Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation 10 days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.
—REVELATION 2:10
In 870, the Danes assaulted a community of nuns at Coldingham, Scotland, and were flabbergasted to discover that, following the example of one Ebbe (later St. Ebbe the Younger), they had gashed their lips and noses with razors, rendering themselves so gruesome as to put to flight any lustful thoughts.
The nonplused invaders ended up burning the place down, and its inhabitants with it, and thus joined a long series of practical-minded sorts who have failed to understand the faithful. The roster of baffled infidels includes many Romans, at Masada and when they were martyring early Christians, and missionary-killing aborigines the world over. Now we can add the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and much of the news media.
The day after the Branch Davidians immolated themselves, I happened to drive past Boeing Field in Seattle. The spot where the E-4B airborne nuclear command post used to appear, surrounded by fences, lights and guards, is now occupied by shiny new 737’s and 757’s waiting to be delivered to customers around the world. The prospect of nuclear war has faded with astonishing suddenness. Even the ozone hole is shrinking, another apocalypse to scratch off the list. Yet the Branch Davidians got just the apocalypse they were looking for.
Our cultures used to be almost hereditary, but now we choose them from a menu as various as the food court of a suburban shopping mall. Ambition, curiosity, talent, sexuality or religion can draw us to new cities and cultures, where we become foreigners to our parents. Synthetic cultures are nimbler than old ones, often imprudently so. They have scattered so widely that they can no longer hear each other and now some have gone so far afield that they have passed through the apocalypse while the rest of us are watching it on TV.
The smorgasbord of new cultures is probably a good thing, and for every person it makes crazy, there are probably a hundred it keeps sane. But new cultures lead to new forms of culture shock, and new ways for us to misunderstand each other.
No three cultures could be more mutually incomprehensible than the trinity at Waco: Branch Davidians, G-men and the media. This is not because they came from different places; on the contrary, it is easy to imagine members of all three groups growing up in the same small town in the Middle West, starting out as schoolmates and winding up on opposite sides of barricades shouting gibberish at one another.
Waves of police, each more heavily armed and psychologically refined than the last, were dispatched to Waco, but came no closer to understanding the cultists than did local cops. Still, they came closer than the news media. Before the flames had even died out, journalists were complaining about the lack of on-the-scene fire engines—as if the trigger-happy cultists, dodging the battering rams and tear gas to slosh lantern fuel across the floors of their own home, amounted to just another predictable public health hazard, like cryptosporidium in Milwaukee.
. . . and God shall will wipe away all tears from their eyes.
—REVELATION 7:17
Tear gas hurts, even if you have a gas mask, and the Branch Davidians withstood it with the same fortitude as the razor-wielding nuns of Coldingham. Looking out their windows at the weird tanks sent to assault them, the cultists could not have failed to notice their resemblance to the hellish tormentors prophesied in their favorite book of the Bible: “and they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron [Revelation 9: 9–10] . . . and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone [Revelation 9:18].”
The F.B.I. was surprised by the fire because it apparently did not take David Koresh’s religion at face value. Now many commentators find fault with the Government, and in so doing misunderstand Branch Davidians even more miserably than the F.B.I. (The agency’s bombardment of the compound with amplified rock and Tibetan chants shows that it understood synthetic-culture shock at least well enough to use it as a weapon.) The pundits (and Congressional inquisitors) who find fault with the F.B.I.’s approach and who suggest that anyone other than the cultists themselves is to blame for the deaths are just as out of it as the Danes in 870.
In weighing the morality of the Branch Davidians, it is not necessary to go any deeper than the fact that they were abusers, (allegedly) molesters and (finally) murderers of their own children. But has our society really secularized to the point where we are so bewildered by people with sincere religious faith? The F.B.I. can perhaps be forgiven for not having seen it in the Branch Davidians’ words—but how can the critics fail to recognize it in their deeds?
In my adopted city, the sun is out for once, illuminating the flowery payoff of a long, rainy spring. No apocalypses seem imminent and the citizens, few of whom were actually born here, are pursuing the customs of their chosen cultures. Around here, this means a lot of young people in bright clothes, healthier than you or me, riding bikes, drinking espresso, and typing away on their PowerBooks—activities that would doubtless meet the approval of the journalists who patronize the Branch Davidians by scolding the F.B.I. The scene is as shiny and inviting as the spring snow on the glaciated slopes of the Cascades, which conceals jagged crevasses hundreds of feet deep. Still it is a better place to live and to raise children than older societies that held up people like St. Ebbe the Younger as role models.
For many, the heavy eschatological issues that lie just below the surface of religion are simply too icky and troublesome to think about. But in a society where multiculturalism has become a new creed, it would not hurt for some of us to spend some time trying to see things from the standpoint of a sincerely religious person, just as we would for a differently abled sexual minority.
Though I have recently started going back to church, I am as full of doubts and skepticism as many full-blown atheists. Even so it doesn’t take much of a stretch to understand that the Branch Davidians didn’t think death was such a bad thing. One does not have to believe David Koresh was the Messiah to understand that he wasn’t kidding. Next time the organs of secular society find themselves pointing their cameras and gun barrels into a compound full of Scripture-toting survivalists, a perusal of the lives of saints or the story of Masada might be illuminating.