‘Love Has Won’ Demonstrates Reason 59,731 Not to Start a Cult

By Alison Lanier | TV | November 24, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | November 24, 2023 |

Amy Carlson decided that she was God—literal God, and Jesus, and Mother Nature, walking the Earth with perfect love for all creation. And other people believed it too. There are some that still do. She made a lot of other claims, too, like that Robin Williams was dictating her diet from beyond the grave so she’d be light enough for the spaceship to come and pick her up to take her to the fifth dimension. You know. That kind of stuff.

It’s all documented in Hannah Olson’s docuseries Love Has Won, now airing weekly on Max. Olson started making the series very shortly after Carlson’s mummified body was discovered enshrined in the cult’s house, interviewing cult members who are very, very much true believers in the immediate aftermath of the cult’s reckoning. These interviews become mind-boggling and then disturbing as the cult speaks its own language and reiterates increasingly strange and vicious delusions. But we’ll get to that.

Rewind a few years. Carlson, claiming to be “Mother God,” gathered a hippie, New Age cult around her, recruiting from serious conspiracy theorists and bored rich white girls on the internet. They gave her their life savings, moved into her house, and dedicated their life to “Mom.” They developed their own prototypical cult language with some striking overlaps in vocabulary to Heaven’s Gate (ascended beings, divine guides from the next level of creation, spaceship to heaven, etc). Together they stayed stoned every waking moment, venerated Amy as god, livestreamed continually, indulged in every conspiracy theory that came across Reddit (from Q being Amy as “Queen of Creation” to Hitler “working for the light”), and sold truly woowoo New Age products for absurd prices to keep the bills paid.

Incredibly, this wouldn’t necessarily be a problem. (Well, except maybe the Q stuff and claiming Robin Williams, Gene Wilder, Marilyn Monroe, and dozens of other real, dead people for their “galactic A-team.”) I mean, if a bunch of stoned folks want to sit around and document passing clouds as spaceships while braiding Amy’s hair and selling crystals and tinctures to believers via livestreams, it’s not necessarily a dangerous thing.

But of course, there’s the destructive side. We can begin with the customary cult tactic of cutting off everyone, including and especially concerned family members, from their previous life. Then there are the interviews with cult members—an ex-Marine, a victim of child abuse, a grieving son—who were clearly in a deeply vulnerable place when the cult offered them comfort and belonging while rewriting their worldview and demanding obedience.

Then there are the more specific aspects of this cult. For one, Carlson’s boyfriends, or her “Father Gods”…namely the final one, Jason, or “Father of All Creation” as he introduces himself to interviewers. He’s a career criminal and severe drug addict with a propensity for power trips, and telling him he’s god and giving him authority over a demure New Age cult didn’t help matters.

Then, in tandem with Jason’s dramatics, was Carlson’s escalating own drug use and addictions. Her followers call these substances her “tools,” insisting that the outside world doesn’t understand how to use them “consciously” and “intentionally.” Those tools transform Carlson in front of the camera’s eye. She apparently drank continually, and her broad-spectrum substance abuse visibly decimates her physical and mental health as the footage rolls on. First, she becomes belligerent and cruel as she slurs and screams at her followers. Then she truly begins to waste away.

Now here’s one of many reasons not to start a cult: say you’re a cult leader, claiming to be god, who has cut her followers off from belief in mainstream medicine. Now say you’re dying of liver failure after years of alcoholism. Say you’re asking to go to a hospital and recanting your claims to be god. Say at this point you really just want to survive.

Her followers, who were at that point being denied food and sleep while being continually high, are not swayed. They are very devoted to Mother God’s message—to the point of not listening to Mother God when she herself tells them it isn’t real. Instead, they poured colloidal silver—the cult’s chosen “panacea” for all earthly ills that are, of course, caused by “energy imbalances”—down Carlson’s throat by the liter. Her face turned blue. Really, really blue. What looks like scabies blanket her skin. She is in pain and she is dying, and she knows it.

As Carlson sinks into organ failure in the cult’s footage and livestreams, one of the central cult members (one of the rich white girls pursuing a New Age mission in life), describes that “3D hospitals” wouldn’t even understand “Mom,” and that the toll her “divine” mission was taking on her “earth body” would be so beyond mortal medicine it would blow their minds. At this point, my wife, who is a healthcare provider, was shouting at the screen: “Liver failure! Liver failure!”

This is one of the most riveting and terrifying aspects of Love Has Won. Carlson clearly has lost control of her creation, and she is now helpless to save herself from it. In stories of cults and their leaders, we so often hear about a charismatic figurehead escalating their control and guiding their followers toward self-destruction. In the case of Amy Carlson, her long-time domination over the lives of her followers actually ends up robbing her of her agency even over her own body.

There’s one more episode to this wild ride of a cult documentary, as Olson guides us toward the moment in which police find Carlson’s mummified body wreathed in Christmas lights and with stones lodged where her eyes should be. I’m buckled in for the final installment next week. If nothing else, this is a story about how people become so enmeshed in an abusive and controlling worldview, and looking into the eyes of the end product.

Love Has Won airs Mondays at 9 pm EST on Max.