The Testament of Ann Lee: A Mystical, Musical Vision of Building a “New World” Utopia

Mona Fastvold’s 2025 film The Testament of Ann Lee, with Amanda Seyfried in the title role, shows a working-class woman passionately and relentlessly seeking the realization of her unique spiritual vision. It will bring Ann Lee’s story to scores of women who are relegated to the margins of their religious traditions despite their rich spiritual gifts. It will speak to people of any gender whose sincere faith inspires a deep hunger for spiritual and social liberation now, not just in “the sweet by and by.” And it will speak to all of us who feel out of step with a culture that passively accepts the world as it is and instead feel called to build a better one. 

The Testament of Ann Lee is an unconventional movie musical, using contemporary arrangements of Shaker hymns and stylized choreography to communicate the passion and immediacy of a  mystical eighteenth-century Christian movement that grew from the Quakers. An illiterate child factory worker in England at the dawn of the industrial revolution, Ann Lee grew to become the revolutionary spiritual mother of a religious community in the “New World” that followed a gospel of union with God, gender equality, and proto-communism. Although the film uses character amalgamations and time compressions to translate the historical events into slightly more than two hours, it is mainly true to the historical record. 

The deeper I dug, the more treasures I uncovered. By centering Shakerism’s spiritually ecstatic music and dance, The Testament of Ann Lee presents the audience with a religious experience, a sensual encounter with the Divine that is purer and truer than any of our inadequate attempts to translate it into language. And while this spirit-filled emotionalism won’t be for everyone, for those that it touches, it touches deeply.

The basic facts of Ann Lee’s story are simple, and at first glance not too different from the more oft-told tale of the Puritans: a religious leader is inspired to bring their followers to the New World, seeking freedom from persecution and new converts for their nascent protestant movement. Theologically, though,  the Shakers were the mirror opposite of the Puritans. Puritans feared and avoided pleasure but allowed sex under certain restrictive conditions (spawning psychological hang-ups that still keep thousands of therapists in business to this day). The Shakers lived in celibacy but whole-heartedly embraced and pursued pleasure as a divine gift of God. 

Through singing, dancing, and other charismatic gifts, Shakers experienced a higher ecstasy than mere sexual gratification can offer. While this may elicit a “thanks, but no thanks,” from most of us allosexuals living in the twenty-first century, the film tries to help contemporary audiences understand that celibacy was not another form of mortification of the flesh but a method to achieve something utopian: bodily autonomy and social equality for women.

The film viscerally depicts what was a common experience in Ann Lee’s time and place. Wives were compelled to be sexually available to their husbands at all times, with no thought given to their feelings or pleasure. They could expect to be constantly pregnant, at a time when giving birth was dangerous and sometimes fatal for mothers, their newborn babies, or both. 

A heartbreaking musical sequence shows a distraught Lee losing four children in quick succession, from stillbirth to other ailments. Her plight was not uncommon, but it  weighed especially heavily on Ann Lee, who never wanted marriage or sex and was forced into both by the pressures of her family and culture. 

The film also briefly touches on the sexuality of Ann’s brother William, who is shown leaving a male lover in order to commit to a celibate life. The historical record calls William Lee a “former dandy,” something that at the time probably meant “womanizer” rather than queer, though doesn’t preclude both (shout out to my fellow bisexuals). It is easy to imagine that the celibate Shaker life would have appealed to some queer people living in the eighteenth century, when “sodomy” was a hanging offense and their only option for family life might have been heterosexual marriage. Shakerism offered our queer ancestors a liberating path to spiritual fulfillment, social equality, and the love of a chosen family. Because of the large numbers of orphans at the time as well as widows with orphans, there were always children in the Shaker communities

Shakers rejected the racial order of the day as well. The film is historically accurate in depicting Black Shakers as equal members of the community, and while many famous Shaker hymns have no attribution, the song “Pretty Mother’s Home,” performed in the movie by Black actor Lark White, was written by a formerly enslaved woman named Patsy Roberts Williamson. Williamson’s enslavers initially joined the Shakers of the Pleasant Hill commune in Kentucky, but when they decided to leave, Patsy bought her freedom with help from the community and remained a member for the rest of her life. 

The Shakers and their indomitable woman leader were remarkable in successfully escaping the extremely limiting social expectations of their time and place and forging a completely new path for themselves. As the film shows, Shakerism began in England as a more outwardly expressive branch of the Quaker movement, but did not blossom into its full expression until Mother Ann, as she became known, was anointed by the Spirit through charismatic visions that began when she was in prison. 

Her visions inaugurated what Shakers consider to be the Second Coming, the presence of Christ’s spirit not just in Mother Ann, but in all true Believers. They cemented celibacy as a requirement for the true Christian life and America as the place that this new gospel seed should be planted. While the number of Shakers living today can be counted on one hand, the many Shaker communes still preserved as historic sites in the United States are the impressive material evidence of what a small band of spiritual radicals was able to achieve. 

The rule of Shaker community life was “from each according to his ability, to each according to his capacity,” a motto inspired by language from the Christian Bible that predates Marx. Leadership and labor were shared equitably  by men and women, children were raised collectively without the use of corporal punishment, and communities sustained themselves by selling their innovative yet simple goods, such as herbal remedies, straw hats, and their famously well-crafted furniture. They lived the ideals of Marxists and feminists before either of those words existed. In fact, when Marx faced doubts about achieving communism in his lifetime, Engels wrote to encourage him, “Remember the Shakers!” 

The Testament of Ann Lee not only remembers the Shakers, it brings them back to life. Through historically accurate costuming and set design, creative reimaginings of traditional Shaker music and dance, and stellar acting, especially from Seyfried as Ann Lee, the film brings us into the living dance of a people who dared to follow God beyond every limit they encountered. Unfortunately, it also shows us in graphic detail the too common fate of dissenters and resistors both in her time and our own. Ann Lee died before the age of 50 from injuries inflicted by hostile mobs. This is not a film for the faint-hearted.

Ann Lee broke through the boundaries of gender, race, conventional religion, and the economic order of the day to co-create the world of peace and liberation that God revealed to her. Despite any theological differences that the span of more than two centuries of religious and social change have created between people of faith today and the early Shakers, we can still find inspiration in their lives.

Our current times may call for new ways and forms, but today’s religious socialists can still look to this inspiring film and feel called to join with the revolutionary Ann Lee in boldly proclaiming, “We are the people who turn the world upside down.”

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Works consulted for this essay include the following: The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection, edited by Robley E. Whitson, and Mother Ann Lee, Morning Star of the Shakers by Nardi Reed Campion.

Image: "The Testament of Ann Lee" Press Kit (Disney)