In 1982, Maura, along with her husband and 12-year-old daughter Rebekah, moved to Sacramento to join a religious community that was then called Free Love Ministries, in what Maura says was a quest to find purpose in life. “God was calling us, and we needed to be obedient to God’s calling,” she recalls.
But Maura’s time in the group, which now goes by the name Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, ultimately turned into a nightmare for her. Her ordeal is depicted in the National Geographic TV program I Escaped a Cult.
According to the group’s website, its co-founder “General” James Green was born in 1945 in Kentucky, but as a teenager hitchhiked to California, where he “became entwined in a hippie lifestyle.” It was there that he met his wife Lila, who now goes by the name of “General” Deborah. In the early 1970s, according to the website, the two joined a group called the Bear Tribe, which sought to emulate a traditional Native American lifestyle. But while on hitchhiking on a trip to scout land for the group in Montana, James Green was picked up by a driver who talked with him about Christianity, and he and his wife “felt the drawing presence of Jesus.” The couple moved back to Kentucky and joined a local church, but where disillusioned by what they saw as its corruption. Eventually, after doing missionary work in Central America and working in a Salvation Army shelter in Miami, in the early 1980s they went back to California, where they started Free Love Ministries.
According to their website, the Greens gave their new community a “paramilitary structure,” supposedly inspired by the Salvation Army. It was a rationale that appealed at the time to Maura. ”We believed that we were God’s end day army, and we had the important message that we needed to spread to mankind and that is that they needed to repent and that people were evil,” she recalls in the program.
According to a 1984 Sacramento Bee article on the group (reprinted here), Free Love Ministries’ philosophy of “aggressive Christianity” attracted at least 50 members, many of whom lived in four communal houses called “the camp” and worked at a chain of framing shops owned by a member. The group’s daily radio program, The Battle Cry, exhorted listeners to prepare for a war against Satanic forces, whom the group said were behind everything from psychoanalysis and karate to fairy tales, and who even caused colds. (The rhetoric grew so extreme that a Sacramento religious radio station decided to stop broadcasting it, out of fear that the group was turning into a cult.) The group’s tracts railed against a wide range of other religious groups, from Buddhists and Mormons to Scientology. At one point, members were directed to follow an elaborate 50-day fasting regimen, in which they spent 21 days consuming only bread and water and a week of only fruit juices. As a 1989 Portland Oregonian article detailed, the Greens and their followers took to wearing military-style khaki uniforms with brass name plates and arm patches, and to addressing one another by rank.
