This week marks the 25th anniversary of one of the strangest and most tragic incidents in American religious history: the bloody ending of the siege between FBI agents and members of the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco, Texas.
For many people, Waco is a lurid story about a cult — a story that has lent itself to decades of sensationalist media coverage (and, recently, a television miniseries). It’s the story of a maniacal and apocalypse-minded cult leader, David Koresh, whose delusional stubbornness led to the deaths of 76 people. The 1993 media coverage of the Waco massacre — which depicted Koresh as a single-minded genius exerting power over his fellow Branch Davidians via mind control — has by now become the defining story of the siege. A 1993 Texas Monthly story captures this mentality well:
For 51 days federal agents camped outside the compound, paralyzed by their own ineptitude, while this notorious liar and con man was permitted to broadcast his incoherent message to the world. The authorities must have known that it was all a sham ... but Koresh had given them no choice. The feds were the hostages, the ones who were surrounded without hope. They kept assuring [the public] that they weren’t about to be drawn into a firefight, then permitted exactly that to happen. ... What happened at Mount Carmel was not suicide; it was Holy War. Just as Koresh had prophesied.
