Ann Lee

And so I've actually written two books of Shaker ghost stories.

And of course the Shakers, you know, came out, you know, history came out with the current movie, you know, the testimony of Ann Lee.

I don't know if you saw that or if you know anything about the background of the Shakers.

And of course they had villages in the Northeast as well as,

And now we have Phoebe the, the Shaker.

And here, i- she is, uh, she speaks of Mother Ann Lee.

And we know Ann Lee was d- almost sort of a contemporary of Joseph Smith.

Yeah.

Eleanor Lee married James, Lord Norris of Rycot, since Earl of Abingdon.

Anne Lee married Thomas, eldest son of the Lord Wharton.

One Montague, now Lord Norris.

Two James.

Old Sir Henry Lee, Knight of the Garter, and was supposed brother of Queen Elizabeth.

He ordered that all his family should be christened Harrys.

This account I take from my Lady Elizabeth Viscountess Purbeck, the eldest daughter of Sir John Danvers, sister to the Lady Anne Lee.

One-eyed Lee married Anne St. John, married Henry Lord Wilmot, John Earl of Rochester.

To tennis and the U.S. Open, where the women's singles tournament is into the third round.

Americans Jessica Pagula, Emma Navarro, Anne Lee, and Taylor Townsend are all playing today, along with world number one Irina Sabalenka, who made quick work of her second round match, defeating Polina Yatsenko 6-1, 6-1 in just 54 minutes.

The women's doubles tournament also continues today, including the first round match featuring Venus and Serena Williams taking on Aussie Maya Joint and Taiwan's Haoqi Chan.

As of this recording, we're not sure when that match will start, so we'll link to the full U.S. Open schedule in the show notes.

Right.

The deep dive touches on comparative cases like Ann Lee and the Shakers, who had the charisma but instituted a doctrine of strict celibacy, which structurally guaranteed their demographic decline.

Or you look at the darkest extreme, Jim Jones and the People's Temple.

The People's Temple is a horrifying study in what happens when the charismatic originator refuses to distribute power to an organizational structure.

Now yes, everyone was expecting a man, but through divine revelation, Mother Anne and her followers understood the Christian God as equally male and female, and both aspects needed to incarnate before the apocalypse could begin.

Anne Lee was a charismatic leader of an American branch of Protestant Christianity known as the Shakers, short for Shaken Quakers.

Mother Anne and her fellow devotees practiced a form of ecstatic worship in which they quite literally shook and quaked, believing to be in union with God.

Capitalizing on a period of major social unrest and the Christian revival known as the First Great Awakening, Mother Anne became a traveling preacher, going around building a movement that they called the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing.

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Outsider sources say that Shakers believed Mother Anne to be the mother mentioned in a prophecy from the book of Revelation chapter 12.

So clearly they viewed her as something more than just a leader, instead viewing her as some sort of divinely blessed agent.

But then she died.

Sergeant Lee, you are the standard.

Sergeant Ann Lee, for your courage, your skill, your willingness to step forward when lives were on the line, Military Broadcast Radio proudly puts you in this week's spotlight.

Thank you for your service, and thank you for showing us what it means to be there when somebody needs you most and you know it just goes to say that the whole philosophy character doing the right thing when nobody's looking that's that that that should be the definition uh of character i thought it was You know, I don't know the definition.

I'm just, I'm just blabbing.

Her influence, and not her ballot, if she had one, threatened anarchy in the state and caused a schism in the church such as might have crushed out the life from the infant body to which Paul was writing.

In 1774 appeared the next public woman preacher, Anne Lee.

She proclaimed that God was revealed a dual being, male and female, to the Jews, that Jesus revealed to the world God as a father, and that she, Anne Lee, Mother Anne, was God's revelation of the mother, the bearing spirit of the creation of God.

She founded the sect of Shakers, whose main articles of belief, besides the one above mentioned, were community of goods, non-resistance to force, even in self-defense, the sinfulness of all human authority, and consequently the sinfulness of participation in any form of government, absolute separation of the sexes, and consequently no marriage institution.

Her mission as the Christ of the Second Appearing began with her announcement of God's wrath upon all marriage and the public renunciation of her own.

The next pulpitless preacher in the succession we are considering appeared in this country in 1828.

Her name was Frances Wright.

She was a person of totally different mind and methods from Anne Hutchinson and Anne Lee.

Okay, just before we go, I'm gonna make a quick recommendation.

I, uh, I saw last week, um, a movie, uh, that came out at the end of last year, uh, called The Testament of Anne Lee, uh, which is a, uh, co-written by the guy who made The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, and w- with his wife, Mona Fastvold, who also directed the movie.

And it is a, um, biographical portrait of the woman who founded the Shakers, uh, or, or, or created the community of Shakers in, in the United States.

Born in Manchester, uh, comes to the United States and, uh, founds the Shaker, essentially the Shaker communities, uh, in the, uh, late 18th, early 19th centuries.

And they sang, uh, hi- hymns they made up on the spot, uh, you know, praising God.

And the movie is kind of a musical [laughs] because it has these 10 sequences in the course of it in which you see the Shakers, um, having these moments of ecstasy in Manchester, on, onboard, onboard the boat that they come over from England to the New World, and then as they exist in the New World building these, uh, communities.

Uh, and Amanda Seyfried, uh, a, a, an actress who had a huge hit last year with this very melodramatic, pulpy movie called The Housemaid and was, you know, uh, you know, mo- most famous for, like, being in Mamma Mia!, playing the, the, the, the, the ingenue daughter in Mamma Mia! and, and being one of the dumb girls in Mean Girls 20 years ago, gives an absolutely jaw-droppingly astounding performance as, as Anne Lee.

Um, and it is really a wonderful, remarkable movie.