ABSTRACT
Although raised in the Methodist faith, Rebecca Cox Jackson came to embrace an understanding of sanctification that led her to a theology of celibacy, away from her family and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and toward the Shaker religion. Shakerism gave Jackson a framework for her difficult spiritual and temporal choices: leaving her husband and the “world” of Philadelphia for a life of itinerant preaching, then separating from the unchaste, unredeemed “world” by living in a Shaker community at Watervliet, New York. Jackson eventually utilized Shaker phraseology with a political and racial imperative that bewildered white Shaker leaders, particularly when she asked them for leave to start a Shaker out-family in Philadelphia—a ministry to “the world” in her own city. By becoming a prophet-writer and eldress of her own Shaker family of Black women, Jackson brought her “worlds” together in an inclusive version of God’s kingdom on earth.
This chapter argues that Jackson’s intricate theology of “holy living” (sanctification and sexual abstinence) is revealed through sumptuous dreams and visions about avoiding the lusts of the flesh, key moments of identification with biblical prophets, and shifts in her language regarding the unredeemed “world.” For Jackson, sanctification becomes an afterlife, a watershed moment of life after choosing celibacy that allows for explanation of “the life” as constructed in her text, and the perfection of her life while still on earth.
