My mom, the cult leader: ‘She told us what to wear, when to pray, how we would have sex. We were prisoners’
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Sarah Green realised things weren’t right in the religious community where she was raised when her mother forced three of its members to live in a locked shed. All three were women, disowned by their husbands, and forced to live off scraps of food. Her mother, Deborah Green, said they had been judged by God and this was their punishment. One of the women, an old family friend called Maura, was made to wear a white sackcloth dress and renamed Forsaken. The other two women were renamed Barren and Despised.
Sarah is a strong, striking woman with a keen sense of irony and a joyous cackle of a laugh. But now she’s in tears. “I felt sickened to my gut. Even though I’d been groomed and my mom told me, ‘I’m God’s oracle, so therefore I hear what God wants for everybody, and this is what they have to go through because they’re sinning’, it didn’t make sense to me.” She sniffs back her tears. “Sorry, I’m getting emotional. So when they locked the people in the shed, I’d sneak them food. I just didn’t understand why Maura, who was part of our membership, had kids, all of a sudden was being forced to live like an animal and do the most degrading things. I didn’t understand why.” Sarah is wailing, as if she’s been transported back to the little girl she was at the time. “What had she done? I didn’t see anything, and I grew up around them. So from that moment you lived in fear, because you could be the next person on the chopping block.” Sarah eventually discovered that Maura’s sin was that she had refused to beat her children.
Deborah Green was born in California and originally called Lila Carter. She was a straight-A student and became a communist at Sacramento State College. Deborah met her husband and Sarah’s father, Jim Green, in a hippy commune in California. Then they found God through the charismatic Pentecostal church Christ Gospel, and became missionaries. They moved to Mexico, working first in an orphanage and then a Christian college. During the day at the college, Sarah and her younger brother Josh were looked after by an 18-year-old male student. Every afternoon, he put Josh, then aged two, down for a nap and took Sarah for a walk. One day he took her to the empty school church, exposed himself and told her to touch him. He did this for a few weeks and then raped the four-year-old Sarah. Deborah, who was still going by the name Lila, discovered what had happened after finding blood in Sarah’s knickers.
Horrified, the family packed their bags and left the college and Christ Gospel to find a true God. They led a nomadic lifestyle, travelling through Mexico and Central America. Despite the trauma of the rape, Sarah says in her early years, family life was relatively functional. “We were always dirt poor because we were missionaries. But my mom was nurturing. She taught me how to cook and sew. She was an average mom in the early days.” Sarah attended regular schools, was sociable, and loved pushing herself academically, as her mother had done. But in 1981, Deborah told the family that she was now hearing directly from God. “She was given prophecies and I slowly watched my mom deteriorate into … I don’t know how to describe it.” She settles on “craziness”, but that somehow sounds too benign.
Her parents founded Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (ACMTC) in Sacramento, California. Initially, it was known as Free Love Ministries, although she no longer believed in the hippy concept of free love and there was little that was loving about ACMTC. She relinquished the name Lila, taking Deborah from the soldier-prophet in the Old Testament’s Book of Judges. ACMTC was run like an army, and Deborah and Jim were the generals. She wore a white beret, and white military uniform with a white polo neck and a huge beige garrison belt. Deborah was both style icon and brutal cult leader.
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Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/29/daughter-interview-deborah-green-cult-aggresive-christianity-missions-training-corps-free-love-ministries.
