Sacred and Profane How Not to Negotiate with Believers

Save paper and follow @newyorker on Twitter Annals of Religion MARCH 31, 2014 ISSUE Sacred And Profane How not to negotiate with believers. BY MALCOLM GLADWELL At Waco, the F.B.I. treated a community’s religious claims as a mere distraction. PHOTOGRAPH BY RON HEFLIN / AP hen Clive Doyle was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-fifties, he and his mother met an Witinerant preacher outside their church, in Melbourne, Australia. He was a big, gruff Scotsman named Daniel Smith. The Doyles were devout Seventh-Day Adventists. But Smith was the follower of a self-proclaimed prophet named Victor Houteff, who became an Adventist just after the First World War and parted ways with the Church a decade later. The Doyles listened to Smith’s account of the Houteff teachings until the small hours of the morning and were impressed. “We were taught that if someone comes with a message based on the Bible, instead of trying to fight it, instead of trying to put it down or trying to prove it wrong, we should study the Bible to perceive whether the message is true,” Doyle writes in his autobiography. “Study to see if it’s so.” The Houteff group held that those in the mainstream Seventh-Day Adventist Church had lost their sense of urgency regarding the Second Coming and would soon face the judgment of God. To the Doyles, however, this presented a problem: where did it leave Seventh-Day Adventists who hadn’t heard the Houteff message? The Doyles knew, for example, that no one had taken the Houteff teachings to Tasmania, off Australia’s south coast. So, in 1958, Doyle quit his job as an apprentice in a cabinet shop, and he and his mother took the overnight boat to Tasmania, where they spent a month trudging around the back roads of the island, going from one Seventh-Day Adventist church to the next. “My mother had borrowed the biggest suitcase she could find,” he writes. “We had packed it full of books because we thought: They’re going to want to know what we believe, so we’ll give Bible studies . and we’ll use the Bible to prove our points. I was just a teenager lugging this huge suitcase all over the island. It weighed a ton.” The Doyles were neither wealthy nor well educated. Clive Doyle’s mother worked in a The Doyles were neither wealthy nor well educated. Clive Doyle’s mother worked in a garment factory. His father had left before he was born. Doyle once came home from Sunday school and solemnly greeted his mother with: “You’ve shaken hands with a servant of the Lord.” He writes, “I was two or three years behind everybody. I was never in the ‘in’ crowd in school.” He and his mother were religiously committed, and indifferent to what others thought of them. Matters of religious doctrine, in their view, required action and commitment. In Tasmania, Doyle was looking for people who wanted to “actually get down to the nitty-gritty” and study the Scriptures with him. That search would end up consuming Doyle’s life, leading him clear across the world to a religious retreat founded by Houteff, just outside Waco, Texas. The group that Doyle joined was called the Branch Davidians. Their retreat was called Mount Carmel, and the most famous of its leaders was a young man named David Koresh. “A Journey to Waco,” Doyle’s memoir, is an account of what it means to be a religious radical—to worship on the fringes of contemporary Christianity. Doyle takes the story from his childhood in Australia through the extraordinary events of 1993, when some eighty armed agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided the Mount Carmel community, in an effort to serve a search and arrest warrant on Koresh, on suspicion of violating federal firearms rules. “I want you all to go back to your rooms and stay calm,” Doyle recalls Koresh saying, as federal agents descended on Mount Carmel. Doyle goes on, “I could hear David’s steps going down the hall toward the front door. Then all of a sudden I heard David say: ‘Hey, wait a minute! There are women and children in here!’ Then all hell broke loose—just a barrage of shots from outside coming in. It sounded like a bloodbath.” In the resulting gun battle, four A.T.F. agents and six Davidians were killed. The F.B.I. was called in. The Davidian property was surrounded. An army of trained negotiators were flown to the scene, and for the next fifty-one days the two sides talked day and night—arguing, lecturing, bargaining—with the highlights of their conversations repeated at press conferences and broadcasts around the world. The Waco standoff was one of the most public conversations in the history of American law enforcement, and the question Doyle poses in his memoir, with genuine puzzlement, is how a religious community could go to such lengths to explain itself to such little effect. “If people read this account, they will at least gain a different perspective on who David Koresh was, where he was coming from, who we were, and why we believe the way we do,” he begins. “Most people think ‘cult’ about us and think we are people who were brainwashed and deceived. They think our church members don’t know what they’re doing or where they’re going. Hopefully, my story can open their eyes.” he Branch Davidians belonged to the religious tradition that sees Christ’s return to earth and the establishment of a divine Kingdom as imminent. They were Tmillennialists. Millennial movements believe that within the pages of the Bible are specific clues about when and how the Second Coming will arrive. They also rely on specific clues about when and how the Second Coming will arrive. They also rely on what the Biblical scholar James Tabor calls “inspired interpreters,” prophets equipped with the divine insight to interpret those clues and prepare their followers to be among God’s chosen. Mormonism began, in the nineteenth century, as a millennial movement; its “inspired interpreter” was Joseph Smith. Jehovah’s Witnesses began as a millennial movement, as did the Pentecostal Church. Of all mainstream contemporary American churches, though, the Seventh-Day Adventists have the strongest millennial tradition. The Church—which has around eighteen million adherents worldwide—was formed by followers of the early-nineteenth- century evangelist William Miller, who prophesied that the world would end in 1843. During the next century, the Adventist community produced one “inspired interpreter” after another. Ellen G. White laid down the foundations of the Church in the eighteen- sixties. Victor Houteff broke away to start the Davidian movement at Mount Carmel, and after he died, in 1955, the movement splintered again, creating the Branch Davidians, headed by Ben and then Lois Roden. Doyle came to Mount Carmel during the Roden era and stayed with the group as it underwent its final iteration, under the leadership of David Koresh. David Koresh was born in Houston in 1959, to a fifteen-year-old single mother. He arrived at Mount Carmel at the age of twenty-two, pulling up to the retreat in a yellow Buick—another in the long line of disenchanted Seventh-Day Adventists in search of a purer church. Koresh was not slick or charismatic, in the conventional sense. He was thin, with long wavy dark hair and a gentle manner. He was good with engines and guns, and he played in a rock band. His formal education was limited. His vocabulary was full of words of his own invention. He wore dirty jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, and, after study sessions, would gather some of the other young men and head into Waco, as another survivor’s memoir, by David Thibodeau and Leon Whiteson put it, to “kick back, swallow some suds, play some tunes.” When it came to the Bible, however, he was without peer. Doyle had heard Koresh’s predecessor, Lois Roden, speak and had “wrestled” with her message. But, the first few times he heard Koresh speak, he was convinced that “this was of God.” Koresh, he writes, “made scripture come alive. He showed that all of the prophets in the Bible were writing more for our day than for their own time.” Koresh would speak of obscure Old Testament kings like Ahaz and Hezekiah as if they were household names. He didn’t preach. He threw out theories and ideas—inviting argument and discussion. To the Branch Davidians, who walked and talked and dreamed about the Bible, this was intoxicating. “We thought of Mt. Carmel as a training ground and haven,” Doyle writes. By the early nineteen-nineties, the community consisted of about a hundred and fifty people—many of them sleeping in spartan dormitories. Doyle continues, “A lot of them came with their heads in the clouds or with cameras, thinking they were tourists, if it was their first time. David straightened them out pretty quick.” Koresh told them, “You their first time. David straightened them out pretty quick.” Koresh told them, “You should come here to learn, that’s why you came. If you want to do those other things, you might as well leave now and go have your fun. But if you are here to study, you need to get your priorities straight.” There were Bible studies at night, and smaller group studies during the day. As another Branch Davidian put it, “Lots of times, maybe he would say, ‘I am tired of giving Bible studies to you guys.

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