Prophet’s Daughter with Erin Prophet
Erin Prophet is a scholar of religion. She is the author of Prophet’s Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet inside Church Universal and Triumphant. She is a co-author of the textbook Comparing Religions by Jeffrey J. Kripal. She co-authored with her mother Reincarnation: The Missing Link in Christianity. She has a master’s in public health from Boston University and is completing her doctorate at Rice University. In early 1990, in response to apocalyptic prophecies given by her mother, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Erin Prophet entered a network of underground bunkers in Montana along with members of her mother’s Church Universal and Triumphant, a controversial New Age sect. Emerging to find the world still intact, Erin was forced into a radical reassessment of her life and her beliefs. She had spent her adolescence watching her mother vilified as a dangerous cult leader even while attempting to meet her expectations by becoming a “prophet” herself. Prophet’s Daughter describes Erin’s search for her mother’s origins and motivations. With the craft of a storyteller, she describes the combination of health crises and external pressure that drove her mother’s ever-more dire prophecies. She reveals how the allure of infallibility led her mother to a conspicuous downfall, and how her mother’s rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s disease truncated any hope of resolution. A remarkable memoir with implications for the dialog about power, group behavior and the future of religion.