Love Has Won

Love Has Won was a small new-age group led by Amy Carlson, whom followers addressed as "Mother God" and regarded as a divine being guiding humanity toward a coming "ascension." The group was notable as a distinctly internet-era movement: it spread its teaching and sustained its community largely through online broadcasts and social media, livestreaming for hours and selling wellness products, and blended new-age spirituality with ascension beliefs and a good deal of contemporary conspiracy material. It came to wide public attention in 2021 under painful circumstances, when Carlson was found dead at a house in Colorado; her body had been kept by members for some time after death, and the discovery led to criminal charges against several followers related to the handling of her remains, and to considerable media coverage.

Reporting and former-member accounts described heavy dependence on the leader and concerns about members' health and finances. The group, small throughout, continued in reduced and splintered form afterward. Love Has Won is discussed as an example of how the dynamics long studied in charismatic movements now play out through streaming and online community, and it should be treated with care given the recency of events and the reliance on media and testimony rather than settled findings.

In April 2021 sheriff's deputies in Saguache County, Colorado, found the mummified body of Amy Carlson, the leader her followers called Mother God, wrapped in a sleeping bag and decorated with Christmas lights in a shrine like arrangement at a member's home. Followers had carried the body from California, believing, consistent with the group's teaching, that she might rise or ascend. Seven members were charged with abuse of a corpse and related counts; the prosecutions largely ended in dismissals and pleas to minor offences, the courts recognising that the defendants were mourners acting on belief rather than concealing a crime, and an autopsy attributed the death to alcohol abuse, anorexia and chronic colloidal silver ingestion, which had turned her skin grey blue. The aftermath played out online, where the group had always lived.

Love Has Won's daily livestreams, thousands of hours of them, became the raw material for the 2023 HBO series Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God, which reconstructed Carlson's path from Kansas fast food manager through the ascension movement to goddess of a tiny itinerant household, and treated her followers, several of whom continued under names like Joy Rains with a 5D Full Disclosure mission, with unusual restraint. The case is now cited in studies of online charismatic movements for how completely a group of a few dozen people, filmed constantly by itself, could construct and consume its own reality.