Ann Lee was a sharp-tongued woman from the back streets of 18th–century Manchester, celebrated for put-downs worthy of Coronation Street’s Bet Lynch. But instead of calling time on regulars at the Rovers Return, she announced that it was closing time for the whole of humanity.

As a young woman Ann had joined a maverick Protestant sect that became known as the Shakers, or ‘Shaking Quakers’. In fact their shaking was the least of it: they howled, gurned and gibbered while flirting with the notion that God would return to Earth in the form of a woman. All sexual activity, even between man and wife, was forbidden. Ann then had a series of visions that, according to subsequent Shaker accounts, identified her as the ‘woman clothed with the sun’ whose appearance in the Book of Revelation heralds the end of the world.

In 1774 ‘Mother Ann’ and a small band of faithful emigrated to America. They settled near Albany, New York, where they were persecuted for their pacifism, their rowdiness, their surprising success in winning converts and the suggestion that, to quote a later source, ‘Christ did verily make his second appearance in Ann Lee’. Ann herself did not quite claim to be a female Messiah, reportedly preferring to think of herself as incarnating the ‘Christ-spirit’, but the distinction was lost on many of her followers.

As for the film’s grasp of religious ideas, my doubts set in within the first five minutes

Lee died in 1784, after which the Shakers developed along lines that should be familiar to any student of new religious movements. The original Shaker settlements, intended as temporary accommodation while the faithful awaited the Second Coming, morphed into well tended villages. The dubiously sourced sayings of Mother Ann were tidied up, along with reports of her miracles. Shaker dancing became ritualistic. Ex-members circulated horror stories of children ripped from their parents’ embrace by the cult. But public outrage died down as the Shakers became progressively more quaint – and, since they continued to preach celibacy, there was never any danger of them multiplying like Mormons. Also, they started making lovely furniture, combining elegance with homeliness. Inevitably they died out – there was no getting round the ban on procreation – but that only enhanced the collectability of those gorgeous chairs.

Back in 2015, the conservative essayist and pastor C.R. Wiley wrote a piece entitled ‘Stirred by Shakers: On the Elegant Errors of a Failed Sect’. It began: ‘When it comes to the opinion of the people who........

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