A few years ago, Brooklyn-based author Harrison Hill discovered that his neighbor had a secret: she had escaped from a New Mexico cult at the of age 26, leaving behind her entire family and the apocalyptic spiritual worldview of the group known as the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. Hill’s new non-fiction book, “The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult,” tells her story, as well as the rise and fall of the militarily obsessed cult she grew up in. KUNM's Ty Bannerman spoke to Hill for the “City on the Edge” podcast about his approach to writing the account and finding the humanity in the midst of the group’s monstrous actions.
HARRISON HILL: So the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps began in the early 1980s in Sacramento, California. It was the brainchild of this couple named Jim and Deborah Green. They were former hippies who'd converted to Christianity in the 1970s. After their conversion, they had started going to regular evangelical churches, and they felt like the congregations they encountered and the messages they were hearing were not intense enough for them. They were not aggressive enough for them, and so they basically split off and started their own kind of community, which at the very beginning was known as Free Love Ministries. Then, as their beliefs became more and more radical, as Deborah began to say that she was a prophet, the group started picking up this whole kind of militaristic bent. They would wear military uniforms. They called themselves soldiers for God. They called themselves God's Army, and then ultimately, of course, they adopted this kind of huge, hilarious, slightly terrifying mouthful of a name: the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. And so for about a decade they operated out of Sacramento, ran into some legal trouble, had to scurry about the West Coast, and then of course ultimately landed in rural, rural New Mexico around Fence Lake. I mean, it really doesn't even qualify as a town. I think online it's called a Census-designated area, and they lived there for a number of decades. Then accusations of various crimes came up against them, and there was a big raid and a trial that led to the collapse of the group.
KUNM: So, what does the title "The Oracle's Daughter" refer to?
HILL: It's the story of the daughter of the founders, a woman named Sarah Green, who grew up in the group, and then in 1999, at the age of 26, she escaped in the middle of the night, left her children, left her whole family, and started over again. So it's her story as well, and then it's a broader examination of fringe religion in America and cults generally. I'm trying to use the group story as a way of thinking about the broader issues about freedom of religion and American religious history.
KUNM: Could you sketch out some of the allegations that led to the downfall? This is pretty dark stuff. So I feel like a content warning is appropriate for people.
HILL: For years the group had been dogged by allegations of just like general mistreatment of people, withholding of food, just kind of generally abusive situations, but it reached an entirely new level in the years following the escape of this woman, Sarah, who's at the center of the story. So, in 1997, a baby was trafficked from Uganda to New Mexico. Deborah allegedly orchestrated this entire trafficking operation. They got this baby through the most wild story possible, and this child became the object of all of Deborah's wrath. So the abuse, the alleged abuse, became much, much stronger as this young girl grew older, and this these were allegations of physical abuse, of sexual abuse, of withholding food, of making this young woman like sort of run around for no purpose, do lots and lots of chores and things like that. And then there was another boy who died of the flu when he was around 14 years old, in, I want to say 2014, and his death really triggered some investigations into the group, or it helped kind of push things along. And there's more that's not even in the book because it's like, you know, the reader can only handle so much. I hope that the book, aside from providing all of this stuff that I was talking about earlier, I hope that it does say something bigger about the nature of what it is to be a human being and how everyone has the capacity to be really amazing and really the opposite of amazing.
KUNM: So you don't necessarily see this as a story of inhuman monsters, exactly.
HILL: You know the epigraph for the book, it’s a quote by the philosopher William James, which for me was a real guiding light. “The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates.” So the idea there, and the idea that I was trying to communicate in the book, is that these people committing these horrific crimes, they have the same machinery. They're not as different from us as maybe we like to think, and that that's maybe a little bit, I mean, it should be eerie, and I think it should also maybe generate, I hope a little bit of understanding. I think people may be held to account for their crimes. But I think it's also interesting and good to understand, on the one hand, yes, it's this crazy group, and on the other hand, this intensity, this insanity, is very much a product of very basic human impulses.
