Worship in motion

The Testament of Ann Lee

Directed by Mona Fastvold
Searchlight Pictures, 2025.

The simple beauty of the Shakers’ carefully-crafted buildings and furniture has left its mark on American design. But who founded this movement, one that included upwards of 6,000 followers at its height in the 1840s? This question compelled director Mona Fastvold to develop a biopic billed as a musical, The Testament of Ann Lee. The film traces the radical leadership of “Mother Ann” from her early Shaker involvement in Manchester, U.K., to the New England colonies in 1775.

Unlike their quiet Quaker “cousins,” Shakers sought to embody their faith in worship that involved the ecstatic shaking of bodies. The Shakers’ faith expression via impromptu movement can still be jarring today for anyone raised in cultures teasingly labelled “frozen chosen,” where silent listening equals proper worship.

Remarkable biography

The film’s haunting, sometimes discordant, soundscape reflects events that shaped Lee’s life. She suffered a breakdown after losing four children. From her asylum bed, we hear her ragged breath slowly beginning to shape the song “Beautiful Creatures,” an expression of deep grief and suffering.

Fastvold carefully traces the development of Lee’s conviction that celibacy was necessary for all followers. Despite the Shaker emphasis on embodiment, Lee came to view sexual expression as devilish, saying: “the desire of the flesh is an ugly beast that will only devour people. . . . Paradise comes through toil and chastity.”

Later, jailed as a heretic, Lee emerges from the darkness of a hunger strike, nourished by astonishing visions, including one of herself as manifesting Christ’s second coming.

Believing that if she remains in England, she will be killed, her followers depart from Liverpool in spring 1774. During their voyage to the American colonies, the ship is severely handicapped by a gale and Ann again has a vision: Christ promising to bring them through to safety. She and her followers dance on deck, singing of how “angel wings will carry us.”

Ecstatic movement also marked confession, an important aspect of Shaker worship. Shakers held that secrets gain power that can dissipate if brought “into the light” of communal understanding grounded in Christ the merciful. How rare an experience this is in real life, much less depicted on screen.

Lee envisioned and structured communities based on Christ’s invitation that “the first shall be last and the last, first.” Male and female, African-American, Indigenous and European – each member was called to help create a way of life that challenged private ownership and “top-down” attempts to control.

Final movement

In Testament’s final scene the community prepares Lee for burial. Members commemorate her through formal dance: circles within circles, a dance structured to reflect the values that she envisioned for communal health. The camera never stops moving, filming the dance from above, from the side: circles of men, of women, and then lines forming that move towards and through each other in a weaving of equality – Imago Dei reflected as equally male and female. And so, Mother Ann is laid to rest from her labour.

This film portrays a female leader whose charismatic qualities are not used for “vainglory,” not to dominate or manipulate. It recalls the signs and wonders of an indelible faith-based counter-cultural movement in early American history, one that flourished for a time but gradually dwindled. There are three Shakers left in the world now.