THE ORACLE’S DAUGHTER: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult, by Harrison Hill
“The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates,” wrote William James in his classic text “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” It’s the epigraph to Harrison Hill’s excellent debut, “The Oracle’s Daughter,” which tells the story of how one woman, Deborah Green, raised an incredibly harmful Christian cult from the ashes of 1960s counterculture. An equally fitting line might have come from William Carlos Williams: “The pure products of America go crazy.”
The Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps began its life in 1983 as a small gathering of believers called Free Love Ministries. Today, in the cult’s death throes, spreading the good news appears to mean going online and shouting things like “PIZZAGATE IS REAL!!!” to anyone who’ll listen.
In addition to tracing one group’s story, Hill asks larger questions. How does seeking freedom from the oppression of conformity become its own form of oppression? How does a desire to realize the commands of the Gospel curdle into self-destructive blindness? Anyone whose religious background has forced them to grapple with such questions will appreciate the author’s attempt to trace the ways some uniquely American impulses, such as our predilection for tyrannical utopias — and for the protection of individual liberty at the expense of collective safety — allowed the movement to fester.
But the most powerful parts of this book are the sensitively rendered portraits of the women who eventually freed themselves from Deborah Green’s ever more warped vision of Christianity: Maura Schneider, one of the cult’s earliest members, and Sarah Green, the daughter of its founder.
The book opens in 1999, in New Mexico, where we meet Sarah — 26 and the mother of three, married to a man she did not love — in the process of escaping from the group’s compound. From there, we travel back to 1969, when Maura, a nurse tending to a young man dying in a Sacramento hospital, becomes friends with the patient’s sister, the charismatic, enigmatic Lila Mae Carter. Where Maura is hesitantly beguiled by the possibilities of the counterculture, Lila is more of an active participant, and the two women join a back-to-the-land commune. It’s there that Lila meets her husband, Jim Green, and the two of them drift from one spiritual adventure to the next, exiling themselves from one disappointing Eden after another like a chronically peeved Adam and Eve.
Maura and Lila reconnect in the 1980s, by which time their seeking has led them, like so many, toward evangelicalism. Soon after, Lila and Jim rebranded themselves as the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps — a militaristic commune, complete with uniforms and ranks, consisting of a few dozen people who farmed, sold handicrafts and evangelized under the command of Lila, who renamed herself Deborah after the Old Testament prophet and judge.
Over the next few years, the cult moved from California to Oregon and then to New Mexico, and as Deborah, an issuer of vociferously unforgiving and frequently biblically unsound edicts that she claimed came directly from the Lord, Green was able to convince members of their utter unworthiness.
But it was the children — especially a child whom Sarah smuggled, at Deborah’s insistence, from Africa to the compound — who suffered most. And ultimately, it was it was two other former members’ concern for the abuse they alleged these children had experienced that led New Mexico police officers to arrest Deborah and two other cult members in 2017. She was tried and a jury sent her to prison for 72 years. But, after documents surfaced that weren’t produced during her trial, a judge vacated her sentence and ordered a new trial that was, in turn, canceled after a key witness became unavailable. Deborah was released from prison and, although ordered back again by the New Mexico Supreme Court, has been in hiding ever since.
This is exactly the kind of story that the true-crime industrial complex lives to hyperventilate over. But Hill is an extremely skilled writer, and his conscientious, measured reporting is a gift. He’s also a reliable guide who’s managed to create stunningly vivid scenes from the memories with which his subjects have trusted him.
The immediacy with which Hill portrays their conflicted longings gives the book the propulsive feel of a novel. There’s a particularly arresting scene in which Sarah, at around 10, leads a group of children through an abandoned school — a forbidden space for members of the cult — and has them press their hands to the walls and their ears to the wooden floors of the auditorium to see if they can make contact with the sounds that once echoed through the place.
The imaginative power with which these moments are described suggests something deeper: that being alive to the world — as Sarah Green was as a child and fought to remain — is a faith that needs no formal community or theology to legitimize or deepen it.
THE ORACLE’S DAUGHTER: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult | By Harrison Hill | Scribner | 342 pp. | $30
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