The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult

Summary

The shocking true story of the rise and fall of a woman-led cult—a debut work of narrative nonfiction about extremism, the search for belonging, and America’s turbulent religious history.

On a cool fall night in 1999, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Green crept out of her house, retrieved a backpack from its hiding place, and ran for her life. She was escaping not just the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a paramilitary religious cult operating out of the New Mexico desert, but also the punishments and cruelty of the cult’s leader—her mother, Deborah.

In The Oracle’s Daughter, Harrison Hill traces the fascinating beginnings and violent end of ACMTC, from its early days as an outgrowth of the hippie movement, through the conspiracy-theorist 1990s and into the present day. This is the story of three women—Deborah, the group’s founder and self-proclaimed oracle; Maura, one of its first members; and Sarah, Deborah’s daughter—bound together by a punitive, baroque set of radical beliefs and practices, including exorcism, kidnapping, prohibitions against the “abominations” of popular music and psychoanalysis, and the horrific mistreatment of those who fell out of the leaders’ favor.

Though ACMTC was radical in its beliefs, deprivations, and abuses, its history is a window into the particular character of American fanaticism, and an examination of the porous boundary between the fringe and the mainstream. With a propulsive, deeply researched narrative, The Oracle’s Daughter illuminates the strange twists and turns of the country’s religious development—and how much more vulnerable we are to extremism than we might like to think.