--- title: 'Love Has Won' Is the Rare Cult Doc That Leads With Empathy description: HBO's 3-part docuseries captures the depressing appeal of cults in a lonely, spiritually bereft world. Read TIME's review. canonical: https://time.com/6334386/love-has-won-review-hbo/ author: Judy Berman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-11-13T19:29:47.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T04:52:52.195Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 'Love Has Won' Is the Rare Cult Doc That Leads With Empathy og:description: HBO's 3-part docuseries captures the depressing appeal of cults in a lonely, spiritually bereft world. og:url: https://time.com/6334386/love-has-won-review-hbo/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt64da309b7e9fae6e/698a42300116822261983a05/love-has-won-the-cult-of-mother-god_6.jpg?branch=production&width=1440&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: love-has-won-the-cult-of-mother-god_6 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'Love Has Won' Is the Rare Cult Doc That Leads With Empathy twitter:description: HBO's 3-part docuseries captures the depressing appeal of cults in a lonely, spiritually bereft world. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt64da309b7e9fae6e/698a42300116822261983a05/love-has-won-the-cult-of-mother-god_6.jpg?branch=production&width=1440&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # _Love Has Won_ Is the Rare Cult Doc That Leads With Empathy > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Judy Berman](https://time.com/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman TV Critic Nov 13, 2023 7:29 PM UTC  Amy Carlson with followers Amy Carlson with followersHBO  by [Judy Berman](https://time.com/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman TV Critic Nov 13, 2023 7:29 PM UTC For her first couple decades on Earth, Amy Carlson lived a pretty typical Gen X life. Born in McPherson, Kan. in 1975, the first child of parents who divorced when she was seven, she was a good student and a loving sibling to little sister Tara. “Amy had dreams,” her mom Linda recalls in the HBO documentary _Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God_. “She wanted to go somewhere. She wanted to be somebody.” But Carlson didn’t come from money. Her ambitions got channeled into climbing the corporate ladder at McDonald’s. One day, she tried ecstasy and realized how empty her quotidian existence had become. She knew she had to change her life. Another young woman might have picked up a guitar or a paintbrush or started an Etsy shop. Carlson got into New Age spirituality, rechristened herself “Mother God,” and became a de facto cult leader, presiding over a household of around 20 followers. Then she died, in the spring of 2021\. Police eventually found her body—emaciated, mummified, adorned with glitter makeup, and strewn with Christmas lights—in what was once her bedroom. Her disciples had been awaiting her resurrection. _Love Has Won_, a three-part series from director Hannah Olson (_Baby God_) that premieres Nov. 13, tells the sad, weird story of Carlson and her Love Has Won community. Deeply reported, surprisingly empathetic, and revealing, if not always as insightful as you’d hope, the documentary captures the appeal of [cults](https://time.com/6260815/growing-up-in-cult-survival-skills/) in a lonely, spiritually bereft world.  Amy Carlson near the end of her life HBO Like so many bizarre 21st century sects, from [NXIVM](https://time.com/5880876/the-vow-hbo-nxivm/) to the [DayLife Army](https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/24/21302287/tumple-daylife-army-ozm-feature-go-read-this-facebook-twitter-cult), Love Has Won existed in physical space but was a product of the internet. Carlson found a spiritual community through the message boards on [Lightworkers.org](https://lightworkers.org/), which describes itself as “a transformative online platform for individuals seeking spiritual growth, healing, and enlightenment,” in the mid-2000s. There she met Amerith White Eagle, who became the first of many “Father Gods” to her divine feminine. “My current life situation is living in a world of illusion,” she confessed to him in one post. Soon they were together. “The way I look at it, everybody’s God,” White Eagle, an older man with a fuzzy white beard, explains to Olson. “We would talk about ascension, stepping out of the programmed world, attaining a higher vibrational consciousness. We were trying to bring this heaven on Earth, where everybody could be part of it—like a family.” But Carlson didn’t just want a soulmate or an equal. She wanted a platform. She wanted followers. She came to believe that, as White Eagle puts it, “she was more God than other people were God.” The couple started a website called The Galactic Free Press, where they wrote and vlogged about their beliefs. Mother God became a rabbit hole you could fall down, after passing through conspiracy theories about 9/11, UFOs, the global banking system. By the early 2010s, White Eagle had been sidelined in favor of Father Gods more amenable to Carlson’s delusions of grandeur. A few years later, she assembled a bigger live-in community made up largely of attractive young adults afflicted with spiritual hunger. They earned a living by selling crystals, T-shirts, healing sessions, and the dangerous [pseudo-panacea colloidal silver](https://time.com/5806518/covid-19-scams/).  Two of Carlson's followers livestream in front of a banner that pays tribute to the late Mother God HBO Because the internet provided a platform for the group to both make money and conduct outreach, _Love Has Won_ benefits from a massive, effectively edited archive of livestream footage and other video that captures the daily lives of Carlson, her Father Gods, and the rest of the community. We get to see Mother God at her most charismatic and beatific, as well as in moments of sadness, frustration, and rage; armchair psychological diagnosis can be hard to resist. Carlson’s excessive drinking and restricted diet take a toll on her outward appearance over time, as well, heralding the long, slow, seemingly avoidable slide into death. Meanwhile, Olson interviews followers whose belief that Carlson was a physical manifestation of God kept them from intervening when it would have been obvious to anyone else that she was critically ill. Despite her failure to resurrect, many continue to walk the path she set out for them. While cult docs often feel derisive or exploitative, _Love Has Won_ plays like a tragedy. It would be easy to mock many aspects of Carlson’s belief system—the most prominent figure in the divine pantheon of celebrities and historical figures with whom Mother God claimed to communicate was [Robin Williams](https://time.com/3104915/robin-williams/)—but, mostly to her credit, Olson’s primary lens is empathy. Sometimes, to the series’ detriment, this stops her from probing the most troubling details, including an affinity between Love Has Won and [QAnon](https://time.com/6076590/qanon-conspiracy-why-people-believe/)’s proclamation of a Trump-catalyzed Great Awakening. “As far as Hitler working for the light, I will tell you, everybody has been working for the light,” Carlson says in a snippet of audio that is left uncontextualized.  Amy Carlson, pre-Mother God HBO More outside perspectives would have brought some much-needed grounding to this saga. Still, in sticking close to Carlson’s family and Love Has Won’s inner circle, Olson achieves something that has proven impossible for documentarians telling the stories of cults—[NXIVM](https://time.com/5568135/nxivm-allison-mack-raniere/), the [Manson Family](https://time.com/5869991/helter-skelter-epix-review-charles-manson/), and now [Twin Flames](https://time.com/6321502/twin-flames-universe-prime-video-documentary/) [Universe](https://time.com/6333184/escaping-twin-flames-netflix-what-to-know/)—that caused more profound, widespread damage: she makes the appeal of Mother God’s largely unhinged worldview legible. Many of her followers’ backstories include poverty, abuse, addiction, or just lack of opportunity; one explains how graduating high school amid the 2008 recession exposed the trappings of material success as an illusion. Carlson shared those experiences. And some of the ideas she synthesized from them were startlingly rational. “Too many have too little, and too few have too much,” she says in one video. “The federal government is owned by the people, not by the corporations.” Like the true-crime genre with which they overlap, cult stories are usually packaged and consumed as freak shows or fright fests. One look at Carlson’s lifeless, blue-tinged body in the police footage that opens _Love Has Won_ suggests how easily this series could have fit that mold. A better reason to pay attention to cults, which are generally conceived as alternatives to an inferior mainstream, is that they tell us so much about how the society we inhabit is broken. Carlson’s fate remains haunting because, regardless of her megalomania or her likely mental illness or her conspiracy theories, she identified and tried, in her own delusional way, to fill a yawning void at the heart of contemporary American life. The prescription she offered her followers turned out, sometimes literally, to be poison. 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