THE ORACLE'S DAUGHTER

Searching history of an American cult.

Hill’s account opens with the adoptive daughter of cult leader Deborah (née Lila) Green slipping out of the group’s compound in rural New Mexico and making her way to the Pacific Northwest. She meant to return to reclaim the three children she left behind, but Sarah Green stayed away for decades, which would be much mooted in court years later. At issue were the many crimes committed by Deborah, her husband, Jim, and other members of the so-called Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, including the physical and sexual abuse of children. Sarah was not the only member to escape the group, but others were expelled for being insufficiently obedient to the two “generals” of the paramilitary cult, Deborah intoning, “I say that I the living God will vindicate myself upon those who plot against my beloved.” The Branch Davidian siege at Waco added paranoia to an already fraught scene, and the children suffered even more, one dying of fever with no medical attention. In the end, “an alphabet soup of state agencies and departments got involved,” backed by the FBI, and Deborah, now “a little old lady in white military drag” was sentenced to 72 years in prison—a sentence vacated by one court but then reinstated by the New Mexico Supreme Court in 2025, though Deborah had by then disappeared. The story is ugly, and Hill is unsparing in his reportage. But more, he offers thoughtful notes on how cults work: “Whatever religion promises, cults promise in excess. If devotion is good, more devotion must be better. If discipline is good, more discipline must be better, too.” Pointedly, he notes that ACMTC, which began as one of countless “Jesus freak” cults in the 1970s, was once an outlier, but now, with MAGA and QAnon, “swaths of the culture had caught up to them.”

A compelling study of the meeting of religious zealotry with the cult of personality.