Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside the Church Universal and Triumphant by Erin Prophet from Lyons Press is $2.28 (US Kindle)
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For the first time, the truth about what went on inside a secretive sect during an event that gripped the nation—by the daughter and onetime heir apparent of its founder.
In early 1990, in response to the apocalyptic prophecies of her mother, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Erin Prophet entered a network of underground bunkers in Montana along with members of her mother’s Church Universal and Triumphant, a controversial New Age sect much of America had branded a “cult.” Emerging to find the world intact, Erin was forced into a radical reassessment of everything she knew, or thought she knew, about love, life, and obligations to church and family. She had spent her adolescence watching her mother vilified as a dangerous cult leader even while attempting to meet her mother’s expectations by becoming a “prophet” herself.
In Prophet’s Daughter, the onetime heir apparent of the woman known to tens of thousands of followers as “Guru Ma” provides a fiercely honest account of her struggle to understand a mother who was both loved and hated. Even to her family, Elizabeth Clare Prophet projected an aura of infallibility and held her closest followers to a rigid moral code. With the craft of a storyteller, Erin shows how she first dismissed, then entertained, rumors of her mother’s sexual hypocrisy, and suggests that the strain of maintaining a façade of perfection fueled her mother’s departure from reality.
The taut narrative hangs on an intense combination of health crises and external pressures that drove Guru Ma’s increasingly dire prophecies. Throughout the book, Erin also candidly recounts her own journey, the dwindling of her belief, and the turmoil of witnessing her beloved mother’s decline. In a moving conclusion, she describes her efforts to combat the subtle corruption brought on by Guru Ma’s power and increasing isolation, only to be thwarted by the onset of her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
A remarkable memoir, Prophet’s Daughter affords a rare look inside the workings of a secretive sect that once held a nation’s attention and still exists today. And it makes a powerful contribution to ongoing public debates about power, group behavior, and the future of religion.
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