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How a woman’s daring escape from a cult led to ‘The Oracle’s Daughter’

April 15, 2026

In the dead of night, Sarah Green escaped from a cult.

That cult, which called mainstream religion “an abomination” and referred to itself as a “war machine” with God as its “dictator,” was run by her mother.

Still haunted by her past nearly two decades later, Green finally decided to tell her own story. By that time, she was a middle-aged married woman with teenage children, and a neighbor introduced her to his brother, an aspiring writer, Harrison Hill.

Now, seven years of research and writing later, Hill’s book “The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult” recounts the story of Green’s early years being raised by Deborah and Jim Green in the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps.

The cult remained stubbornly small, in large part, the author says in our video interview, because of the “punitive aspects of life” inflicted by the leaders, from grueling work to insufficient food, for adults and children alike.

In the book, Hill’s investigation takes him beyond Green’s story; he broadens the scope to tell the cult’s entire history, both before Sarah was born and after she left, and he also examines it in the larger context of religious cults in America, why they grow and why they’re often tolerated by lawmakers and law enforcement well past the point they should be.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How much has Sarah changed since you met her, and can she see her past without guilt or shame?

One of the real rewards of a project like this is seeing that change, which can only happen over years. Sarah definitely has more perspective on it now. And the dial is turned down in the way she interacts with her past emotionally. She was always ready and willing and frankly eager to talk about her story, but my observation is that now it appears to cost her less to talk about it.

She just got to read the book and said, “I read it like I was reading about someone else’s life. It really sank in how crazy our actual lives were.” So she definitely has a new perspective.

She also has a sincere desire for her own story to be useful to people. She wants it to be inspiring to people who are in extremist situations, to show you can get out, or to show people who are out and who are struggling that they can move on and build a new life. When I was finishing the book, she asked me if I could include a callout to resources for people who have left groups like this.

Q. America seems particularly susceptible to these cults, as you document in the book.

There’s a uniquely American component to it, which is that we really value freedom of religion, which I think is an objectively fantastic thing. But there is a dark underbelly to that freedom, and this is it.

Q. That freedom of religion makes law enforcement hesitant about going after cults, but you note that this is particularly true since the 1993 government siege at Waco that left dozens of Branch Davidians dead.

If I were to point to one reason that this group was able to exist as long as it did, it was because of the shadow of Waco.

Waco was being cited by law enforcement in 2017 when the compound was being raided, and it was on the minds of people when I was interviewing them in the past several years. It feels so present tense to people. There’s a reputational fear at play, and also a sincere fear that people don’t want to get it wrong.

Q. You also write about how, beyond traditional Christian evangelicals, the fringe Christian right has now grabbed more and more political clout.

It’s much bigger than people understand. These congregations just completely dispense with any allegiance to the American idea of pluralism or anything but White Christian nationalism. That’s shocking to me and sad too, because it does a disservice to the country, it does a disservice to religion and it does a disservice to the people who follow them.

These people are being led astray. They’re being taken somewhere really dark and somewhere that’s not healthy for them or for the world. So there’s my little soapbox moment.

Q. Did you have any passions or obsessions that helped you understand how people can latch onto something, even if yours were for something healthier than a religious cult?

I absolutely have had those experiences, but they’ve been positive ones; they’ve been experiences where the social pressure of the group is felt in a productive way. When I was acting in plays in high school and college, there was a unifying energy and the energy of the group bent everybody towards itself.

And when I did [rowing] crew as a teen, there was that feeling you get of the four people in the boat pulling the oars and coming together. There’s an elegance to the togetherness, and the loss of individuality is something extraordinarily powerful and beautiful.

This shedding of the ego is what some people get when they take psychedelics and it’s what a lot of people think happens after death. I felt it in sports and in theater. And there’s a real joy and fulfillment in letting go of yourself.

It’s funny to say, but those life-affirming and beautiful experiences of my life did give me a window into what it means to be in a highly destructive, abusive cult group. But it’s like a photo negative to that experience.

Q. So if all those people who are joining cults would just join community theaters instead?

That is the lesson of the book: A cult is the wrong answer to the right question. People seeking out something like a cult … it’s just us being human beings and seeking something bigger than ourselves. What’s wrong is the cult itself.

Orange County Register

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How a woman’s daring escape from a cult led to ‘The Oracle’s Daughter’

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