Dateline: “Mother God” (NBC-TV, aired October 15, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

NBC-TV had been ballyhooing an episode of their true-crime show Dateline all week about the exploits, career and bizarre death of cult leader “Mother God,” true name Amy Carlson, who was born in Texas on November 30, 1975 and died some time in April 2021. Among the people interviewed for this program were Carlson’s mother, Linda Haythorne, her two sisters, two of her three children (each of whom had different fathers) and a woman named Amanda Ray, who got interested in researching Carlson’s cult when her husband left her to join them and ultimately was found naked in the woods outside the cult’s headquarters in Saguache County, Colorado under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen he had been slipped in a drink of colloidal silver. I’ve long been interested in religious cults and in particular how certain individuals can attain such power over their recruits that their followers willingly and often eagerly hand over all their money and possessions and essentially turn themselves into their leaders’ slaves. It’s possible my interest in cults was triggered by my experience living in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s, while I was a student at the University of California (though I only lasted two quarters) and often met recruiters for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church on the streets. I was probably in a state of mind then that might have made me vulnerable to manipulation by a cult – especially one as big, powerful and well-organized as Moon’s – and I remember going to one of their recruitment meetings but finding myself uninterested (bored, actually) and never followed up.

In some respects the cult founded by Amy Carlson – or, as she called herself, “Mother God” – was pretty typical of the breed: a leader claiming divine (or at least semi-divine) status, a preposterous theology jumbling bits and pieces of established spiritual traditions, and a set of fervent believers who would literally do almost anything to serve the leader. For the first 30 years of her life Amy Carlson lived a relatively normal existence in Dallas, where she was born, where she was a straight-A student (at least according to her sisters) stuck in a dead-end job at McDonald’s. She had risen to being a “manager” at McDonald’s, but that’s not much of a step up from being one of the regular peons in the McDonald’s lines either in terms of responsibility or pay. At age 30 she suddenly quit her job, left Dallas and went to live in Mount Shasta, California with a tall, bearded man who had apparently contacted her via the Internet and spread some New Age-ish ideas that led her to join him and the two of them to present YouTube videos and other messages calling themselves “Father God” and “Mother God.” The two of them didn’t stay together long, but Carlson continued to use the “Mother God” title and to promote her beliefs online via a succession of YouTube videos and Facebook posts – which is quite frankly one of the most fascinating parts of her story: the effectiveness of the Internet in disseminating all sorts of bizarre beliefs, from propaganda against the COVID-19 vaccine and allegations that the 2020 election was ‘stolen” from Donald Trump to the sorts of religious beliefs that used to have to be retailed on street corners, storefront churches and invitation-only meetings.

There have been a number of cults that have incorporated science-fiction tropes into their belief systems, including L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate, and the one the authors of the book When Prophecy Fails (Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter) stumbled on in the early 1950’s – they were doing historical research on what had happened to people who joined groups prophesying the end of the world when the world didn’t end on schedule, and by chance they discovered that a flying-saucer cult was organizing in their vicinity and would allow them to study the question in real time – but Amy’s group, which she called “Love Has Won,” is one of the first cults that effectively used the Internet to disseminate its beliefs and attract followers. The Dateline episode was two hours long and, while some of their previous shows about more ordinary crimes have seemed padded (especially by comparison with Headline News Network’s Forensic Files, which can tell a compelling true-crime story in a half-hour time slot that probably works out to just 20 minutes after you deduct the commercials), this one really needed to be that long to tell the entire story. It seems that “Mother God” concocted a theology that held that the world we actually inhabit and exist in, which she called the “3D World,” is an illusion (which is not that different from another female cult leader, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and her similar dismissal of the real world as “an illusion of mortal mind”) and the purpose of her group was to raise humanity to the ideal “5D World” in which there would be permanent love and peace. “Mother God” herself claimed to have been reincarnated 534 times, and she said among her previous incarnations were Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe.

She also claimed to have recruited Robin Williams to her cult … after he committed suicide in 2013. She shot a YouTube video in which she announced she was in communication with his spirit, and added, “Nanoo-nanoo,” the famous catch phrase from his star-making role as a space alien on the TV show Mork & Mindy. (People who actually knew Robin Williams in this life say he hated it when people came up to him saying “Nanoo-nanoo” or otherwise referencing Mork & Mindy.) And in her later years she embraced Donald Trump – she claimed he had been her father in one of their previous incarnations – and apparently added some of the QAnon allegations into her theology. The group bounced around between Colorado, California (their original redoubt in Shasta County) and the island of Kauai in Hawai’i, where according to the Dateline program she made a major mistake: she announced that she was the living incarnation of the Hawai’ian volcano goddess Pele. Not a good move: there are apparently a lot of Hawai’ians who, whatever the rest of their religious beliefs, revere Pele and took as kindly to Amy Carlson’s claim to be Pele as a convention of Fundamentalist Christians might to someone in their midst and claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Her “I am Pele” claim led to pickets surrounding her rented home in Kauai and the mayor of the island approaching her and her cult members and telling them that, for their own safety, it would be a good idea for them to leave and head back to the mainland. Also, over time Amy’s health started to deteriorate and so did her mental state. For one thing, she became a heavy-duty alcoholic – among the duties of her inner circle was to get her an endless stream of rock glasses filled with vodka garnished with lime – and she became more and more unkempt. In her early videos she looks like a hippie about 40 years too late, but in the later years she was staring at the camera, her hair tousled and uncombed, her face hardened into a scowl and her speech peppered with the “F”-word and an unending stream of insults aimed at her followers.

Also, her skin was literally turning blue, which Amanda Ray and some of the other people who kept track of her online videos without actually joining the cult attributed to the group’s heavy use of colloidal silver. I remember first hearing of colloidal silver in the early 1980’s, when I was writing for the Holistic Living News and was surrounded by a whole lot of New Age stuff, some of which made good sense, some of which seemed harmless and some of which seemed just silly. I had put colloidal silver in the crazy-but-harmless category, but as I was writing this I did a quick online search and ended up on the Web site of a branch of the National Insittutes of Health called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/colloidal-silver) – which does not sound like a source that would automatically be hostile to alternative therapies in general. But they are quite nasty about colloidal silver, which they explain is “tiny silver particles in a liquid that is sometimes promoted on the Internet as a dietary supplement. However, evidence supporting health-related claims is lacking. In fact, colloidal silver can be dangerous to your health.” The reason, the site explains, is that when silver collects in your body it can cause a toxic condition called “argyria,” which among other things turns your skin a bluish grey. One of Amy Carlson’s cult beliefs was the efficacy of colloidal silver as a cure for just about every disease – one member who was being questioned by the police talked up colloidal silver to the officers who were interrogating him and urged him to use it, and one of the cult’s biggest sources of income was selling colloidal silver on line. So were so-called “etheric surgeries” through which “Mother God” claimed to be able to give a person psychological healing even over the phone or online – once again, like a lot of other cults who preach the laying on of hands and other nonexistent “cures” both for nonexistent diseases and very real ones.

One story told on the Dateline program was that Amy Carlson actually at one point realized what was happening to her and asked her principal assistants, “Aurora” (Lauryn Suarez) and “Hope” (Ashley Peluso), to call her a doctor. But they refused on the ground that having “Mother God” treated by a “3D Doctor” went against everything the group believed – which, if true, suggests that Amy Carlson became a victim of her own success at brainwashing the people around her. (Aurora and Hope were later questioned by police, and they said Amy never wanted them to call a “3D Doctor” and that had just been a private joke between them.) Another interesting wrinkle in the group’s history is that Amy retained a sex drive and would periodically anoint her current boyfriend with the “Father God” title. One of the former “Father God”’s, Andrew Profaci, was interviewed on Dateline and elsewhere, including a piece on the Web site Insider (https://www.insider.com/inside-bizarre-cult-love-has-won-mother-god-amy-carlson-2021-8) in which he’s quoted as saying, “ "It's really a shame what happened to these people because they all started with good intentions.” (That’s a common lament from quite a few people who join a cult because it seems to offer something positive and genuinely spiritual, only to find out the darker side and leave once they can no longer rationalize it or explain away the cognitive dissonance.) Profaci recalled that when he arrived at Cult Central in Colorado, he was told he was to be “a vessel for Father God’s consciousness,” which included becoming Carlson’s lover. “To tell you the truth, I had no intentions of being in a relationship with her. I mean, no offense, but she's not my type,” Profaci told Insider. “Unfortunately, you couldn't get her away from this idea of needing this title and thinking she's God. And that really perverted everything that we did.”

After Profaci left the group, Carlson recruited a new “Father God,” Jason Castillo (who was shown on Dateline in a quite hot-looking topless photo showing a great pair of pecs – suggesting that, at least physically, Carlson’s taste in men had taken a definite step up from the rather wimpy-looking Profaci), who’s quoted in Insider as saying at first he had a hard time accepting the idea that God was a woman, but “You think, of course, who gave birth in your family? The woman does.” Amy Carlson’s power over her followers was so strong they literally continued to worship her even after her death – apparently she died in California but the cult members brought her body back to Colorado, set it up in bed, wrapped it (except for her face, because they wanted her still to be recognizable), surrounded it with Christmas lights, anointed it with aromatic oils and burned a lot of sage around it to cover up the smell of her decomposition. The body was discovered and reported to authorities on April 28, 2021 by Miguel Lamboy, one of Carlson’s most important male followers, who had been spared “Father God” duties in her videos (and her bed) but had become the group’s business manager, had incorporated the movement as a not-for-profit corporation, and had put all the finances in his name.

Lamboy was particularly anxious about it because among the seven people in the house with Carlson’s corpse were his two-year-old son and another child, a teenager, and he was naturally anxious to get his son back. He reported the body to authorities – there was a bit of a jurisdictional snarl because he went to one county sheriff and then was told the house was located in the neighboring county – and ultimately the adults who were in the house with Amy’s remains were arrested on suspicion of child abuse and improper handling of a corpse. Eventually all charges against them were dismissed, which pissed off Amy’s relatives (especially her mom) but seemed fair to me – as macabre and disgusting as the actions of Amy’s followers were around her body, I had a hard time imagining just what about their conduct would (or should) be illegal. Just when Amy Carlson died and what the cause of death was remain mysteries, but it is known that Aurora and Hope, the two women who were at Amy’s side in her last months took over the movement and have rebranded it “5D Full Disclosure.” They put out videos claiming that Amy Carlson had “ascended” and that her “ascension” would pave the way for the rest of humanity to “ascend” to the 5D paradise, too. But Jason Castillo, the last “Father God,” has started his own online religious movement called “Joy Rains” [sic].

My working definition of when a new spiritual movement ceases to be a “cult” and becomes a “religion” has long been whether it can survive the death of its founder: the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science pulled it off. So, much to my surprise, did the Church of Scientology, which I remember reading about when L. Ron Hubbard was still alive; I never dreamed a group with such a bonkers theology (it’s hard to tell the difference between L. Ron Hubbard’s writings as the scriptures of Scientology and Hubbard’s science-fiction stories written for the commercial marketplace before he got into the religion biz) would survive the founder’s death, but it did and it’s still flourishing (and no doubt extracting a lot more money from its adherents than the relatively penny-ante Love Has Won ever did). As someone who’s never taken the God stuff seriously – I’m no longer the hard-core atheist I was in my younger years but I’ve never felt compelled, or even interested, in the idea that there is a God, and as depressing as it may be to contemplate my own death I’ve never taken seriously the idea that there is a life after this one – I have a bemused attitude towards religious cults and the people who run them, at once hating them and the way they manipulate people into doing stupid things and also having a great deal of compassion, especially for those they ensnare. Aside from their effective use of the Internet to spread their gospel far and wide, and the macabre ending to the story by which the cult members continue to worship not only the memory but even the physical presence of their Leader after her death, Love Has Won seems to be a pretty ordinary cult story – but the way movements like this keep cropping up and attracting followers says something pretty depressing about the human condition.