker available to tell any story about them. This is his labor, too.
Periodically a would-be Shaker novice arrives with the intention to join the community formally. These people tend to be relatively young and for one reason or another have not stayed more than a few years. This is expected: Even people passionate about Sabbathday Lake are not necessarily suited for the monastic life. Michael Graham himself was once one of these young people. As a kid he became interested in Shakerism by collecting its woodwork, and he attended Bates College nearby because he was curious about Sabbathday Lake. Soon he was spending weekends and breaks at the village. He returned throughout college to stay and wanted to become a novice, but Brother Arnold intuited that Graham’s future lay elsewhere. It was a determination Graham resisted furiously.
“But I work hard,” he appealed to Brother Arnold at the time.
“But you don’t believe,” Brother Arnold pointed out.
“But I will work hard at believing!”
Brother Arnold replied, gently, that this isn’t how it works. Still, when Graham considered taking a job in Connecticut, Brother Arnold stepped down as the curator of the museum in part so that he could have a permanent position at Sabbathday Lake. Now, Graham occupies a unique role: He’s not a Shaker, but he is integral to the village’s functioning — and, by extension, the faith. Like Brother Arnold before him, Graham had to accept that loving and respecting the community can sometimes mean abiding by decisions you don’t immediately understand. In hindsight, he told me, though he loved Shakerism enough to devote his life to it, he didn’t really have the depth of conviction that he would have needed to live as a Shaker.
Like everyone else at Sabbathday Lake, Graham is curious whenever a new person makes an attempt: Will this be the one? If and when that person arrives, they will not have what Brother Arnold and Sister June did: the experience of being discipled in a robust Shaker community with many members shaping its culture and preserving its institutional memory. Whatever Shaker future they make would be different, though Shakers have always been interested in innovation, Brother Arnold reminded me. The village was one of the first properties in the area to be wired for telephone service, way back when.
When I asked Brother Arnold about his conviction that the religion will outlive him, he said: “I was given an intuition 30 years ago: The work is going on. You have to hold on, and you have to stay focused, and they will come.” He pointed out that Mother Ann had her initial group of Shaker émigrés build infrastructure for hundreds of followers before any arrived. Her small band was draining swamps for new dwelling houses, planting more crops than they could eat, and when they questioned her, she told them not to worry; people would come like doves. She was right: Acolytes finally arrived in the hundreds, overwhelming the village. Brother Arnold has decided to act in the same spirit. Mother Ann used to say that Shakers should open the windows and doors and receive whomever is sent. Brother Arnold’s job, as he sees it, is to keep the windows and doors open.
For generations, Shakers were intensely insulated, even restricting access to books and music from “the world.” Certain Shakers were designated for contact with the outside, receiving visitors or conducting business; everyone else was kept at a remove. But by the 20th century, Shakers progressively relaxed this rigid separation, forming friendships with select laypeople who were not precisely Shakers but were not of “the world” anymore, either. Now, these friends make up a majority of attendees at Sunday worship services. They work on the farm, drive long distances to visit and help repair old buildings and revive previously unseen parts of Shaker history from the archives. Sabbathday Lake wouldn’t run without these people, Graham pointed out to me. “We have two Shakers and a handful of employees,” he said. “Folks that don’t understand community think that there’s something fragile or ephemeral about that structure.” But this ever-growing outer family has become woven into the faith, inadvertently stretching and changing the traditional definition of what Shaker community means.
Graham is functionally the head of the outer family, and as when he was young, he works hard — often 85-hour weeks. He scoops manure, hays the fields, sweeps the road and then washes his hands and sits down to fund-raise and write grants, oversee building restoration and land management, coordinate workshops and public events. Over the past five years, he has raised millions of dollars to update and restore the village. It’s an exhausting calling — a vocation nearly as all-consuming as the one he originally intended.
“I once heard along the way that Winston Churchill identified himself as a buttress of the church, supporting it from the outside,” he told me. “And that really resonated with me. I’ve spent my life here supporting this place, understanding that my role is important and has value. I was called to be close. I might not have ever been called to actually be a Shaker, but I’ve been called close.”
One morning in the late spring, Graham walked me around the property and spoke about the community’s efforts to faithfully preserve Shaker history and make it available to anyone who came looking for it. Sabbathday Lake holds a large collection of Shaker materials, the only one that has always been curated entirely by Shakers. Graham’s long-term goals include building a research museum to safely preserve the materials in climate-controlled environments.
More immediately, the National Endowment for the Humanities had recently granted Sabbathday Lake $750,000 to help restore their historic herb house building for education and cultural programming. Whole staffs of young people work in the garden. There are teenagers working the gift shop on their summer holidays alongside retirees. In the warm months, Sabbathday Lake itself is full of children swimming. Each spring, a local high school class visits for a weekly “Shaker studies” elective, and early this summer a middle-school class came to help plant the garden. Every year, the Shakers partner with local organizations to bring kids with intellectual or developmental disabilities to work in the herb garden.
Seeing Sabbathday Lake touch and change people moves Graham profoundly. The world is hungry for what Shakerism has to teach, he thinks: community, generosity, hard work, sustainable relationship to land, the belief that everyone has something important to contribute. Still, the pressure of preserving and growing that living tradition — and his desire to see it manifest in new Shakers — can feel overwhelming. He has been working for decades, and yet the future is still not secured. “I used to feel like I was holding a clock of Shaker time,” I once heard him say, holding out his hand as if a round and weighty object were there. “And now I feel like I’m holding a stopwatch.” A friend asked him if Brother Arnold ever worried. Graham laughed but looked exhausted. “No.” As has always been the arrangement, Brother Arnold is the one who believes. Someone is coming; “the work will go on.” Graham respects the profundity of this conviction — and worries double-time.
Occasionally, I would witness Graham and Brother Arnold disagree or debate some logistical consideration. When this happened, they were at once impatient and careful with each other. Even on the existential questions they sometimes differ: Graham’s instincts about shoring up Sabbathday Lake against an uncertain future run toward planning for all contingencies, maybe even proactively reaching out to find new members; Brother Arnold, assured as he is that the Shakers have a future, believes that Shakerism simply needs to be available for the finding. This is Brother Arnold’s decision, in the end, which Graham has had to learn to accept.
Graham and I made our way through the mud to the mammoth ox barn, built in 1830, that anchors the south end of the village. Under his direction, Sabbathday Lake received funds from the National Park Service to restore the structure, one of six remaining great Shaker barns in the country. To repair it, he explained, contractors would have to lift the entire thing 20 feet into the air.
“You’re kidding,” I said. We stood in front of the barn, which towered over us. Getting the thing to float above the ground sounded like a fantasy. It was so old; would it even survive being taken off its foundation? But while the soil around the foundation had eroded, as it naturally does, contractors had taken measurements and found that in almost 200 years, the barn had only come a half-inch off plumb.
Weeks later, I checked in with Michael. He was busy but responded with a photo. It was the ox barn, hovering in the air.
On Sunday, Aug. 4, the chapel on the second floor of the dwelling house was crammed with people. Folding chairs were brought in for those who couldn’t find a seat, and rules about separating the sexes were seemingly relaxed in the back of the room so that bodies could be squeezed into every corner. It was the weekend of the anniversary conference. The outer family, friends, collectors, scholars, curators and curious outsiders arrived from all over the country to listen to panel talks and celebrate with Brother Arnold and Sister June, who entered quietly in traditional clothing: a long, modest dress for her, black vest and white shirtsleeves for him.
The reading chosen for the week was 2 Corinthians: “We are no better than pots of earthenware to contain this treasure, and this proves that such transcendent power does not come from us but is God’s alone. Hard-pressed on every side, we are never hemmed in; bewildered, we are never at our wits’ end; hunted, we are never abandoned to our fate; struck down, we are not left to die.” Brother Arnold gave a brief homily about the moment in the Gospels when Jesus instructs the disciples to love one another as he loves them. It’s so hard to love everyone, he said, when people can be so darn irritating. Brother Ted used to tell him that Shakers are not called to like anyone, but to love everyone. Brother Arnold fails at this all the time, he said. But failure is inevitable and forgivable; what’s demanded is the continual willingness to begin the labor again.
Shaker meetings have the rhythm of call and response: speaking and then an answering song. The assembled sit in silence until someone feels compelled to stand and speak. These orations can be about anything — reflections on the prayer, a story from the week, a confession, encouragement. After the person finishes speaking and sits, a silence hovers. Then someone begins to sing spontaneously. More than 10,000 worship songs remain, and on this Sunday those assembled held hundreds of them in their memories, many from generations ago. A young woman, maybe not even 20, rose to speak about struggling to love someone she actually loathes. The congregation sang back to her a 19th century song, “If Ye Love Not One Another.” (“More love, more love, alone by its power the world we will conquer.”) In a meeting, everyone who knows a song sings, and then the room falls quiet again until someone else rises to speak, song and confession taking turns until a final silence hovers.
That night, after the long day of meeting, presentations, and activities, Graham and his partner, Jesse Michaud, lingered near the dwelling house with a few friends, talking again about the future and all the ways it could look. Graham confessed that he was fretting. Since the 18th century, Shakers have believed that the body of the church isn’t only in its living members but also in its ideas and the spirits of their ancestors, which are eternal. The material things of Shaker life have always changed, decayed, disappeared, but the principles of the church remain. Someday, even a hundred years from now, people could find the oral histories, the writings and teaching, the songs, and pick up the thread. Still, like Brother Arnold, he is waiting for someone to come.
Once, after supper, I asked Brother Arnold, “What makes a good Shaker?” He was in the recliner in the corner of the kitchen, looking at his phone. He told me about the willingness to labor, both physically and spiritually, in perpetuity. This is what it takes. Not everyone can do this work knowing that they might never see the fruits of their labor. “The idea that we need to see results in our lifetimes — that’s not how the Shakers actually teach us to think about those types of achievements,” Graham pointed out to me. “That’s man’s time, not God’s time.” Brother Arnold said to me more than once that Shakers live “in the eye of eternity.”
There are a lot of people around Sabbathday Lake striving to labor in the eye of eternity these days. Maybe a new Shaker will come this year; maybe not. But in the Meeting House this summer, people are singing. Lavender is drying from the eaves of the old sisters’ shop; future harvests will hang in the new herb house. A concept of survival and flourishing that isn’t primarily concerned with linear time or material gains may be the most radical thing about this historically radical American religion, and the one most resonant with a world that is experiencing, constantly, its own existential threats and calamities. It is obvious by now that everyone and everything is dying and living all at the same time, that failure and hope are all mixed up, and still the sheep are lambing and the roof has sprung a leak again and you’ve been snappish and petty even though you swore you’d be better and someone has to make breakfast and even breakfast can be a gesture of belief in the world as it could and should be.
The night before the anniversary of Mother Ann’s arrival in America, Brother Arnold stood before the conference and told stories about elders and spirits, all the ones he loved who have died, and then he said: “We’ve survived 250 years. We are looking forward as much as our ancestors did to the next — whatever that involves. All we have to do is be ready.” He shrugged and smiled. “We’ve got clean rooms. We’ve been working on that.”
Lucas Foglia is a photographer who focuses on stories about people in nature. His next book and exhibition, supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, follows the longest butterfly migration across international borders.
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