The Oracle's Daughter
The Rise and Fall of an American Cult
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- Vorbestellbar
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- Erwartet am 7. Apr. 2026
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- 14,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
A gripping chronicle of the rise and fall of a woman-led cult—and the enduring allure of extremism across 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 1960s counterculture to its descent into conspiracy-fueled abuse. 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, and the horrific mistreatment of those who fell out of the leaders’ favor. With a dramatic, deeply researched narrative tracing the strange twists and turns of the country’s religious development, The Oracle’s Daughter illuminates the porous boundary between the fringe and the mainstream—and shows how much more vulnerable we are to extremism than we might like to think.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hill debuts with a hair-raising chronicle of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, a religious cult located in the New Mexico desert for nearly four decades. From 1981 until the late 2010s, members of the ACMTC lived and worked in compounds in the Southwest under the guidance of self-proclaimed prophet Lila Green—"Deborah" to her followers. Beneath the group's sunny global mission trips and frequent proclamations of God's grace was endemic child sexual abuse, carried out by Green and other senior officials, and extreme emotional manipulation of members who questioned Green's authority. After painting a vivid portrait of the ACMTC's operations, Hill details its slow collapse. An early member who defected sued Green for millions of dollars; Green's daughter, Sarah, fled the organization in the late '90s, when she was 26, and began speaking out about her experiences. The dominoes continued to fall until Green was arrested in 2017 and sentenced to 72 years in prison for child abuse and kidnapping. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the history of fundamentalism, this rigorous study of religious abuse isn't easy to shake. Readers will be haunted.
