The Testament of Ann Lee

 

The Testament of Ann Lee is a 2025 historical drama, starring Amanda Seyfried as "Mother Ann," Anne Lee (1736-1784), the founder of the Shakers. The film faithfully recounts the story of Manchester-born Ann Lee, a pious child, with an early acquired aversion to sexual intercourse, who, together with her brother William, associates with a local group of "Shaking Quakers," who claim that the Second Coming of Christ will be incarnate as a woman and who engage in noisy shouting, singing and dancing as their form of worship. Ann marries a fellow Shaker and has four children, all of whom die in infancy. Her sexually unsatisfactory marriage and the deaths of her children seem to reinforce her revulsion against sexual activity.

Meanwhile, Ann becomes one of the most prominent leaders of the group, which leads to her arrest and imprisonment, during which time she has visions, which cause her to teach that fornication was the original sin and that celibacy is the path to salvation. Ann eventually leads a group of Shakers to America, where, despite some setbacks, they found their first settlement at Niskayuna in New York State. Her brother William promotes the cult as an itinerant preacher on her behalf, and the community grows with new converts and the adoption of foundling children. Ann's pacifism gets her arrested by the Continental Army. Having been released by Governor Clinton, however, she continues her mission and founds more Shaker communities in New England. Soon after an attack in which several Shakers are beaten and killed and Ann herself is sexually assaulted and called a witch, William dies. One year later Ann dies. 

Following Ann's somewhat strange life, the film introduces us to the Shakers' distinctive beliefs and, very powerfully, to their special way of worship and their unique hymnody. Seyfried is fantastic as Ann, and her amazing performance truly carries the show. So powerful is her performance that one is easily tempted to identify with Anne and thus to suspend judgment on the community's unorthodox beliefs and even stranger behavior. The Shakers lead a very simple life, which coheres with their Quaker origins and the general tenor of post-Reformation sectarianism, but their worship is passionately physical - perhaps providing initial emotional release from the stultifying circumstances of daily life in 18th-century Manchester, and later perhaps also a compensation for the lack of normal sexual outlets. Certainly, one can easily imagine how attractive such an emotional and physical religion might have been to those living in that socially stratified and relatively repressive society, especially perhaps to women, whom it liberated from sexual subjection. It presumably made sense to go to America, where such an extremely egalitarian vision might more easily find acceptance, although even in America in the Revolutionary era the sect seemed obviously too extreme for many. (As always with the sectarian wing of the Reformation, their pacifism could and did also alienate some of the surrounding society.)

Surprisingly, the historical Shakers survived Mother Ann's death. (The movie ends there, with no reference to what impact her death might have had on the community's eschatological beliefs. The film is ultimately much more about her personal religious experience than about the Shakers' sectarian trajectory.) By the mid-19th century, there were several thousand Shakers living in at least 18 major communities and some smaller, short-lived communities. Most remaining Shaker sites are now museums (well worth visiting). There remains only one active community - at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, Maine. Until recently, it had only two surviving members, but a third is alleged to have joined the remaining two. It would seem that, whatever the Shakers' contribution to the overall story of sectarian apocalyptic Christianity in America, that contribution has now come to completion.