Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303280284
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JOAN CONNELL NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It probably was the most accurate prophecy he ever made.
He never became the rock star of his dreams, but Koresh, the charismatic leader of the Branch Davidian sect, found another outlet for his talents, leading the followers of his doomsday cult up a stairway to heaven. In the end, the walled compound on the outskirts of Waco, that the Davidians called Mount Carmel, became a living hell.
Besides the dead and wounded in the battle between police and Koresh's band of religious zealots, the explosion of violence in Waco generated another kind of fallout that could leave the landscape of religious tolerance in America pitted and scarred.
Advocates of religious liberty fear a deepening suspicion and mounting intolerance for those who belong to unpopular or exotic religious groups on the fringes of conventional culture.
Others are bracing for more violent, guns-and-God scenarios acted out by apocalyptic cults as the year 2000 approaches.
"Every time something like this happens, `cult' becomes a four-letter word," said sociologist Robin Perrin of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.
"Religious cults are a dime a dozen in America. But the kind of drama that has unfolded in Waco is rare, not normal in the life cycle of other cults," said Perrin, an expert on so-called "deviant religions," groups whose beliefs are radically different from mainstream religion.
Many of the members of such groups, in his view, are relatively normal people, no quirkier than, say, the average Catholic, Protestant, agnostic or Jew.
"There's no justification for the actions of evil cult leaders. But we must be careful not to assume that every new religious group is going to be the next Jonestown," Perrin said, referring to the 1978 massacre and mass suicide in Guyana, where more than 900 people died at the behest of People's Temple leader, the Rev. Jim Jones.
Marcia Rudin, director of the American Family Foundation, an anti-cult organization in New York, said her group has no intention of doing away with religious freedom.
"We're concerned with peoples' behavior, not their ideas. Cult members are free to believe what they want, but when they get into the realm of illegal action, the government must step in," Rudin said.
"There are lots of groups with really weird ideas that don't do harmful action and that's OK. It's the abuses, mind manipulation and totalist atmosphere they create that we object to."
John Roth, a theologian at Claremont-McKenna College in Southern California and an expert on faithin America, is less concerned with religious intoler-ance than with the cynicism engendered any time the dark side of religion is exposed.
"Religion is as full of pathology as it is of health and life-giving resources. You see some of the best human qualities in religion and some of the darkest," said Roth, who compared the negative effects of the Waco confrontation to revelations about Catholic priests who sexually molest children.
"Outbreaks like these only confirm peoples' deepest suspicions about religion - that it's manipulative, exploitative of the naive and a bad deal," he said.
As federal law enforcement officials negotiated with Koresh and his followers inside the compound they called Mount Carmel, agents for filmmakers and "tabloid television" programs reportedly tried to cut different deals for rights to tell a story that pushed every cynical button about contemporary belief: The 33-year-old leader who claimed to be Jesus and who, in the name of God, apparently was able to convince his followers to do the opposite of good.
Former cult members told the Waco Tribune-Herald that Koresh persuaded husbands to give him their wives, and parents to give him their daughters - some as young as 12 and 14 years old - for sexual relations. Children produced from these unions supposedly would rule with Koresh until the end of the world, which he believed was imminent.
Koresh, who was previously known as Vernon Howell, even persuaded the members of this odd but once-peaceful sect to stockpile an arsenal in preparation for the catastrophic events that would propel him and his followers to heaven.
The linkage of guns and God may be a rarity in America, but in John Roth's view, it could become more commonplace.
"Historically in America, people of different faiths learn to get along," Roth said. "But the idea of having to fight to protect what you believe is an ancient dimension of religious life. Even today, in places like Serbia and India, people are quite prepared to take up a sword or a gun to protect what they hold sacred.
"We're approaching the end of the millenium and it wouldn't be surprising to see more instances of armed believers anticipating the end of the world," added Roth.
That Koresh and his followers focused their faith on firepower is a particularly painful irony for pacifist Seventh-day Adventists, whose members refuse to carry arms of any kind. The Branch Davidian sect is an offshoot of a larger group that broke off from Seventh-day Adventism in 1929.
"It's so far from our ideals," said George Reid, director of the Biblical Research Institute, an Adventist organization in Silver Spring, Md.
Reid said Davidians still claim to be Seventh-day Adventists and heavily proselytize Seventh-day Adventist churches.
Other branches of the breakaway sect exist in southern Missouri, Idaho and suburban New York, Reid said, but the Waco branch is the only one that incorporates violence into its theology.
"Vernon Howell has taken a movement that was once relatively benign and taken it to the precipice," Reid said. "He's created a high-pressure emotional situation under which rationality lets go."
by CNB