Freedom, Religion, and the Strange Case of an American Desert Cult
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In his new book, The Oracle’s Daughter, Harrison Hill ’19SOA traces the story of the Aggressive Christianity Mission Training Corps (ACMTC), a woman-led paramilitary religious cult that was founded in 1980s California before settling in rural New Mexico.
How would you describe the ACMTC’s beliefs and its restrictions on members’ lives?
ACMTC members believed they were soldiers in what they called “God’s Army.” Exorcism was central to daily life in the group, as was prophesy and speaking in tongues. Much of the outside world was seen as evil, from television and yoga to tight jeans and abortion. Members cut off contact with friends and family members on the outside and had little to no exposure to the world beyond the group. They were often denied food and medical treatment; Some members claimed they were subjected to extensive physical and sexual abuse. At the center of it all was the cofounder and leader, Deborah Green, a self-proclaimed prophet who claimed to have a singular connection to God.
The book got its start as a feature article for The Cut that followed how Sarah Green, the daughter of ACMTC founders Deborah and Jim Green, escaped the group’s New Mexico desert compound at age twenty-six in 1999. Is Sarah’s experience of indoctrination and escape typical of cult members?
No, she’s unique in a couple of ways. First of all, she never “joined” the ACMTC. She was in the group because her parents founded it, and that happened after Sarah had been in the regular world for a number of years, so she had a taste of what existed before. She also had a vision for what her life might be like outside of the group. I think her particular situation comes down to personality and character. Her brother had very similar upbringing, but he stayed in the ACMTC.
More often, when someone leaves a cult, it’s because they’ve had a blip of exposure to the outside world that offers a peephole into what they’ve been missing. If they leave a compound and spend a fair amount of time with experts or family members who can show them what’s contradictory about the cult’s philosophies, the speed at which a person can change is surprisingly fast. That was something that really surprised me in learning about these groups.
The ACMTC is pretty small, with only around 100 members at its peak, but you demonstrate how it intersects with currents in American religious culture — from Deborah styling herself as a prophet in the vein of Ann Lee of the Shakers to pastor Jerry Falwell declaring that evangelicals were “fighting a holy war” the year before the Greens founded the group. How did you come to trace and contextualize the ACMTC within a larger history?
When I started writing my article for The Cut, I wasn’t thinking about the broader historical resonances. But over the course of doing that reporting, certain themes started to emerge. The more I read, the more I realized that ACMTC is like the Forrest Gump of cults — it just always happens to be there either literally, or its story resonates in a sociopolitical, religious way, not just contemporaneously, but also throughout American history.
Read the full article at link below.
Content retrieved from: https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/oracles-daughter-harrison-hill-acmtc-cult.
