This is the text of my response to Kenneth G. C. Newport's presentation at the Loma Linda University Campus Hill Church on November 17, 2007. Since then I have added the material in the brackets. For my summary of Newport's presentation, my response and the discussion that followed, please visit the Spectrum Blog. It may be necessary to use the Archives for November 2007.
Kenneth Newport's work [The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect. Oxford University Press, 2006. xi + 379 pp.] on what went wrong at Waco is scholarship at its best. Tediously researched, precisely written and dispassionately argued, it is an overwhelmingly positive contribution.
Its value for Seventh-day Adventist thought and life is especially great. I hope that many advanced Sabbath School classes around the world will discuss one of its seventeen chapters each week. Few experiences can do more to help us understand what it means and does not mean to be a Seventh-day Adventist today.
Newport's scholarship in his book is so excellent that my understanding of its central thesis is the only thing with which I disagree. I take this to be that "the end-time scenario at the heart of SDA thinking almost since the movement began, including such concepts as the remnant, the continuation of the prophetic gift, and the nearness of the end, provides the basic canvas upon which the distinctively Branch Davidian apocalyptic images can be painted." (41)
It is particularly in the next sentence that Newport goes further than I can. "More broadly," he writes, "Koresh differed in degree and detail more than in kind from countless millions of his fellow Americans who, the statistics indicate, have "'no doubt' that Jesus will one day come to earth again."
I am unable to follow Newport when he suggests that these differences were more quantitative than qualitative. It is difficult for me to put David Koresh and Billy Graham in the same family photograph, for example. Likewise, it is almost impossible for me to picture David Koresh and Ellen White holding hands. Their differences strike me as more than a matter of degree.
[They are differences in kind. Branch Davidian theology is not an elaboration, extension or intensification of either Seventh-day Adventism or American Christianity more generally. It is their grotesque and diametrically opposed distortion. It retains some of the terms and themes but it turns them upside down and inside out.
Perhaps the most obvious example is that for a century and a half SDAs have typically refused to bear arms, even in times of war, choosing out of moral conviction and their community's special skills, sometimes at great personal sacrifice, to serve in the military as medics who treat wounded friends and foes alike. David Koresh, on the other hand, had a phallic obsession with fire arms and he gathered a huge and diverse supply of them at Mount Carmel, just as he collected compliant women. This is a reversal, not a development, of SDA theology. In conversation Newport acknowledges this; however, he gives it less importance than I do.]
More generally, Newport attributes more of what went wrong at Waco to what the Branch Davidians believed than I can. "Theology, talk about God, and understanding of God, and an understanding of God's purposes for the world were what made them tick. It was for theology that these believers lived. It was for theology too that some of them died," he writes. (16)
Although they would probably say that they lived and were prepared to die for God, not theology, many Branch Davidians would probably agree. But perhaps this is to accept their understanding of themselves too uncritically. My view, based on Newport's research, not mine, is that theological, psychological and ethical pathologies on both sides of the conflict converged to cause what happened.
If these three pathologies had plagued only the Branch Davidians or only the government's agents, I doubt that we would have seen Waco's flames. Also, if in either or both sides any one of these three factors had not been present, I again doubt that we would have seen them [though about this I am less certain. In any case, as I see it, we are dealing with two sets of three pathologies, or six in all. All six were raging out of control on April 19, 1993. It was a perfect recipe for horror.]
Newport convinces me that the Branch Davidians probably ignited the flames of Waco. "Did the biblical text inspire this act of self-destruction?" he also asks in tonight's presentation. "I think it did, or at least I think that there was a direct relationship between the texts, what the Branch Davidians thought those texts meant, and what happened on April 19, 1993."
I agree; however, I doubt that by itself their reading of these texts would have caused the Branch Davidians to light the fires. In addition to this theological pathology, very serious psychological and ethical pathologies probably made their contributions too. Otherwise, why is it that out of millions of Seventh-day Adventists around the world and many more millions of other Christians in North America, less than a hundred of them died at Waco? [Humanly speaking, this is a huge loss; however, statistically speaking it is insignificant.]
[What caused this difference? I think that Newport might have given this question more attention. If he had, I think he would have placed much more emphasis upon the many points at which the line of thought from Victor Houteff to David Koresh fundamentally changed its theological inheritance. It is notoriously difficult to discover why things are different by concentrating upon how basically similar they are.]
Both sides exhibited theological pathologies [on April 19] in that they both tried to force the hand of God in human history. "In God we trust," declares the civil religion of the United States. Among other things this means that neither the nation as a whole nor any group within it is authorized to usurp the role of divine providence. Also, at our best, though we must concede that we are often at out worst, we Americans trust God, not the AFT or FBI, and certainly not the guns of David Koresh. Forgetting this is a huge theological problem.
Neither David Koresh and his followers nor those in the government who managed things on April 19 were dysfunctional psychotics. About this Newport is certainly correct. This does not mean that they all deserved a clean bill of psychological health, however.
A quick look down a list of psychological disorders gives one pause. Here are some possibilities that I would like to discuss with a fully qualified professional: Acute Stress Disorder, Antisocial Personality Disorder, Anxiety Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Dependent Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Paranoid Personality Disorder and Sleep Terror Disorder.
It is unlikely that everyone on both sides of the conflict suffered from one or more of these pathologies. It is even less likely that only a few of them did. My view is that we cannot understand what went wrong at Waco unless we take such psychological factors into account.
Both sides exhibited serious ethical pathologies. Two of the most common temptations are sloth, living like less than a human being, and pride, living like more than one.
I think that the Branch Davidians at Waco gave in to the temptation of Sloth. In important areas of his personal life David Koresh lived like an animal and his followers did little or nothing to stop him.
I think that the representatives of the government gave in to the temptation of pride. They did not want to be humiliated, shamed or held to scorn by their apparently unmanly inability to bring the stalemate to a close [after the better part of two months], most particularly not on the grasslands of Texas! Faced with the prospect of sacrificing either their sense of honor or the lives of the Branch Davidians, they made their choice.
Does this mean that we Seventh-day Adventists can avoid all responsibility for what wrong? My answer to this question is "no."
The proof-text method of studying Scripture can cause problems by allowing one to combine a verse from here with a verse from there and both of them with yet another text in a third location, all taken out of their settings, in order to prove anything. Koresh was the king of proof-texting and a few--very few-- SDAs and others were wrongly impressed. Even one is too many.
Another problem is the high value some in our circles place upon deference to religious authority. We know that we are supposed to be "thinkers and not the mere reflectors of the thought of others;" however, sometimes we are very hard on those who think for themselves. This, too, is a big problem. Every time we squelch someone who questions or proposes something by demanding uncritical obedience to arbitrary authority, we throw fuel onto the fires of [the next] Waco.
We should always think for ourselves but never think by ourselves!
I close with an expression of my gratitude to Kenneth Newport. We can only hope that all former Seventh-day Adventist professors who become Anglican priests and academic administrators will serve us so well! .