A woman escaped a New Mexico cult led by her parents. This author tells her story

A new nonfiction book tells the story of a young woman who escaped a cult based in rural New Mexico. But the person who left wasn’t just any member — she was the daughter of the group’s leaders.

"The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult" delves into the Aggressive Christianity Mission Training Corps, which was located in a small community called Fence Lake, New Mexico, about two and a half hours southwest of Albuquerque and an hour and a half from Springerville, in eastern Arizona.

Author Harrison Hill spoke with The Show more about his latest novel as well as delving into the group and their mission.

Full conversation

HARRISON HILL: So the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps was founded by a pair of ex-hippies named Jim and Deborah Green, who, following their time in the counterculture, they became Christians.

And in the years that followed their conversion in the 1970s, they became kind of convinced that the churches they were visiting were not sufficiently intense or as aggressive as they wanted them to be. And so as a result of that, they founded a group that eventually became known as the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, which was really a kind of, I call them pseudo-Christian group, a kind of group that just dialed their faith up to an 11.

And they began in Sacramento in an ordinary-looking neighborhood. They recruited members from all over the city. When they ran into a little bit of trouble, they ultimately had to flee to New Mexico, where they lived for many years until in 2017, there was a major raid conducted for alleged abuses and the group kind of collapsed from there.

MARK BRODIE: So what kinds of things did they believe in, and sort of what were their actions like?

HARRISON HILL: So they were really obsessed with a practice that they called deliverance, which was a kind of exorcism where they would say that people were possessed of kind of ordinary sins like lust and hatred and all that kind of thing, but then also things like caffeine or nicotine, things like that. They said that people could have up to 6,000 demons in themselves at a time.

So yeah, they were really into this idea of spiritual warfare. A lot of it was based in a kind of recognizable Christianity, but they just torqued it up so far beyond anything that’s kind of recognizable that it really did, to my mind at least, become something kind of different.

MARK BRODIE: And you mentioned that they had to flee, they ran into some legal trouble. These were some pretty serious things that they were involved in, it sounds like.

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, the original allegations that led to the downfall of the group involved a lot of child abuse, both physical and sexual. They’d had a lawsuit that they’d dealt with years prior in the 1980s where a woman alleged that she’d been forced to do all this kind of forced labor and just all kinds of mistreatment.

And then just beyond the kind of obviously identifiable crimes like those, there was also just this kind of an oppression of their members, a kind of spiritual — I mean, I would call it spiritual abuse in terms of the way that they made people cut themselves off from their families or leave their jobs or all that kind of thing, take vows of poverty.

You know, it’s not sort of illegal in the same way that some of those other crimes are, but to me it has, you know, that’s part of the portrait of the group that I think makes it especially damaging.

MARK BRODIE: So let me ask you about Sarah Green. She is one of the main characters of your book and the daughter of the founders of this organization, and also somebody who left, right?

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, so the book is called, as we said earlier, it’s called “The Oracle's Daughter,” and the daughter herself is Sarah Green. Her face is really big on the cover of the book. Yeah, her parents were Jim and Deborah Green. She grew up in the group, you know, from the 1980s onwards.

She had lived a little bit of a life outside of the group before her parents kind of — before they became sort of extreme. And so because of that, she really had an idea of what she was missing when she was in this group that had just removed itself from the regular world.

The result of that was that by the age of 26 in 1999, she was just desperate to leave and start over. And so she managed to do that. That’s where my book begins, with this escape in the middle of the night.

MARK BRODIE: How did she actually go about leaving? I guess both emotionally and logistically.

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, you know, emotionally, the emotional part of it was significantly more difficult than the logistical part. Logistically, it was just that she woke up in the middle of the night, pulled herself out of her sleeping bag, packed some granola bars and a water bottle in a backpack and just headed out and started hitchhiking her way to the West Coast. It’s a pretty remarkable moment. That’s why I chose to begin the book with it.

But then spiritually and emotionally, it was extraordinarily difficult, and it was difficult for many years. You know, she had wanted to leave, she was frustrated and overwhelmed by the teachings of her parents and wanted to in some sense reject them, but they were also part of her. And so this was this kind of conflict that was at the center of her.

You know, she wanted to start over, she wanted to be working as a midwife in the Pacific Northwest, she wanted to have boyfriends and experiment and just live life like anybody. But she also was just haunted by these sermons and kind of screeds that her parents had implanted in her basically.

And how she dealt with it was really just by putting one foot in front of the other, by slowly getting a job, getting a bank account, getting an email address, all these kind of everyday little things. That increased exposure was what was able to eventually create enough of a scaffolding for her to say, "No, this is my life, I am permanently out here, and that life I lived in the group is over."

MARK BRODIE: That just sounds like it would have been such a difficult sort of internal wrestling match to, as you say, put one foot in front of the other and actually do it.

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, and the other factor that I haven’t mentioned is that she was actually leaving three children behind. She intended at the time that she left, she intended to come back and get them out, and I won’t say too much more about what happened there, but that tension of being a mother, being devoted to her children, which there absolutely was, and being a mother was at the center of her sense of herself, that was just completely in conflict with what she wanted out of her life, or I shouldn’t say completely, it was partially in conflict with it.

And that tension, that kind of impossible knot, was actually part of what made me really interested in writing this project. There’s a kind of human complexity there that, yeah, a lot of us have not been in that similar kind of situation, but the feeling of being caught, of being in a kind of impossible circumstance, I think that is something that a lot of us can identify at least on some level.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. So I want to ask about the process of reporting this story and reporting this book, because it sounds like there wasn’t necessarily a whole ton to go on. You kind of had to look through public documents and other kinds of records like that. Is that a fair assessment?

HARRISON HILL: Yeah, that’s very fair. You know, it’s funny, when I start telling people about this project, they’re often like, "Oh, you know, I’ve never heard of that group before." And I always sort of jokingly say, "Yeah, that’s why I wanted to write a book about it." But yeah, because of that absence of public coverage, I had to do a lot of digging.

I traveled around California, New Mexico. I got tens of thousands of pages of legal documents. I interviewed, I conducted over 200 interviews in the course of the book. I was reporting it for several years. I spent the night out near where the compound was located in New Mexico just to try and get a feel for like, what was it like, if you’d been escaping in the middle of the night as Sarah was doing, what did it feel like, what did it smell like, what were the sounds?

And so it was really important to me to kind of bring that texture, that kind of sensorial richness to it, which meant that it wasn’t just about figuring out the precise legal machinations of it, which were very complicated and which were totally fascinating and anything dramatically dynamite. It was also about finding those little details that make something feel real and human. And my goal really was to make this read like a novel.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Harrison Hill, author of the book “The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult.” Harrison, thanks so much for the conversation, I appreciate it.

HARRISON HILL: Thanks so much, Mark, a pleasure.