Before they started the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps, Jim and Lila were aimless hippies.
Lila Mae Carter was at the top of her high-school class, a pretty girl in makeup and glasses, widely known for her intelligence and competence. She could be quiet and reserved, but everyone seemed to recognize her, if only for her quicksilver-green eyes, her sharp cheekbones, and the striking gap between her two front teeth.
In 1964, she was girls’ vice-president of her West Sacramento high school. She appeared never to have a boyfriend, though at one point she was elected “class kitten,” a feminine riff on the wildcat, the school mascot. Her classmates were surprised to see her jumping and cheering in front of a crowd. But you never knew what was inside a person, did you? She abandoned a home life defined by poverty and turmoil for Sacramento State College, where she quickly fell into the counterculture burgeoning on campus. Now a full-bore hippie, she dropped out after three years. In 1971, after the death of her younger brother, she moved to a back-to-the-land commune called the Bear Tribe. Out in the woods, Lila took peyote, told people’s fortunes, and pronounced herself a medicine woman. She adopted a new name, Full Night, and wore fringed buckskins, moccasins, and a loincloth. She spoke with the herbs of the forest and engaged in what she described as sorcery. She also met a 25-year-old from Kentucky named Jim Green, or Buffalo Sun as he was known to the group. Jim was white, and in full command of the English language, but he often spoke in a kind of monosyllabic TV-Indian pidgin: “Me hunt.” “You go.” One night he held a “blood oath” ceremony in which he and other members cut themselves and offered their blood to the moon. Disturbed by Jim’s behavior, the group’s leader, a Chippewa medicine chief named Sun Bear, escorted Jim off the property. Lila soon followed after him. In the wake of the Bear Tribe’s collapse, the couple hitchhiked through Montana and Idaho searching for new land where they could resuscitate the group. As the days and weeks went by, however, Lila grew frustrated with Jim, grumbling to herself about his fanatical need to keep pressing forward. Sometimes she wondered if he’d been damaged by all the drugs she knew he’d taken. That July, the couple attended a raucous concert in Farragut State Park in Idaho. It was a wild scene with between 20,000 and 40,000 attendees. Young men and women openly hawked drugs , injected their veins with mushroom tonic, and gave speed to sleepy stagehands. According to a report, one man advertised his availability for sex “by means of balloons tied to his penis.” The concert also attracted members of the Jesus movement, a groundswell of hippie Christians more interested in emotion than doctrine. “The Lord is really moving all over here,” a 20-year-old woman told a journalist. “Yeah, yeah, there’s been drugs, but a lot of kids have turned on to Christ, too.” Jim and Lila weren’t impressed. No one evangelized to them, as Lila, topless, sat listening to music with Jim in the amphitheater, though plenty of men did gawk at her breasts. From Farragut State Park, the couple continued east, grabbing food and rides wherever they could. When they were approached by an evangelist one day, Jim grabbed the young man’s Bible and ripped out a handful of pages. “This is what I think of this stupid book,” he said.At the end of the summer, the couple moved into an abandoned cabin in a field near Seeley Lake, Montana, an hour outside Missoula. Jim made money by trapping beaver and muskrat and selling furs. When it got cold out, he and Lila insulated the cabin by hanging the furs from the walls. As winter continued, Jim and Lila grew only more and more unhappy. Lila said she was sick of eating muskrats, sick of being “snowed in with a maniac.” She announced she was going back to Sacramento. Instead, she descended deeper into a depression. At the laundromat one day, she picked up an illustrated booklet promoting Christianity. It said nonbelievers were doomed to hell, a claim that didn’t frighten Lila as much as it enraged her. The arrogance of it all! The presumption! “The more I read the angrier I became,” she later wrote. “I was a volcano.” For the next several days, she remained preoccupied by the booklet. At this point, Jim announced he was going to Missoula to buy hash. He left Lila alone in the cabin, hitching a ride with a man who started talking about Jesus. Jim held his tongue and stared at the passing landscape as the man prattled on.Jim spent the next three days smoking and drinking in Missoula. On the way home, he got a ride from a man in a truck — yet another Christian, it turned out. “You don’t have to live in darkness,” the man said as they passed through the snowy landscape. Jim usually dismissed evangelists out of hand. But something about the young man or his message or Jim’s state of mind began to work on him, and Jim responded with uncharacteristic sincerity. He wasn’t a church person, he said. He “didn’t fit in with the crowd.” And it was true. Jim’s hair and beard were thick, ratty, and unkempt. He looked more like a mountain man than a churchgoer. But the man said none of that mattered. Jim didn’t have to belong to a church; accepting Christ was all that mattered. Jim pondered the man’s message as he looked out at the mountains. Eight years had passed since he’d left Kentucky. He’d ventured west in search of new gods — but where had that gotten him? He was now a washed-up hippie, a deadbeat drug user, his relationship with Lila all but over.When they arrived at the cabin, Jim invited the young man inside. Lila was in bed under the covers, hungry, bedraggled, and upset. She’d clearly been crying. Jim told her to listen to the evangelist. Lila was indignant. She and Jim didn’t need God, she said. Religion was for the weak.listening — to what he had to say. Like Jim, Lila had found little in the way of lasting satisfaction or happiness. She and Jim were “hippie wanderers, desolate, chasing false gods, and living only for darkness.” Much as she’d despised the booklets at the laundromat, they highlighted how far she’d fallen, how miserable she’d become. She sat down and looked at the floor. Then something switched — in the room, in Jim and Lila. It was time. “Repeat this prayer after me,” the young man said. Jim and Lila took each other’s hands.A kind of brightness filled the cabin. Lila raised her hands to her face: It was as if someone had lifted a heavy burden from her back. She felt like singing. Jim too felt the release of a great weight, the presence, throughout his body, of an ecstatic, radiant love. Goose bumps prickled his arms. Then, suddenly, he was speaking, not in a language he’d ever known but in God’s own holy tongue. Tears fell down his face. He clasped his hands in thanksgiving.Lila was crying now too — crying and smiling as she looked out the window. The snow was so fresh, so white. How beautiful it was. How beautiful and pure. Jim and Lila might have sincerely regretted the lives they’d led prior to conversion. But for the purposes of narrative — for the stories they would tell about who they’d been and how they’d transformed — they couldn’t have planned things any better. They’d been drowning in “a slimy cesspool of wickedness,” a pit of “fervid lostness.” Yet still God had saved them. This was the Road to Damascus by way of Haight-Ashbury, a spiritual U-turn that was all the more compelling for being so dramatic and unexpected. Lila and Jim pursued their new faith with the same intensity they’d brought to the Bear Tribe. They were disappointed with the leniency of the Jesus-movement churches they encountered, hopping from one congregation to another. They got married after Lila suffered a miscarriage in what seemed like a punishment for their extramarital relationship. By late 1972, a year after becoming Christians, they’d moved to an old farmhouse in Kentucky near where Jim had grown up. Lila gave birth to a daughter shortly after Christmas. The baby was sweet and good-natured. She had blue eyes, big lips, and wispy blonde hair. Her name was Sarah. Jim called her Sissy Bug. Jim did landscape work while Lila stayed home with Sarah, all part of Lila’s effort to “submit to her husband” as directed by Scripture and social convention. But this was a difficult transition for Lila, who’d been largely self-sufficient since childhood. In early 1975, she gave birth to a son, Josh, in an excruciating delivery that resulted in a C-section. Though she lost a great deal of blood in the operation, she refused to get a transfusion. She said she didn’t want someone else’s tainted blood flowing through her veins. In the months and years that followed, the Greens moved several times throughout the South and the Lower Midwest, sampling and rejecting churches as they went. Increasingly, however, they felt unsatisfied and discouraged in their faith. They were still “hungry for God,” as Jim put it, “vexed in our soul” that they hadn’t experienced “the peace that transcends all understanding.” Something was missing.Eventually, they landed near Jeffersonville, Indiana, where they joined a massive church led by a booming-voiced female preacher named Berniece Hicks. Christ Gospel was one of many congregations under Hicks’s leadership: By the mid-’70s she ran what one journalist described as a “vast empire” of churches nationwide and abroad. As a Pentecostal church, Christ Gospel was part of the so-called charismatic renewal that reinvigorated American Christianity in the 1960s and ’70s, when many Christians sought out a more emotional, embodied connection to God. Christ Gospel was Pentecostal to a.” Parishioners spoke in tongues, calling back in a sacred cacophony, whirling and whooping in the aisles. Jim and Lila took to the place quickly. After years of wandering, they had finally found a church whose sensibility matched their own. They spent the mid-to-late-’70s on mission trips organized by Christ Gospel. Around 1976, they moved briefly to Mexico, where they worked at an orphanage and, later, at a Christian college. Sarah, 4, was a happy, rambunctious child, unbothered to be living in a squalid shack once inhabited by pigs. Things changed, however, when her babysitter, a male student from the college, started sexually abusing her. Lila was horrified when she discovered the abuse and vowed to make things right. The family returned to the United States shortly thereafter. Back at home, Lila told Hicks what had happened, but as Sarah recalls it, Hicks didn’t believe her. Her response angered the Greens, who’d been growing increasingly dissatisfied with Christ Gospel. They hated that Hicks lived such a notably extravagant lifestyle, clear proof, as they saw it, of her hypocrisy. Eventually, the Greens decided to leave the church to seek God on their own. They packed their green panel truck, strapped their faded suitcases to the roof, and headed south through Mexico and into Central America. They visited churches. They distributed Spanish-language Bibles. They ate cans of pork-and-beans they heated in fires alongside the road. Sarah was still a version of the bright, bubbly girl she’d always been. But the pain of her experiences in Mexico remained deep within her. At night she slept in the front of the truck, terrified she was going to be kidnapped. Around this time, cult leader Jim Jones organized his infamous mass murder-suicide in Guyana. The shocking episode drew the attention of people worldwide, the Greens included. Jones’s warped version of Christianity had little in common with their own, but the couple could recognize an organizational and spiritual master when they saw one. In 1979, the Greens moved back west to Missoula. Sarah was 6. Josh was 4. The family attended a few prayer meetings around town, but mostly they avoided more established congregations. They would worship and pray at home, away from the hypocrisies and degradations of the church. In the fall, Sarah started second grade. She was scrappy, small for her age. Her favorite subject was history. After school, she and Josh played with Cowboy, the family Pekingese, or roller-skated in the basement.Sarah was upstairs several days later when she heard a strange guttural noise coming from the basement. It was a woman’s voice. It was her mother’sSarah crept down to the basement, where she found Lila curled in a fetal position on the floor. Jim sat next to her, praying silently. Sarah walked back upstairs. She tried to ignore the noises as they continued at various rhythms and pitches for the next hour. Lila kept moaning in the basement in the days that followed. Then one afternoon, she invited Sarah and Josh downstairs to join her and Jim. Lila explained what was going on. She said she was birthing new souls into God’s kingdom. From then on, Sarah and Josh joined their parents in the basement for prayer, their foreheads pressed against the concrete for up to two hours at a time.Weeks went by like this. Then Lila started making prophecies. The end of the world was coming, she said. A time of purification was at hand. Sarah remained indifferent to her mother’s pronouncements. Sometimes she fell asleep on the floor as Lila groaned next to her. For Jim and Lila, however, this was wildly exciting stuff. For years they’d felt unfulfilled in their faith. They’d fasted. They’d prayed. They’d begged God to intercede in their lives. Yet mostly he’d stayed remote, silent, and unresponsive. They’d never been able to figure out why. Now they understood. Lila’s visions grew only stronger and stranger in the months and years that followed. At God’s direction, she, Jim, and the kids moved back to Sacramento. They got in touch with old friends and held prayer meetings they opened to the public. In late 1982, they purchased an unassuming cluster of three homes at the corner of X and 23rd Streets, almost certainly with the significant financial assistance of David Gains, a local businessman entranced by the Greens’ message. The Greens took the main house, an old bungalow with steep entry steps and a wide, domineering porch. Gains, who left his wife and young daughter to follow Jim and Lila, took the first of the two adjacent Tudors. One of Lila’s old friends moved with her husband and five young children into the second. When they removed the fencing between the houses, the property was subtly but importantly transformed. No longer was this a modest street corner in an ordinary working-class neighborhood. Now it was “Fort Freedom,” a military base with a “Citadel” and a pair of “Barracks” . For a time, Lila worked nights at the hospital, typing up patients’ charts. But she soon quit her job to spend more time receiving visions in a “prayer closet” built for her in the Citadel. Jim, meanwhile, spent his days holed up at a drafting board, drawing tracts to promote the ministry’s message around Sacramento. Sarah and Josh shared a bedroom on the main floor of the Citadel. They slept in low-clearance military bunk beds and stored their belongings in steamer trunks, the spartan furnishings in marked contrast to the filigreed lighting fixtures and intricately carved brass doorknobs that filled the house. Jim and Lila held meetings in a room just off the walnut-paneled parlor. By now, their theology had come to a partial clarity. Free Love Ministries members were the “Manifest Sons of God,” elite believers who would reach a state of “sinless perfection” through prayer, deliverance, fasting, and missionary work. It was time to “raise up a people,” Lila said, to prepare the way for Christ. “You may not find it in the Bible,” Lila said, “but you can know it is true because we have heard it directly from God.” For now, the Greens and their few followers remained connected to the broader Sacramento community. The kids still attended public school. Sometimes they went to the library or even the ice-cream parlor. Sarah liked to visit an antiques shop near the compound where she bought cheap but beautiful artifacts: an old lace dress, a pair of baby shoes with tiny leather buttons sewn into the side. To help promote the ministry, the group purchased airtime on KFIA, a Christian radio station on which Jim hosted a show called “Battle Cry.” Local pastors wrote letters objecting to Jim and Lila’s increasingly frenzied broadcasts, and eventually KFIA kicked the Greens off the air. The Greens moved to an open-access radio station and started distributing tracts in bus stations, on campus at UC Davis, and around low-income housing developments. The booklets were filled with screeds against yoga, tight jeans, homosexuality, abortion, television, and, above all, the institutional Christian church. At first, the visitors came one or two at a time, drop-ins who’d heard about Jim and Lila from the radio or tracts or through friends. Within a few months, more than a dozen people were regularly stopping by the compound. They were nurses and construction workers, alcoholics and veterans, punk rockers, college dropouts, and aspiring pilots. They lived on the streets or went to college or came from backgrounds of great privilege. They were in their teens, 20s, and 30s; they were white, Black, Hispanic, and Native American. Many moved on after a meeting or two. Others came by again and again. High-schooler Julie Padilla left a life of booze, gangs, and parties to follow the Greens. Rachel Johnson, an alcoholic, quit her job as a psychiatric nurse to move to the compound. A former Air Force member came to the ministry consumed with guilt about his past: He said he’d slept with 16 different sex workers while stationed in the Philippines. Derek and Lisa Dye were unemployed when they first arrived at the compound, but they quickly received jobs at the art shops. The Greens bought a fourth house adjacent to Barracks 2 when it came on the market. Fort Freedom now straddled a sizable portion of the block. Curious neighbors asked what was going on, particularly when Jim and Lila put up signage and raised a flag above the compound. But no one meddled. The Greens weren’t doing anything illegal. They kept the property spotless. Inside the Citadel, however, every evening the group exploded into a frothy, cacophonous frenzy. Members fell from their chairs, wailed in tongues, and convulsed on the floor. One day, several boxes arrived at the compound containing military uniforms: collared button-downs, pleated khaki pants and skirts. Eventually, all 20 or 30 members were given military ranks to match the outfits. Jim and Lila were lieutenant colonels. The children were privates. Group members signed loyalty pledges, burned their old baby photos, and severed connections to unconverted friends and family members . Sarah and the other children were pulled from school. Eventually, Lila also encouraged members to change their names as an indication of their new lives in Christ. Not everyone was rechristened — Sarah, Jim, and Josh remained as they were — but Lila took a name from the Old Testament. “Villagers of Israel would not fight,” proclaimed the Book of Judges. “They held back until I, Deborah, arose, until I arose, a mother in Israel.” So too would Lila arise. So too would Lila — wouldEven the group itself received a new name. Free Love Ministries was over. In its place was born the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. For now, the group’s militancy was largely spiritual. But the Greens’ behavior was about to grow radically more punitive, its abuses not just mental but physical: kidnapping, malnourishment, beatings, all in the name of God. All in the name of Deborah — general, prophet, holy chosen oracle.The Oracle’s Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American CultYour Weekly Horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant: March 29–April 4Your Weekly Horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant: March 29–April 4The Luxury Birth Center Breaking Hearts on the Upper East Side The Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns promised privacy and Chanel. Patients and doulas report fleas, filth, and neglect. Your Weekly Horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant: March 29–April 4 Jealousy may flare as Venus enters Taurus, while the full moon in Libra reveals what’s out of balance in your life.In this week’s story, a bisexual newsletter editor for a PR firm goes on dates and flirts on apps.At the iHeartRadio Awards, the pair marked their awards-show debut as a couple with plenty of kissing and celebrity photo ops.Including under-$50 Levi’s for women and men, our best overall and best less-expensive bed pillows, and lots of our longtime favorite beauty products.A new report says the Defense secretary overstepped his role to prevent two women and two Black men from being promoted to one-star general.New York
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