Stories: A Guest Post by Harrison Hill

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. Read on for an exclusive essay from Harrison Hill on writing The Oracle's Daughter.

 

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.

 

 

As a nonfiction writer, I’m always asking the people in my life for story ideas. Has anyone encountered someone with an especially interesting life? Have my friends or family members traveled anywhere that hasn’t been covered, or noticed any fascinating new trends? I try to keep my own eyes and ears open, attuned to whatever the world throws my way. But I’m only one person. It pays to have a brigade of others sniffing out ideas on your behalf.

It paid off for me, anyway, when my younger brother Edward and his wife Margaret introduced me to a woman who lived across the hallway from them in Brooklyn. They’d all become friendly after the woman helped clean up after water leak. When the woman started talking about her life, she revealed that she’d grown up in a cult — a cult run by her mother.

I met the woman, Sarah Green, at a bar for a drink in 2019. I explained I was interested in hearing her story, and — if she was up for it — writing about her. To my great good fortune, Sarah said yes.

I remember so clearly the excitement I felt as I walked home after that first conversation. I could tell that Sarah’s story was both thrilling and shocking, and that it resonated with broader emotional and political themes. I was especially excited by what I saw as the story’s narrative elegance. There was a clear rising action: once hippies, in the 1970s and 80s Sarah’s parents had created a pseudo-Christian cult in Sacramento. There was conflict: after getting in trouble with the law, the cult fled to the New Mexico desert, where Sarah lived until 1999, when she escaped in the middle of the night. And there was something like resolution: in 2018, an explosive trial brought the group’s myriad alleged crimes to light.

In 2021, The Cut published an article I wrote about both Sarah and the cult, which was called (get ready) the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. But I knew there was so much more to explore. And so I decided to write a book. Scribner is publishing that book on April 7th.

What surprised me most about the whole process was just how fun it often was. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we emphasize the difficulty or even the pain of writing. Of course, writing is often difficult or even painful. But it’s also a source of great pleasure. What a privilege, to spend a day making words dance across a page!

Now that the book is written and about to come out, I miss those days of deep writing. But I know I’ll get back to them before long. All I need is the next story, the next book that sends me vibrating out of a bar and into the street. For that, I’m counting on my friends and family to point me in the right direction.

Or perhaps you, reader, have a story I should know about. Do you?