Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

David Koresh prophesied that he would be martyred. And at thirty-three, just like Jesus, he was killed by the empire’s henchmen. Unlike Jesus, he took four government agents and seventy-five of his disciples with him, all killed in a gun battle and fire after a federal team came to check out their arsenal of semiautomatic rifles. I’m not suggesting Koresh and his followers are typical of Christians awaiting the supernatural end of the world, or of Americans whose gun love is driven by dreams of an armed citizen uprising against tyranny. But the Branch Davidians’ theology is not so different from that of a large fraction of Americans. We call Koresh a “cult leader,” which allows us to file him away reassuringly as a one-off nut, like Charles Manson or Jim Jones. But it’s important to recognize that his church was a long-standing subgroup of a 150-year-old Protestant denomination that is one of the twenty largest churches in America, with six thousand U.S. congregations.