[On the Shakers and their promotion of gender equality]

Perhaps, then, the price for gender equality is ultimately ethnic extinction, and this explains why patriarchy has always been the norm, and gynocracy the exception. This would also explain why major religions are invariably patriarchal, while female-oriented faiths, like Shakerism – and now the Episcopal Church – eventually die out.

However, more ominously today, it is not only some odd sects or cults that have adopted the Shakers’ values, but an entire political party, and indeed the secular orthodoxy that dominates the national narrative. Are Americans destined, under an equalist, gynocratic rule, to dwindle and die out? To the Shakers, that wouldn’t have been a tragedy; the equalist heavenly kingdom is not concerned with such trifles as the survival of peoples, as it is eternal. The rest of us, however, might do well to ask whether the destiny of our posterity concerns us, and if so, why we should allow today’s neo-Shakers so much power over its fate.