Aggressive Christianity, Part II
Mike Smith
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Last month in “My Strange New Mexico,” we explored the unusual history and beliefs of a small religious sect known as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps. (Click here to read that first installment.)
Inspired in part by the Salvation Army, this little group was born of an alleged 1979 revelation, in which God Himself purportedly commanded Jim and Lila (a.k.a. Deborah) Green, two 1960s hippies with notable tendencies toward the extreme, to found and lead a spiritual army—the “Army that Sheds No Blood.”
Jim Green is described in Donna Kossy’s book Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief as boasting about nights of his youth spent strung out on crank, howling at the moon, wearing only a loincloth, hurling a hunting knife, and yelling “KILL, KILL, KILL,” making it seem almost natural that his shift from drugs to Christianity would happen in a similarly grandiose manner—would happen with the founding of a uniformed corps—a spiritual army—a self-proclaimed “Cult of the Living God.”
In Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, author-historian Philip Jenkins wrote that one modern-day study showed that “...if we allow for population sizes, the highest concentrations of cult headquarters were actually in Nevada and New Mexico,” and he stated that this may have been partly due to New Mexico's history as a “largely unchurched territory,” its high percentage of New Age and mystical "healers," and also the “continuing vigor of Native American and Hispanic occult traditions.” So it's somewhat understandable that a group such as the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps would settle here.
Originally from Sacramento, California, the group eventually fled the area due to an ex-member's highly-publicized lawsuit that resulted in the seizure of the sect's property—running first to northern California, and then to Oregon, and then to two consecutive sites in New Mexico. In the 1990s, the sect’s membership soon outgrew its first New Mexico compound, in Berino, not far from Las Cruces, and subsequently relocated to Cibola County, just south of Gallup. There, in the little community of Fence Lake, population 187, they established the intensely private Shin Ra Na Holy Tribal Nation, from which they continued to bake $10 loaves of bread to sell in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, raise crops and garden, and engage in mail-order missionary work.
The group produced and sent out literally thousands of miracle prayer cloths, religious audio programs, and various forms of religious literature, including leaflets defining their role as God's spiritual generals here on earth, and newsletters proclaiming the evils of television, rock music, communism, psychiatric medication, ties to non-sect family and friends, and just about every religion beside their own.
“We've got pretty boys with velvet lips and painted up harlots running the house of God,” wrote Jim Green in issue 116 of the Battle Cry, one of the sect's many publications. “...I've been in many churches where lust runs wild. Homosexuals hang out in churches, especially the ones where 'love is.' They like that closeness.”
In another sect newsletter, issue 7 of Acts of the Spirit, a photo caption read, “By a beautiful Act of the Spirit, as a sign of his presence within our camp, Jesus Christ made this wild deer walk peacefully among us for 12 hours (3/07). Here the wild deer stands beside General Deborah Green.”
In November of 2005, the group made headlines again, when the Corps’ internal politics spilled over into the public, after General Jim Green claimed he had suggested that the group make some reforms, including not only allowing former members to return and re-enlist but also permitting non-member families to visit their children in the compound.
“Those reforms divided his followers and angered his own wife, who claimed that Green wanted her dead,” reported Albuquerque's KOB TV, that November second.
Following these disputes, police arrested Jim Green on charges of assault, for allegedly attacking two dissenting members with a homemade scythe after telling the two and his wife that they needed to take a walk with him to be murdered. Green's alleged violence was reciprocated, though, when the two men struck back with walking sticks, beating Green about the head until an armed Cibola County Sheriff intervened and drove Green to a hospital to receive forty staples in his scalp.
Jim Green denied wanting to murder his wife, and was soon bailed out by a group member. His wife, Deborah Green, quickly retracted her claim that her husband had threatened to murder her. The two revised their story to say that Jim Green had merely struck one of the men to make him leave the Greens' house. And the Generals announced in the Gallup Independent that they were “trying to tone things down.”
Toning things down, however, will very likely always be a challenge for the Aggressive Christianity Missionary Training Corps. A group whose thirty to forty members still consider themselves soldiers in a spiritual army, whose leaders have declared themselves Brigadier Generals, whose ex-members have appeared on the Dr. Phil Show (as one did in September of 2006) to accuse the group of brainwashing and kidnapping, and whose very name includes the words “Aggressive Christianity” and “Corps,” is a group that just might not be able ever to stay low-key very easily.
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Reader Comments (6)
I really think people might go for it.
But what mean people are you referring to specifically? And why do it so secretly?
No, but seriously, if you think what I've written isn't true, you are more than welcome to post your side of the story--in fact, I'd love to hear it.
I even sent an e-mail to General Deborah inviting her to respond to the comments on this site. I hope she'll tell us her side.