If there’s any human activity more likely to lead to fragmentation, division, and bitter disagreement than religion, I’m sure I have no idea what it is. Religious arguments are by their nature uncompromising, because all parties are certain they’re interpreting the essence and the will of the Almighty. About the best anybody can do is agree to disagree and leave each other alone. All too often many of us do neither.

Probably the most spectacular argument was that between the monk Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church near the beginning of the 16th century. The taxes, control, and abuses of the Roman church had become so heavy and so notorious that Luther’s rebellion spread rapidly through the masses, who could now – thanks to Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and Luther’s vernacular translation of the Bible – decide for themselves what they believed. A crucial dispute with the authority of the Pope centered on Luther’s claim that all baptized Christians were members of a spiritual priesthood. That idea has been the seed of literally thousands of evangelical and utopian offshoots of mainstream religion ever since, among them the Shakers. Each one of them has given fresh meaning to the term, Protestant.

The Church of England under Henry VIII broke with the church of Rome, returned to Rome’s authority for about five years under Henry’s successor, Mary, and again became Anglican under Elizabeth I. But still the usual tensions prevailed, leading to the bloody English Civil War, the execution of King Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the end of the Anglican monopoly in England. Finally, in 1689, after the restoration of the monarchy, the Toleration Act legalized Protestant groups outside the Church of England, provided they accepted the doctrine of the Trinity.

In this fertile environment all sorts of new religious sects sprouted. The Quakers, founded in 1652, were now able to worship freely. The pacifist Quakers were influenced by exiles from France, named Camisards, who’d fled after unsuccessfully challenging Louis XIV. The Camisards were ecstatics – we would recognize them today as Pentecostals – and their presence among the Quakers was not unanimously welcomed. So a small group of Quakers led by a couple named Wardley, broke away and formed a pentecostal sect known as the Shaking Quakers.

Soon commonly known as Shakers, they called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. They went Luther one better by claiming that Christ already had returned, in the persons of their members, and preached that through purity, mankind could achieve redemption. It’s hard to quarrel with that conclusion, but as with so many sects, the Shakers drew much of their strength from their separatist impulses, and were ostracized and even imprisoned. A Manchester blacksmith’s daughter named Ann Lee joined them, and after multiple incarcerations for disturbing the Sabbath and describing visions, she was elected “Mother in all spiritual things.” One of her revelations led her, her husband, and seven followers to America just before the outbreak of the Revolution. Her husband soon deserted her. Her four children apparently had not survived infancy. Unsurprisingly, she declared marriage a state unfit for believers, and the idea stuck.

The First Great Awakening in America had occurred only a few years earlier. Before long the New World would see the Amana, Ephrata, Oneida, Mormon, and many other communities of dissident or utopian believers. Mother Ann and her followers excited a hunger for spirituality that soon brought many converts to their religion. They sought purity and practiced pacifism and equality of gender and race. While they were notorious for their celibacy, they eventually became famous for their craftsmanship. They believed in the sanctity of work as an expression of their faith. Shaker furniture and architecture are thus to this day tangible results of their attempts to achieve perfection in things physical as well as spiritual.

We had dinner last weekend in the large room of the Great Stone Dwellinghouse, built in 1837. It’s six stories high, divided into halves vertically by stout doors, with separate entrances for men and women. All those men, women, and children left long ago, and it’s now a museum. But to an uncanny extent, it’s still populated and inspirited by the craftsmen and women who fashioned every detail and built it to last indefinitely: moldings and recessed panels, windows, trim, and an amazing cherry banister that snakes smoothly up several flights of stairs. I found myself running my hand along the whole length of the banister and tracing the moldings with my fingers, envisioning the patient skill it took to create such near-perfection with common hand tools. My room was furnished in what I call New England Evangelical: the few things you need and nothing you don’t. The men who once dwelt in it, and who like me wrote a few words in their journals before turning out the lights, believed – in the words of their song – it was a gift to be simple. In that simplicity they found it easier to approach what so many of us still strive for.