Love Has Won, called a cult by former followers, was not the sort where the leader overdoses on power, sexually abuses followers, and hoards weapons until it all implodes. This group’s leader, Amy Carlson, began her journey more as cult followers tend to: She fell down an internet rabbit hole, then ran away from her family. Before long, though, she claimed to be God and started collecting followers…who helped her slowly die. 

“Amy created a palace of lies that she could not escape from,” explains director Hannah Olson, whose three-part HBO documentary series, Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, premiered Monday. 

In April 2021, following a tip, police located a body in an advanced state of decomposition, wrapped in a sleeping bag and decorated with Christmas lights. Carlson had died some days earlier in an Oregon hotel. Not knowing what else to do, her disciples had then taken the corpse to a campground—they were pulled over by cops on the way, who thought the body in the back, wearing a hat and glasses, was sleeping—where they were met by others in the group. The deceased’s boyfriend, known to acolytes as Father God, slept next to her in a tent. Then he and two other followers drove her body across five state lines, back to a home base in Colorado. Before she died, her skin had turned grayish blue. The police who found her thought she had been painted.

Three weeks later, Olson was in town, conducting interviews and scouring more than a thousand hours of footage from the group’s 2,700 YouTube videos and live streams. In 2016, the director had become interested in the way alternate realities were penetrating our democracy. “It’s easy for us to write off people with beliefs that we see as really far out there, rather than looking at the circumstances that created those beliefs,” she says. When she heard about Carlson, she saw an opportunity. 

No one wakes up one day and decides to devote themselves to a woman in Colorado who is 19 billion years old and being helped by a team of dead celebrities, led by Robin Williams, in a cosmic battle against “the cabal.” A woman who can cure cancer, addiction, Lyme disease, and suicidal thoughts; one who would also “drink herself into oblivion every single night,” as one former follower puts it in the series. It takes time to get there. In Love Has Won, Olson effectively depicts the water reaching a boil. 

There are no talking head experts in the series, or clips of media stories. Outside of Carlson’s family members, a local sheriff, and a reporter, the story is told exclusively by current and former followers and the footage they left behind, lending the series an immersive quality. Ultimately, it’s a story of people escaping untenable lives.

In 2007, after a descent into extreme online thought—including classic conspiracy theories as well as beliefs about angels and ascended masters—Carlson abandoned her working-class life and her children in order to join a guy she met online. Soon they were preaching about the deity within us all in their own videos, as Mother God and Father God. But then, as the original Father God says in the series, Carlson decided “she was more God than other people were God.” She left him and found a new Father God (there would be several), who claimed she had cured his cancer. A so-called cult was born. 

The self-styled deity sold remote healings and slowly gained an impressive online audience: almost 20,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 10,000 on YouTube. The group’s videos were watched more than 1.5 million times. All the while, she convinced more and more people to escape their lives and join her party. “You were high from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to bed,” a former follower recalls in the series. 

Many who devoted themselves to Mother God were escaping one specific reality, according to Olson. “This is a group of people who were traumatized by the health care system,” the director says. One member arrived after struggling with an opioid addiction. Another found the group after losing his father to that same disease. One young woman joined after waking up from a coma to discover she owed half a million dollars in medical bills. “Love Has Won exists,” says Olson, “because people were searching online for how to heal their bodies and minds, because they could not afford to go to a doctor.” Many, if not all, were without insurance; the uninsured rate for American adults stood at 11% earlier this year. 

“Reality doesn’t make sense for a lot of people because of the enormous income inequality,” Olson says. “My generation has not inherited the world we were promised.” (The director is a millennial.) Cult studies suggest that when predicted triumphs fail to occur, people tend to shift their realities to match their beliefs rather than the other way around. 

According to sociologists, doomsday thinking increases during crises, including natural disasters and societal shifts such as changing populations, technological leaps, and economic strife. In the film, another Love Has Won follower discusses the trauma she experienced and witnessed following the 2008 mortgage crisis. In times of anxiety, we seek control. “Amy’s ideology empowered people to believe that they could heal themselves,” Olson says. 

At their heart, all doomsday groups are autocracies—it’s another kind of escape, in this case from the hard and messy work of democracy. We seek cults when our realities feel out of control, then cede control upon joining. This is yet another way Love Has Won deviated from the classic pattern. Its core followers eventually took the wheel. While investigating the group, says Olson, “I couldn’t tell who was steering the ship.” This is partly how Carlson lost her life.

Love Has Won sold merch and supplements online, including colloidal silver, a tincture of silver particles suspended in liquid. Its healing properties have also been touted by other outré wellness sites and hawkers, specifically its support for immune function. Though actual science has found no benefit to the oral ingestion of silver, Carlson said it could cure almost anything. In the series, a member alleges that colloidal silver has been intentionally targeted by the medical establishment: “The pharmaceutical industry banned it because healed people don’t make money.” As their leader devolved into alcoholism (Carlson believed alcohol and drugs were her “medicine”), Carlson’s disciples served her more and more shots of silver. 

Meanwhile, she lost weight. Carlson suffered from anorexia, a disease characterized by a strong desire for control and often associated with anxiety disorders. The series shares a diary entry by one of her disciple caretakers that suggests the severity of her illness: “Robin [Williams] says 103.1 is maximum weight Mom can get to” in order to ascend out of the false “3D” world and into the true “5D” plane. The group believed ego entered through “two back doors”: food and sleep. Everyone lost weight. 

Eventually, Mother God stopped moving from the waist down. It’s unclear whether this was paralysis. At least one former member believes it resulted from nerve damage due to advanced alcoholism. Her devotees believed her physical deterioration resulted from Carlson taking on the world’s negative energy, a sign her ascension was imminent. They scoured the sky for the spaceship coming to pick her up. All the while, her caretakers dosed her with tincture. A buildup of silver in the body leads to argyria, a condition that causes skin to turn blue. 

Of the many tragedies associated with Love Has Won, there’s one that stands out: Carlson knew she was dying and tried to get help. Before her final illness, she instructed followers never to take her to a hospital, and refused outside help. Toward the end, she reached out to family members. She even occasionally asked her followers for assistance, but the engine she ignited couldn’t be shut down. “There’s been moments when Mom has asked us to take her to a 3D hospital, and we were like, ‘Nope!’” one of her core disciples says in a video from 2020 that appears in the series. In other reports, we learn why: Her followers believed that if she entered a hospital, members of the cabal, who were trying to stop her ascension, would take over the body of someone working in the hospital and then harm Carlson.

Carlson weighed just 75 pounds when she died. An autopsy determined the cause to be “alcohol abuse, anorexia, and chronic colloidal silver ingestion.” She was 45.

Was Carlson’s death a murder or a suicide? “She created a belief system where poisons were remedies. She adhered to it. And she collected followers who adhered to it. That belief system had built into it her death. It’s a death by addiction,” says Olson, who comes from a family that has addiction running through many generations. “It has the same culpability for both the person and the people around them, that addiction has. It’s just that this one came with a whole cosmology.” 

To be sure, some of the group’s views were deplorable. Members thought the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and believed Hitler was “working for the light.” But using that D-word to describe the people themselves doesn’t help. “It’s so easy on the left to look at people as deplorable or as repugnant, rather than as people who have been failed by our social system,” Olson says.

The core members of Love Has Won still believe Amy Carlson is God and reject the 3D world. Their story isn’t over. “What happens ‘afterwards’ is that these are our neighbors and extended family members,” Olson says. “There are people looking for these kinds of answers all over America.”