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

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. Agent: Alex Kane, WME. (Apr.)