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"That's just the American way": The Branch Davidian Tragedy and Western Religious History
TODD KERSTETTER
This essay examines religion's role in the 1993 Branch Davidian tragedy and places the event in the West's religious history. Like diverse other religious groups, the Branch Davidians found freedom in the West for decades. That freedom's collapse in 1993 revealed limits to the region's tolerance.
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MORE THAN A DECADE HAS PASSED since the Branch Davidian tragedy occurred outside Waco, Texas, in 1993. Four federal law enforcement officials died in the initial raid on the Branch Davidian property that February. More than eighty Branch Davidians died in the raid and its aftermath, most in a fire that ravaged their home in the event's horrific climax on 19 April. The story, however, did not end there. Two years later, Timothy McVeigh linked his bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building to his disgust over what happened outside Waco. Some Branch Davidians remain in jail, while others have rebuilt their lives in Waco and around the country. Some of the children who survived the disaster have gone to college and started families. As of this writing, one works in law enforcement. Waco area residents and government officials assigned to the episode have gone on with their lives.1 A search for meaning as the episode recedes deeper into the past suggests that although the Branch Davidians for decades found a relatively welcoming home in Texas, incompatible visions about faith and freedom brought them into violent conflict with mainstream America and interpretations of its past. |
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In the West's vast space, Branch Davidians found freedom, an idea fundamental to Americans' sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation. In The Story of American Freedom, Eric Foner argues that freedom's significance rests less in the evolution of a single definition than in the multiple purposes to which the idea has been put and the belief systems those purposes illustrate.2 The same might be said of religion in the American West. Historians have lamented the neglect heaped upon the West's religious history. Among those who have addressed the topic, however, the emerging consensus characterizes the West as a place of opportunity and diversity where no mainstream dominated. Space and isolation created an opportunity for diverse religious groups to find homes in the West, especially for groups stigmatized and restricted elsewhere. Consequently, the West became a religiously contested landscape. As Carl Guarneri put it, "The Far West qualified all definitions of the religious mainstream and all pretensions to Christian hegemony."3 Space provided freedom and opportunity, which, in turn, generated some notable conflicts. |
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Two of the most remarkable conflicts happened in the nineteenth century and sent mixed signals about freedom and opportunity in the West. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints found a home in the West. It also found decades of conflict with mainstream America over plural marriage. Practitioners of American Indian ceremonies such as the Sun Dance found themselves in a similar conflict. Most notably, Lakota Ghost Dance adherents experienced repression that contributed to the horrific events at Wounded Knee Creek on 29 December 1890.4 |
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The twentieth-century West fits the no-dominant-mainstream interpretation better, but leaves room for discussion about the existence and nature of a religious mainstream. The proliferation of new and variant religious groups in the region, especially in New Mexico and California, suggest an openness not found elsewhere. These groups have contributed to the West's cultural diversity and have reflected the unchurched region's "secularity." |
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