Sacramento Loons in Their New Mexico Fastness

Eccentric Sacramento, California folks - not a surprise. Isolate them in Fence Lake, which is just about as remote a part of New Mexico as you can possibly find, and nothing good can result:

James Green and his wife Deborah Green (who also goes by the name Lila Green) opened Free Love Ministries in 1982 with four communal houses in Sacramento, California. The Greens had little ministry training but attracted about 50 members. They operated a military structure like the Salvation Army. The Greens adopted the titles of “general.”

The sect raised money by operating custom frame shop.

A few years later, a Christian radio station refused to broadcast the Greens’ content about demons promoting homosexuality, karate and fairy tales.

...By the 1990s, the group was known as the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps. Members call Deborah Green an “oracle” who has direct communication with God.

...While in Berino, New Mexico, the group began publishing a newspaper sharing their militaristic and apocalyptic beliefs. Their literature caught the attention of Mark Pitcavage, now a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

Pitcavage says rhetoric around “warfare” for people’s souls was unusual for the early 1990s. The group’s brochures he later obtained spoke about “bloody Islam” and how homosexuality was responsible for a “decaying society.”

...Andrew Chesnut, a religious studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said the group appears to practice an extreme form of Pentecostalism.

“But some of their beliefs are so outside the mainstream,” Chesnut said.