Thirty years ago today, on April 19th, 1993, the standoff that David Koresh and the Branch Davidians held against the US government came to an end. Ultimately eighty-six people were killed. Those tragic events in Waco, Texas, are now revisited in Netflix’s Waco: American Apocalypse. The documentary is informative to the extent that it features survivors, and presents footage and soundbites of Koresh’s interactions with the FBI’s negotiators. But it largely leaves apocalyptic beliefs out of the picture, preferring to present Koresh as a psychopathic opportunist who merely used religion to advance his own personal carnal and material goals.
There are strong reasons to believe that Koresh was actually sincere in his apocalyptic endeavor. A much more accurate approach to Koresh and the Branch Davidians is presented by Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman in his recently published book, Armageddon: What the Bible Really Says about the End. Ehrman explains that
as the story unfolded over the next few days, it became clear that the besieged group of Davidians were following what they understood to be divine principles laid out in the book of Revelation.
Conspicuously absent from the Netflix documentary is James Tabor, a scholar who volunteered to engage with Koresh in matters of apocalyptic interpretation, so as to persuade him to lay down arms, using his own eschatological worldview. The FBI dismissed all of that as “Bible babble,” opting to deal with Koresh as if he were a conventional criminal – the same way that they deal with, say, a bank robber holding hostages. It did not end well.
Ehrman’s book is a testament to the oft quoted saying, “ideas have consequences.” The tragic story of Koresh was triggered by his fascination with the book of Revelation. In the late first Century, a mysterious author by the name of John on the island of Patmos – most likely a different person than John the apostle, or the author of the fourth gospel – wrote letters to seven churches and put in writing a series of visions about the end of the world. In the midst of perceived oppression – both real and imagined – John foresaw a time when God would violently set things right, turn the tables against the oppressor, and vindicate the oppressed. When would it happen? Ehrman insists that:
John certainly believes that what he has described in this mysterious narrative is to happen soon.
The opening of the seven seals, the deeds of the whore of Babylon, and the invasion of Gog and Magog, were supposed to be right around the corner.
Of course, nothing of the kind has come to pass. But two thousand years later, readers of this bizarre book are still mystified by John’s announcements and refuse to come to terms with the fact that he was just plain wrong. When so much hope is invested in some apocalyptic event, believers are likely to somehow reinterpret the original failed prophecies as if they had a different meaning, so as to keep believing in them. Psychologists call this process “cognitive dissonance.” One of the most dangerous of such cognitive dissonances is found amongst current enthusiasts who interpret the book of Revelation, not as a series of failed prophecies and bizarre visions in the context of the 1st Century, but rather, as a blueprint for things that are yet to come in our times.
John is yet another failed apocalyptic prophet, one of the first in the long list of doomsayers that have colored the history of Christianity. It is easy for liberal Christians to distance themselves from such apocalyptic enthusiasts, and Ehrman narrates at some length how in the history of the formation of the New Testament canon, not everyone was convinced that the book of Revelation should have been included.
But liberal Christians cannot simply let go of Jesus, so they transform him into something far removed from the real historical person. Their Jesus is akin to some modern-day hippie who preaches love and tolerance and has nothing to do with apocalyptic firebrands. In this book, Ehrman is not greatly concerned with Jesus or his teachings, but he has made a career debunking the rosy view of Jesus, and instead, has profiled him as a fiery apocalyptic preacher. Not unlike John, Jesus announces terrible things to come — as in Revelation, in some of Jesus’ speeches there is the expectation that God would violently intervene so as to set things right— and insists that “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” As with all apocalyptic preachers of his time, Jesus announced the imminence of such events. He was wrong.
This raises an interesting question: if Jesus was no twentieth century university liberal campus activist, was he more similar to the likes of David Koresh? Nowadays, it is all too easy for people to say that Branch Davidians are a “cult,” whereas Christianity is a “religion.” But what exactly is the difference between both concepts? In my view, it is a very arbitrary distinction; a cult is simply a religion one does not like.
Jesus and Koresh were both charismatic young men who were consumed by apocalyptic fantasies. Admittedly, there are important differences between the two. We now know that Koresh sexually abused children, whereas there is no indication that Jesus ever did such horrible things. While Jesus expected God alone to intervene, he likely did not seek to carry out the violence himself; in contrast, Koresh took a dramatically more active approach to apocalyptic violence.
But both men were driven by grievances, and we know that such circumstances are fertile grounds for apocalyptic enthusiasm. Jesus lived the harsh reality of Roman occupation. In contrast, it is easy to think that Koresh — a white American male in 20th Century America— underwent no oppression. But on a personal level he struggled with many things — including dyslexia and social alienation — and the way he met his end raises questions about how benevolent the US government was. The Netflix documentary aptly presents many of the shortcomings in the way the US government handled the situation, and this eventually played into the narrative of terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh.
Can something good ever come out of apocalyptic frenzies? I doubt it. But in the case of Jesus and the book of Revelation — and to a certain extent Koresh— one can understand that such fantasies convey a message of desperation. Disturbingly, that is not the way current apocalyptic enthusiasm works. While grassroot apocalypticism persists in many places, its most dangerous variant is manufactured from above. Cynical politicians and businesspeople have noticed that they can profit from pandering to regular people’s apocalyptic expectations, and doomsday mongering has become an industry in and of itself. While John wrote from exile in Patmos in adverse circumstances, Left Behind is a multimillion-dollar franchise.
David Koresh is largely abhorred for all the havoc he wreaked. But he was a little fish. We should be more worried about the big fish. Those are the lobbyists who influence the highest echelons of power, so as to carry out what, in their view, are the necessary events to accelerate Jesus’ second coming. They are the ones who are eager to fume the flames of conflict in the Middle East, and who water their mouths every time a catastrophic event happens, all in alleged fulfillment of a script written by a strange visionary mystic on the island of Patmos two millennia ago.
