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Professor William Schultz on charisma, confession, and the making of the Shaker movement.

In an age wary of charismatic leaders, it would be easy to read Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee as another story of religious fervor and control. Instead, the film offers something rarer: a visual case study of how embodied encounters, rather than doctrine alone, generate and sustain religious movements. 

“There are certain ways you think a religious biopic will go: rise, fall, resurgence,” Will Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religion, observed. “For a movie that involves physical agony, prison, near shipwrecks, and ecstatic dancing and singing, this film felt very quiet, measured, and low-key.” That restraint, he argues, is what makes it revealing: the film shows religion emerging through song, repetition, domestic labor, and shared discipline rather than institutional structure. 

Criteria spoke with Schultz about The Testament of Ann Lee as a depiction of the way religious authority is made through bodies, persecution, and discipline, as well as the shared DNA of American religious utopias.  

This is an edited Q&A with light spoilers for the film The Testament of Ann Lee. 

From a scholarly perspective, what does an overtly religious film like The Testament of Ann Lee allow us to see, more clearly than subtler cultural artifacts, about how religion operates as a system of meaning, authority, and discipline? 

The Shakers are inseparable from Ann Lee as a person. One of the great values of the movie is its portrayal of personal encounter, the way Ann Lee connects with people and leads among her followers rather than ruling over them. Amanda Seyfried’s performance makes visible why followers would accept Lee as the spirit of God made flesh. 

Also, the film's music, built on actual Shaker hymns, has a hypnotic, repetitive quality linked to the pulse of breath and movement that provides a powerful source of connection between Lee and her followers. Watching a hundred bodies move together harmoniously communicates intensity that written accounts struggle to capture.  

Another important aspect depicted in “Ann Lee” is the catharsis of public confession and repentance. In one early scene, James Whittaker’s admission of lust gives way to communal howling and tears, a ninety-second sequence that clarifies the appeal of ritualized release and collective purification. 

The film dwells on Ann Lee’s childhood and life before the Shakers became a movement. How does this portrayal help us think about religion as something that emerges through bodies, conflict, and conviction, rather than something that begins with doctrine or structure? 

The film underscores that early Shakerism was not text-based. A scene in which Lee’s husband mocks her illiteracy highlights a crucial point: authority here does not depend on literacy or scripture. Instead, singing, dancing, and bodily encounter generate belonging and even give the movement its name. While Protestant traditions often imagine transformation through reading, Shaker faith spreads through movement and sound. 

Early historical accounts of Ann Lee consistently describe her as constantly singing. People would come into her presence and note the melodious stream of song. That form of religious practice—singing, dancing, bodily encounter—is far more typical than circulating a text among people and expecting transformation upon reading. That sometimes happens, but it’s a particularly Protestant-influenced understanding of how religion spreads.  

Lee’s belief emerged from her everyday experience and responded directly to the experiences of those around her.   

The film foregrounds Ann Lee’s body and her experiences of pain, ecstasy, repression, and endurance. How does this depiction complicate familiar Protestant suspicions of embodied religious experience, particularly when the visionary figure is a woman? 

In American religious history, revival movements are often remembered through imposing male figures such as Charles Finney, Dwight Moody, and Billy Graham. For these men, authority was tied as much to their charisma, physical strength, and virility as to their preaching.   

The Testament of Ann Lee inverts that archetype, demonstrating that people will respond to a body marked by frailty and endurance with the same fervor as a strapping, six-foot-two, blond guy. Additionally, the film shifts the center of religious experience from the church or the revival tent to the home, highlighting domestic labor and craftsmanship as significant modes of worship. As the Shaker motto goes, “Hands to work and hearts to God.”  

It’s worth noting that the movie also shows the backlash against female religious authority and faith rooted in domesticity. The script incorporates text from an exposé written in the 1780s that portrayed Ann Lee as a dominating, violent, and sexually deviant figure.  

Rather than representing persecution as historical texture, the film suggests that persecution does not merely accompany the Shakers’ history; it helps constitute their religious imagination. How does this align with what we know about dissenting religious communities in the Anglo-American world? 

The movie makes clear that persecution, the sense of being persecuted, and of humbly and cheerfully accepting that suffering become central to the Shakers’ identity. Miraculous stories of Ann Lee’s perseverance often emerge from those moments of peril.  

The longing to find a home free from persecution remains a powerful motif, especially in the founding narrative of the United States, and is well-illustrated by the lore of early American religious utopias, communes, and movements. 

The Mormon LDS church is a useful point of comparison. Like early Mormons, the Shakers’ identity coalesced around narratives of suffering, migration, and the search for a protected communal space. 

What do you think makes Ann Lee, and this particular vision of radical religious life, resonate in our current moment, even for audiences who may not think of themselves as “religious”? 

There is a growing desire for simplicity and clarity. The New York Times recently reported that people are building full-scale replicas of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. I just taught Walden in my class on religion and American capitalism. Thoreau writes about living life deliberately and simply, choosing only what matters. In a cultural moment saturated with consumption and self-promotion, Shaker restraint, much like Thoreau’s transcendentalism, offers another way to be free.  

The film also presents a non-coercive model of Christian faith that is egalitarian, disciplined, and nonviolent, at a time when Christianity is often associated with nationalism and political power. For viewers disenchanted with authoritarian religion, The Testament of Ann Lee represents not only a different way of living but a different way of being religious. 

Pop Religion is a new series from the Divinity School asking scholars to respond to both overt and subtle religious currents in popular culture.