Love Has Won is the name of the new age cult that is the focus of this book. It’s the story of Amy, her metamorphosis into Mother God (as she called herself and made others call her), and her founding of this cult. The events in this book are very recent, as in within the past decade. We also get to see the rampant spread of this cult online and the detailing of how the disinformation disseminated so frighteningly quickly and widely was horrifying. The author does an excellent job of describing where people were at when they discovered this information—their loneliness, their feelings of being outsiders, their constant search for meaning, and their belief that there is something bigger. The Love Has Won cult offered responses and remedies for all of this.
Another thing the author does with this book that I deeply appreciate is add over a century and a half of context. At the core of a number of new age lies, including the ones on which Love Has Won was based, is a debunked theory from an 1860s British zoologist. The author starts there, and as you read, you really get a sense of how things quickly spun out of control. There is also information about historical spiritualists and self-professed new age gurus and how their legacy has reached forward into the present, as well as ones still living today.
Love Has Won, the first iteration with Amy living as Mother God, was not long-lasting but there are still a number of spin-off groups thriving today which, again, is really unnerving. It is not a spoiler that Amy dies and it is gruesome—not gorey violent, but very dark. Because this is such a recent thing and there was a three-part documentary on these events in 2023, the author was able to interview a lot of people, including some of Amy’s actual family.
There are many content warnings for this book: alcoholism, child abuse, verbal, emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, antisemitism, and possibly more. This book was a lot to handle, especially as someone who doesn’t usually read true crime, yet I absolutely devoured it.