How Sarah Green Escaped a Militant Christian Cult Started by Her Parents

At age 26, after having already endured a lifetime of trauma, Sarah Green managed to escape the cult that she had been born into.

Allegedly raped at the age of 4 by a babysitter and taken out of school at the age of 11, according to Harrison Hill’s The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of An American Cult, Sarah was often beaten, deprived of owning any possessions and went without food for extended periods of time at the hands of her own mother, Deborah Green. Deborah, who changed her name from Lila, founded the militant fundamentalist cult the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps with Sarah’s dad, Jim Green, in 1981 in Sacramento, Calif.

ACMTC has roots in the 18th-century Shakers and aimed to create a more structured and disciplined religion, one that eschewed the free love and loose morals of the hippies that Deborah and Jim had once been a part of. The group adhered to homophobic and Islamophobic views. Deborah deemed herself ACMTC’s prophet and started to “receive” messages from God and speak in tongues.

Over the years, the cult became its own self-contained military unit with members required to dress in uniform, refer to Deborah and Jim as “generals” and live in a compound off the grid in the rural town of Fence Lake in Cibola County, N.M. ACMTC considered themselves “a war machine” and believed that “God is absolute and He is a dictator.” Followers were told that children should be beaten regardless of age, took biblical names and had no contact with friends and family on the outside. They were encouraged to “submit to violent ‘deliverance’ ceremonies where demons of lust and laziness were purged from their bodies,” Hill writes.

Because Deborah and Jim preached celibacy, they had to come up with a way to grow the group’s numbers, which resulted in an international trafficking scheme to take babies from pregnant mothers in Uganda. When Sarah refused to marry at the age of 14, she was banished and sent to live in Thailand. Eventually, at 17, she was forced to marry an older man.

Deborah and Jim were arrested in 2017 in New Mexico on charges of child sexual abuse and kidnapping. She was found guilty and sentenced to 72 years in prison. She was also sentenced separately to 18 years for the death of 13-year-old Enoch Miller, who died on the compound in 2014 when Green refused to get medical care for the boy after he became ill. Jim received a 10-year prison sentence as well after not contesting the child abuse charges and his role in Enoch’s death.

Yet Deborah was released in January 2022 after her child abuse convictions were thrown out and a new trial was ordered because prosecutors withheld evidence. Eventually the state had to drop the charges because key witnesses were unavailable. By the time the New Mexico Supreme Court weighed in on Enoch’s death and reinstated the child abuse conviction in April 2025, Deborah had already disappeared without a trace. A warrant still remains active for her arrest.

The Oracle’s Daughter recaps the shocking true story of ACMTC, from its beginnings in the counterculture to the 2018 trial that would lead to its downfall. It also tells Sarah’s story and details her escape from ACMTC with a man temporarily staying on the compound, leaving behind two children from her forced marriage to Peter Green.

Hill shares with A&E Crime + Investigation how, thanks to a flooded basement, he came across Sarah’s story, which she was ready to entrust someone with for the first time, and how he was ultimately inspired by his subjects.

How did you find this incredible story?

It was a bit of true New York happenstance. Back in 2018, my brother, Edward, and his wife moved to an apartment in Brooklyn and the basement of their apartment flooded one day and their neighbor came over to help them clean up. In the weeks and months that followed, they all got to know each other better. Eventually, this woman, who was in her mid-40s and had two kids, revealed to them that she'd grown up in a cult that was run by her mother. And this, of course, was Sarah Green. Edward and Margaret came to me and they said, “We've met this woman, she's game to talk to somebody about her life, do you want to talk to her?” Of course, I immediately, breathlessly said, “Yes!” Sarah and I had our first interview in November of 2019.

How did you bring this story to life when there wasn't a lot of information out there about ACMTC?

There wasn't much of anything, and that was frankly what made me interested in writing about it. This book isn't actually breaking news. What it’s doing is piecing together and deepening and expanding all these sorts of elements that were reported on locally, but they'd not been pieced together. That was a lot of how the cult was able to escape facing repercussions for everything they'd done, because they'd been so all over the place. I wasn't about to write a book about Jonestown or Charles Manson. Those things are just so well-trod. For me, what was interesting was material that was new.

What really captured your imagination with this story? Was there a detail you couldn’t shake?

I really didn't have too much of a sense of cult history or what cults were. But it wasn't so much an anecdote as it was Sarah herself. I was completely fascinated and entranced by her. She's an incredibly charismatic person. It should come as no surprise that her parents were founders of cults. I mean, she is not a cult leader, obviously, but she has some of the same magnetism to her and she's very funny. She has a very wry sense of humor. She's always doing this great cackly laugh and she's also tremendously emotionally available. She'll be laughing one minute and crying the next, so I was really taken in by her persona. The other thing was that, from go, she was very generous with me. This is somebody who wants to talk, is ready to talk and I feel like she and I could have a good sympatico, and thankfully, we do, and we did.

What were the key interviews that you were able to score and how did you go about your research?

Sarah was obviously my main source, but Maura Schmierer was my other main source. She sued the cult in 1989, and as part of that, there were a lot of legal records that were tremendously useful to me, which she gave me access to. She had thought about writing a book herself. She had taken a lot of notes immediately in the years following her excommunication from the group. Though that book never happened, all those notes she'd saved were extremely helpful to me. Unsurprisingly, the people who are still ensnared in this group, to the extent that it exists at all, did not want to speak with me. But I was able to include their voices in a lot of ways, because of what they said while they were on the stand in the trial [in 2018].

Do you think that anyone can be taken in by a cult?

I came into it with the sort of vague awareness that there was more vulnerability to this kind of stuff than I maybe thought there was. But I certainly was startled by the extent of it. The research is pretty startling. [Hill writes in his book that, “Two-thirds of cult members come from what clinical psychologist Margaret Thaler Singer describes as ‘normal, functioning families.’”] I believe these stats, absolutely. It's sort of a head and a heart thing. In my heart, I could never do this. But then my head tells me, “Oh, no, but you could.” And that dissonance is kind of interesting.

How did the people you spoke with, like Maura and Sarah, get their lives back after coming out of the cult? How did they deal with the trauma and PTSD?

I would want them to say whatever they would want to say about it, but what I will say is that I think they both have had quite long journeys. They've certainly found healing, full stop. It's like healing in the way that healing happens in the real world, which is to say that it's partial and there's certain traumas that I think are with them and always will. I'm meeting them for dinner tonight at this Italian restaurant in the West Village; I think that fact alone is a demonstration of how radically they were able to reinvent themselves and to rebuild their lives. It's this moment of like, “Wow, guys, you made it.”

What do you want to be the takeaway for readers of The Oracle’s Daughter? First and foremost, I want it to be an enormously satisfying artistic experience. If people come out of the book feeling like they've learned about cults and how these groups operate and how people get out, if they've learned things that are useful to them in their lives, that certainly makes me very happy.

I've started to get some messages from people on Instagram who themselves have left cults, and it's been enormously satisfying to hear them say that they felt like their experiences were represented in the book. For Sarah, one of the real, if not the main reason she wanted to talk about her story, was that she really wanted it to be useful to people. She asked me to include some resources in the book that could be helpful to people who are leaving groups or want to leave groups like this. It's wanting it to just be artistically sound and satisfying and beautiful, and then also, especially more for Sarah, for it to have a practical usefulness for people in situations she knows all so well.