Landbros and Spinoff Sects

America has always had an atrraction for mini-messiahs. Something about the place — the physical vastness, the thin institutional memory, the foundational mythology of escape from something more controlling — makes it uniquely receptive to people arriving with revelation and a small group of believers. The Pilgrims were a startup. So were the Mormons. So, in their way, were the Shakers.

A recent viewing of Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee brought me back to this. Lee was a working-class woman from Manchester, illiterate, married badly, lost four children each in infancy, joined a splinter sect of English Quakers—the Wardley Society—who had come to believe in Ann as their leader and as the female Christ. That conviction hardened in a Manchester jail, where Lee fasted and received the visions that, for the Wardleys, confirmed it. Rejected in her home city, she decided America was where God wanted her followers, one of whom funded the journey. In 1774 she sailed with eight followers and landed in New York.

What stuck me watching the film — and reading around it — is how recognizable the pattern is. Not the theology, but the operational logic: a charismatic founder with a new model, leading a compact but committed cohort. A rejection of existing institutions as corrupt or exhausted. A physical move to new territory to build something purer. The belief that the old rules don't apply here. The Shakers (known more formally as The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) were, in the language of this moment, doing a spinoff. A pivot from established religion toward something leaner, more rigorous, more direct. They were, in the idiom of ours, land bros.

I mean this seriously, not sardonically. The 17th and 18th century colonial settlements were overwhelmingly structured this way — religious, commercial, or some combustible combination of both. They were experiments, funded or faith-based, betting on a territory to validate a theory. Most failed. Some became Rhode Island. America was built from the wreckage and occasional success of these ventures, which is partly why it remains so structurally hospitable to people who arrive convinced they've found a better way to organize human life.

The Shakers are an interesting case because they actually built something of lasting cultural value — the furniture (we have one Shaker table that has withstood many moves and other family punishments), the music, the material culture — and yet were systematically run off or ostracized by the previous cult of liberty they'd arrived among. Pacifists during the American Revolution, they were imprisoned for refusing loyalty oaths. Their communalism was seen as suspicious by a culture of individualists. Their celibacy was seen as aberrant in society with its own confused morality. The republic that had promised religious freedom found them inconvenient the moment their religion conflicted with the republic's other enthusiasms.

What happened to the Shakers is the more American part of the story. At their peak around 1830 there were more than eighteen communities; by the 1860s the decline was already underway, undercut partly by the Spiritualist movement, which offered the mystical experience without the celibacy and the rules. The American market for revelation is large but impatient. It wants the ecstasy without the discipline, the community without the covenant. The Shakersm who by the American Civil war had reached a peak population of 6,000, held onto their convictions, and over the ensuing century and a half, dwindled to just two members as of 2025.

This is also a recognizable American pattern. The landing strip is generous (to some). The staying conditions are brutal. The country absorbs the founder's energy, borrows the aesthetic, drops the theology, and moves on to the next arrival. The vision becomes a brand; the brand outlasts the believers.