John Fowles (1926-2005) Acclaimed author, wrote a book “A Maggot” which portrayed a fictional story about the early life of the real person Ann Lee who formed the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing – otherwise known as the Shakers. Ann Lee’s life from the time of forming the society is historically well recorded, her persecution for her beliefs in England and later emigration in 1774 to America. Fowles wrote an interesting epilogue to his novel which in its entirety would be meaningless unless you have read the novel. However it contains interesting thoughts that he had - some of which I have edited below:
…..Now I hate modern evangelism, with its spurious Madison Avenue techniques and general loathsome conservatism in politics. It seems almost always unerringly based on the worst, most backward side of Christianity, an insidious supporter of whatever is retrograde in contemporary thought and politics; and thereby denies the very essence of Jesus himself. Nor do I think any better of this same trait in many other religions, such as Islam. But what happened with John Wesley and Ann Lee and their like in the eighteenth century is quite different: ……They had, Wesley by his energy and transparent strength of conviction, Ann Lee in her obstinate (and immensely brave) determination and her poetry - her genius for images - a practical vision of what was wrong with their world…….Ann's vision was more thoroughgoing than Wesley's, a fact that we may attribute in part to her sex,……. At heart people like Ann were revolutionaries; one with the very first Christians of all, and their founder.
Their efforts (especially John Wesley's) were, as always, one day to breed a narrow-minded bigotry, an inward tyranny as life-stultifying as the tyrannies they first tried to end, or fled from. But I speak here of that first fuse, that spirit that was in them at the beginning, before the organized business of religious conversion and gaining adherents en masse came, and dimmed and adulterated their fundamental and highly personal example and force. One of the saddest ironies in all religious history is that we should now so admire and value Shaker architecture and furniture, fall on our knees before the Hancock Round Barn; yet totally reject the faith and way of life that made these things.
It is easy enough now to dismiss much of the aftermath of her memory, the spirit drawings, the 'dictated' songs and music, the trance states, as naive religiosity, and at least partly a product of the sexual abstinence for which the Society was famous….Yet something haunts the more serious side of the United Society's life that cannot be so easily dismissed. It is an aspiration, a determination to escape mere science, mere reason, convention, established belief and religion, into the one thing that excuses an escape from such powerful social gods, the founding of a more humane society……Ann foresaw that Mammon, the universal greed in each for more money, for more personal wealth and possession, would one day rule this world and threaten to destroy it. Our present world is deaf to Anne's appeal for simplicity, sanity and self-control……
Dissent is a universal human phenomenon, yet that of Northern Europe and America is, I suspect, our most precious legacy to the world. We associate it especially with religion, since all new religion begins in dissent, that is, in a refusal to believe what those in power would have us believe - what they would command and oblige us, in all ways from totalitarian tyranny and brutal force to media manipulation and cultural hegemony, to believe. But in essence dissent is an eternal biological or evolutionary mechanism, not something that was needed once, merely to meet the chance of an earlier society, when religious belief was the great metaphor, and would-be conforming matrix, for many things beside religion. It is needed always, and in our own age more than ever before.
A historically evolved outward form, adapted as in a plant or animal to cope with one set of conditions, is doomed when a new set appears; as in my view not only the United, but Western society as a whole, only too plainly shows. What the Shakers 'crossed', or condemned, in the society and world they had to inhabit may seem to us quaint and utopian, their remedies hopelessly unattainable today; but some at least of the questions they asked and the challenges they flung seem to me still unanswered. In so much else we have developed immeasurably from the eighteenth century; however with their central plain question - what morality justifies the flagrant injustice and inequality of human society? - we have not progressed one inch. One major reason is that we have committed the cardinal sin of losing the sense of a wise and decent moderation.
A species cannot fill its living space to absurd excess in number; and still so exalt excess, the extreme, the lack of moderation, in the individual. When excess becomes synonymous with success, a society is doomed, and by far more than Christ.
I have long concluded that established religions of any kind are in general the supreme example of forms created to meet no longer existing conditions. If I were asked what the present and future world could best lose or jettison for its own good, I should have no hesitation: all established religion. But its past necessity I do not deny. Least of all do I deny that founding stage or moment in all religions, however blind, stale and hidebound they later become, which saw a previous religion must be destroyed, or at least adapted to a new world. We grow too clever now to change; too selfish and too multiple, too dominated by the Devil's great I, in Shaker terminology; too self-tyrannized, too pledged to our own convenience, too tired, too indifferent to others, too frightened.
I mourn the lost spirit, courage and imagination of Mother Ann Lee's word……
John Fowles edited by Charles