When news breaks, you need to understand what matters β and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today? A new Netflix documentary premiered this week, recounting one of the strangest and most tragic incidents in American religious history just before its 30th anniversary next month: the bloody ending of the siege between FBI agents and members of the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco, Texas.
For many people, Waco is a lurid story about a cult β a story that has lent itself to decades of sensationalist media coverage and, recently, a television miniseries. The media coverage of the Waco massacre β which depicted Koresh as a single-minded genius exerting power over his fellow Branch Davidians via mind control β has by now become the defining story of the siege.
A Texas Monthly story captures this mentality well :. For 51 days federal agents camped outside the compound, paralyzed by their own ineptitude, while this notorious liar and con man was permitted to broadcast his incoherent message to the world. The authorities must have known that it was all a sham The feds were the hostages, the ones who were surrounded without hope. What happened at Mount Carmel was not suicide; it was Holy War.
Just as Koresh had prophesied. The only people that may be sorry are the parents who had to let their children be released. The prevailing narrative, in other words, presumed that all inhabitants of the Branch Davidian community were crazy, and that therefore, any violent means used against them would be justified. The story of Waco is, without question, a tragedy. I felt it my duty to tell the true story of a group of people who were trying to live according to their religious beliefs and the teachings of a man they all considered divinely inspired.
The story of Waco is also the story of disagreements over religious freedom, the rights and boundaries of the federal government, and what it means to be a legitimate religion. While David Koresh is the figure most commonly associated with the Branch Davidians, the story of the group begins several decades before his ascent to leadership. The Davidian movement was spearheaded in by a Bulgarian immigrant, Victor Houteff, who dissented from aspects of standard Seventh-Day Adventist theology.
