A closer look
Shakers were a radical Christian sect founded in eighteenth-century England that fully embraced a rigid lifestyle of absolute pacifism, strict communal living, and mandatory, uncompromising celibacy. Despite their incredibly quiet and deeply disciplined daily farming routines, their actual religious worship services were wildly chaotic, terrifying displays of unbridled mystical energy. Believers would spontaneously receive powerful spiritual gifts, causing them to violently tremble, shout in unknown tongues, heavily spin in tight circles, and aggressively dance for hours on end. Because they absolutely refused to biologically reproduce, the only way the religion could survive was by constantly recruiting exhausted orphans and converting deeply confused neighbors. The entire sect fundamentally engineered its own slow, inevitable extinction by choosing violent, sweaty dance routines over standard human biology, which is a surprisingly aesthetic way to end a religious movement
