I couldn’t stop blinking back tears, and I couldn’t understand why.
I’d just walked out of a movie called “The Testament of Ann Lee.” Lee was the founder of the American Shakers, a tiny utopian Christian sect that started in England in the mid-18th century. Lee brought a small band of followers to the United States shortly before the Revolution.
The Shakers were known for their ecstatic worship (hence the name), their egalitarianism and pacifism, their absolute commitment to celibacy and their furniture. Shakers committed themselves to excellence in all things, and their craftsmanship was impeccable.
I’m not exactly the target audience for a film about chair-making religious extremists. I’m more the kind of moviegoer who’s drawn to Will Ferrell or light sabers or dragons. Also orcs. I find great meaning in superhero movies. But my wife and son were going, and I wanted to hang out with them.
So I went, a bit skeptically, hoping that perhaps I might get to see a new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of “The Odyssey.” But then the movie started, and it broke my heart.
A theology born of loss and persecution
Lee was born in Manchester, England, in 1736. As a young woman, she joined a group of religious dissenters that eventually became known as the “shaking Quakers.” When they worshipped they would sing and dance and often demonstrated physical manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s presence.
Lee’s theology was born of horrible trauma, deep loss and profound persecution. While living in Britain, she was arrested and imprisoned. She was pressured, by some accounts, into an arranged marriage. She lost four children. She turned to God for solace and comfort and made a radical commitment to celibacy, shunning any further sexual activity, including with her husband. She believed that sex — all sex — separated man from God.
Persecuted in England, she did what so many others did before — and have done since: She left everything behind but the smallest band of followers and sought freedom in the New World.
When she lands the film depicts her immediately witnessing America’s profound flaws. As soon as she gets to New York, she and her followers see a slave auction and shout “shame” at this obvious, grotesque violation of human dignity. After she settles in her new home, American colonial authorities imprison her after she refuses to swear allegiance to the patriot cause — as pacifists the Shakers would not take part in the conflict.
After the governor of New York, George Clinton, orders her release, she and her brother are brutally beaten by a local mob, and in the climactic scene of shock and horror, you can still hear the deep conviction and love of neighbor in her brother, as he begs his fellow Shakers not to resist the beating. “Do not fight back!” he shouts as the blows fall.
Patterns in our history
This movie isn’t a mere period piece. It takes you inside the Shaker faith in a way that’s unusual in American cinema. It portrays the faith so sympathetically and in a way that is so emotionally resonant that I completely understood why the Shakers would endure so much.
In one sense, you’ll look at various scenes in the movie and see something very weird. People moan in sorrow at their own sin. There’s an explosively joyful reaction to the experience of forgiveness. They worship with their voices and bodies, singing and dancing for hours on end. Yet in many ways these scenes of deep emotion are the most authentically real element of the movie.
I’ve been in places of ecstatic worship. I’ve seen people shake and tremble as they perceive the presence of God. I’ve seen how the experience of forgiveness — the idea that the creator of the universe loves you enough to give you eternal hope in spite of your worst and most horrible deeds — creates a sense of joy and relief that is difficult to describe.
But that joy and relief can also turn into dangerous zeal. As history demonstrates, this kind of encounter with the perceived presence of God can create a devotion to God that can rage out of control. The zeal for their faith turns into brutal intolerance of everyone else.
Much of American history follows this pattern. Early settlers often came to the colonies to secure their own religious freedom, not necessarily out of love for the freedom of others. And when they encountered religious differences in the New World, they could be just as intolerant as their oppressors in the Old.
In Ann Lee’s case, her radical faith, which mirrored Christ’s and the Apostle Paul’s commitment to singleness and celibacy, also manifested itself in radical love, both for people inside her community and outside it.
In essence, Lee and her followers turned to God and said — as so many believers have — I will do anything for you. And they heard God’s ancient answer to that declaration: Love thy neighbor. And your neighbor includes the enslaved Black man, and the white indentured servant who possessed so few rights, and the Native American who was slowly but surely being driven from his land.
‘Already and not yet’
When I was growing up in the evangelical church, I was taught an idea we called “already and not yet.” It means that Christ’s death and resurrection changed everything now — already. We can live with eternal hope, and he has established his church on earth. But the “not yet” means the best is yet to come, including Christ’s return and our own resurrection.
You see this in our nation as well. Ann Lee lived in the already and not yet of America. The Shakers did find a place. She did build a community. And in one of the movie’s most powerful moments, she expresses profound gratitude when she hears that Lord Cornwallis had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown.
In the movie’s telling, her body was ruined by beatings. Her brother was dead at the hands of a mob. And yet she was still grateful. She had already built a community, but now there was also a not yet — a promise of true liberty and security.
Hours after the movie, I finally realized why I had tears in my eyes. In the final scene, you see Lee’s plain wooden casket sitting alone under a painting of a beautiful tree.
In that moment, you could clearly see the gap between American hope and American reality. And I was reminded once again of one of Washington’s favorite Bible verses, Micah 4:4 — “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” In his writings, Washington referred to it almost 50 times.
Washington referred to that verse most famously when writing to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. Assuring them of their liberty in this new nation, he wrote, “May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
What a beautiful expression of American pluralism and religious tolerance. Our nation is not a place — it never will be a place — where we all agree with one another, much less look like one another, or even come from a common culture. But we can live together as neighbors so long as we recognize one another’s inherent dignity and worth.
I know full well that Washington himself embodied the already and not yet of America. The man who wrote those beautiful words owned slaves — men and women he did not plan to free until after his wife’s death. His virtue was real; so was his sin.
The tree is still alive
And so it is with this nation we love. In 250 years, the already of American liberty has expanded. We are a better and more decent nation than the one Ann Lee encountered. But as we see state brutality and state violence spill out across our streets, we know that we are not yet fulfilling the promise of the declaration.
Ann Lee died in 1784. When she was reportedly reinterred in the 1820s, she was found to have a fractured skull. It’s 2026 now, and we still see beatings in the streets. There are still too many caskets under the tree of liberty. But the tree is still alive, and it continues to grow. May we all sit securely in its shade one day.
David French writes a column for the New York Times.
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