A History of the End of the World (37 page)

Houteff adopted “Mount Carmel” as the name of his community in an allusion to the site where, according to the Bible, the prophet Elijah orders the seizure and slaughter of 450 priests of the pagan god Baal in an act of carnage that is meant to glorify the God of Israel.
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For Houteff and his followers, as for Elijah and the author of Revelation, the choice between the One True God and all other beliefs and practices is, quite literally, a matter of life or death: “It should be ever kept in mind that the very name ‘Mt. Carmel,’” wrote one observer who visited the compound in 1937, “indicates a place where we are being severely tested as to whether we will serve God or Baal.”
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Houteff, like other doomsayers, was convinced that the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland was a precondition to the Second Coming, and he called his followers “Davidians” in anticipation of the restoration of the throne of King David. To keep them in “a state of perpetual readiness for the End,” he ordered that a clock in the headquarters of the Davidians at Mount Carmel be fixed at eleven o’clock “as a reminder that time was nearing its conclusion.”
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Thus roused to an unremitting state of “psychological imminence,” Houteff and the rest of the Davidians waited for the world to end on time.

Houteff, of course, did not live to see any of the remarkable events that he was able to discern in the coded passages of the Bible. Upon his death in 1955, the community shattered into contending factions, and the one that ended up in possession of the Waco property called itself the Branch Davidians. On April 22, 1959, they gathered at Mount Carmel to witness the fulfillment of a new prophecy by Houteff’s widow, Florence: “the faithful would be slaughtered, resurrected and carried up to heaven.” A journalist who covered the spectacle reported on the “pitiful” display of disappointment by those who found themselves still alive and well at the end of the day. “Of the thousand there, more or less, only one person was relieved,” he wrote. “Me.”
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By the mid-1980s, Mount Carmel was very nearly moribund, but the Branch Davidians were reinvigorated by the arrival of a charismatic young man called Vernon Howell, a “semi-literate rock guitarist with fantastically detailed knowledge of the Bible and an overwhelming urge to uncover its secrets.”
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Howell was blessed with a glib tongue, a lively sense of humor, and “a gift for self-parody.”
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Indeed, he slyly called himself a “sinful messiah,” and he recruited a brood of “wives” out of a self-proclaimed duty to sire as many children as possible.
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As he rose to the leadership of the Branch Davidians, he acknowledged his new role by taking a new name—David Koresh.

The name that Vernon Howell chose for himself is dense with biblical meanings. The first name, of course, was meant to remind the Branch Davidians of the biblical king of Israel whose blood is said to have flowed in the veins of Jesus: “Lo, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David,” writes the author of Revelation, “has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
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And “Koresh” is the Hebrew name of the Persian emperor, Cyrus, who permitted the exiled Jews to return to Judea and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, thereby earning for himself the biblical title of “Messiah.” Thus did Vernon Howell make a coded claim to his own messiahship.

Like Houteff, David Koresh was convinced that he alone was capable of retrieving the hidden secrets of the Bible, especially the meaning of the seven seals of Revelation. Like Jan Bockelson, he prescribed a strict code of sexual morality that applied to everyone but himself, and he openly snacked on forbidden foods like ice cream and candy while his followers were confined to a vegetarian diet “whose rules about food combination changed frequently.” Like Father Miller, he engaged in the dangerous practice of date setting. The Tribulation, Koresh predicted, would begin in 1995, exactly ten years after his “coronation” as leader of the Branch Davidians.
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And, like the author of Revelation, he insisted that he had been “taken up into the heavens by angelic beings,” which Koresh described as “a ‘spaceship’ that ‘travels by light, the refraction of light.’”
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Koresh was convinced that the world was witnessing the fulfillment of the prophecies that are expressed in Revelation as the breaking of the seven seals. He understood his own calling to the leadership of the Branch Davidians as the prophecy of the first seal: “And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.”
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By 1992, Koresh had come to believe that one of the spookiest and most unsettling prophecies in the book of Revelation, the opening of the fifth seal, was imminent:

David Koresh might well have lived out his life in obscurity as a self-appointed “prophet” if he had not also embarked on a fateful plan to arm the Davidians with automatic weapons. He had already amassed an arsenal, and now he began to purchase the kits that would enable him to convert a cache of semiautomatic rifles into weapons with a far greater rate of fire. That’s why agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began to take an active interest in what was happening inside the compound at Mount Carmel. On February 23, 1993, federal agents launched an abortive raid, the beginning of a siege that lasted fifty-one days and ended only with a final conflagration that burned Mount Carmel to the ground and cost the lives of more than eighty Branch Davidians, including Koresh himself.

At one point during the siege, the FBI was given some curious but insightful advice by a pair of professors of religion who insisted that a close reading of Revelation held the key to ending the standoff with the heavily armed Davidians. Koresh was apparently convinced that the Davidians were the ones destined to be “slain for the word of God” when, according to Revelation, the fifth seal is broken. But the two scholars sought to persuade Koresh, by means of a radio broadcast, that he should read and heed the very next line in the book of Revelation: “And it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season.”
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If Koresh could be convinced that “God intended the ‘little’ season to last until after the end of the siege, giving him time to stand trial and then resume a worldwide ministry,” explains Damian Thompson, “then the standoff would end peacefully.”
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FBI negotiators, in fact, took the advice seriously enough to play a tape of the radio broadcast over the telephone for Koresh, and he reportedly agreed to abandon his stronghold at Mount Carmel once he had composed his own treatise on the meaning of the seven seals. But the FBI was not willing to wait long enough for Koresh, who was capable of sermonizing at extraordinary length, to complete his latest exegesis. “[T]hey were unfamiliar with religion’s ability to drive human behaviour to the point of sacrificing all other loyalties,” explains Thompson, writing of an era when the world did not yet fully understand what motivates suicide bombers.
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The role of Revelation in the siege of Mount Carmel was mostly overlooked at the time it was taking place, and entirely forgotten thereafter. The whole sorry affair has been written off as an unfortunate encounter between overeager law-enforcement agents and overzealous religious cranks, all of whom were spoiling for a shoot-out. But the tragedy would never have taken place—and the Branch Davidians would not have come into existence at all—but for the strange power of the apocalyptic idea. The book of Revelation carries some “dangerous baggage,” as we have seen already and will see again, and even the brightest and shiniest dreams of a new heaven and a new earth have a dark side.

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onsider, for example, the remarkable media phenomenon known as the Left Behind series, which exploded into American popular culture even as the ugly memories of Waco were beginning to fade away.

When Tim LaHaye published a tract titled
The Beginning of the End
in 1972, he was yet another hard-preaching doomsayer who urgently sought to persuade his readers that the end of the world was nigh. Indeed, he offered a strong dose of dispensational premillennialism that differed not at all from what John Nelson Darby or Father Miller preached in their own day. “[W]e could well be the generation that sees the culmination of the ages and the ushering in of the Kingdom of Christ,” he writes. “Certainly we have more historical evidence for such a possibility than any generation of Christians in almost 2,000 years. In fact, I believe the Bible teaches that we are already living in the beginning of the end.”
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By 1995, however, LaHaye put himself in a very different place on the cultural landscape when he penned (with coauthor Jerry B. Jenkins) a slick apocalyptic thriller titled
Left Behind.
The message is exactly the same, but the medium is wholly different. Styled as a contemporary potboiler,
Left Behind
features the stock characters, exotic settings, and fast-paced plot that we would expect to find in a best seller by Robert Ludlum. Aside from the fact that
Left Behind
was published by Tyndale House, a leading publisher of fundamentalist Christiantitles, nothing on the front or back cover reveals that it is actually a thinly disguised theological tract. But the very first passage slyly introduces the reader to the doctrine of the Rapture when the hero, a commercial airline pilot called Rayford Steele, discovers that half of the passengers on his Boeing 747 have somehow exited the aircraft in midflight.

“I’m not crazy! See for yourself!” screams a distraught flight attendant. “All over the plane, people have disappeared.”

“It’s a joke. They’re hiding, trying to—”

“Ray! Their shoes, their socks, their clothes, everything was left behind. These people are gone!”
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Thus began a sensationally successful media enterprise that demonstrates the power of the apocalyptic idea in its purest and simplest form. The Left Behind series, a protracted account of the Tribulation and the antics of the Antichrist, spawned not merely a string of novels but a multimedia empire, including books, comics, newsletters, audios, videos, and a Web site called “The Left Behind Prophecy Club.” Significantly, the publisher spun off a separate series especially for young readers, titled
Left Behind: The Kids,
which now consists of an additional forty titles. While Hal Lindsey was hailed as the best-selling author of the 1970s for selling 20 million copies of
The Late Great Planet Earth,
the Left Behind series has reportedly sold more than 50 million copies since the first title was published in 1995. And the end—surely to the disappointment of its authors—is nowhere in sight.

Indeed, LaHaye’s motives in repurposing Revelation as a thriller are not merely mercenary. Before he took up his new calling as a best-selling novelist, LaHaye enjoyed a long and active career as a pastor and an educator, a televangelist and a leading figure in Christian politics. LaHaye is credited by Jerry Falwell as “the motivation behind the birth of the Religious Right,”
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and he served as cochairman of the failed presidential campaign of conservative Republican Jack Kemp, at least until he was asked to resign after he was quoted as calling Roman Catholicism “a false religion.”
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Aside from the Left Behind series, LaHaye’s fifty books include tracts that condemn the United Nations, gay sexuality, “secular humanism,” and various other bogeymen of Christian fundamentalism. “He’s basically provided an agenda for conservatives on a range of issues from abortion and pornography to creationism, prayer in schools, and public education as a hotbed of secularism and liberalism,” according to Paul Boyer.
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And LaHaye himself readily acknowledges that the Left Behind series is a yet another weapon in the struggle for the hearts and minds of his fellow Americans.

“We are in a cultural war in this country, and there are two worldviews—one built on the writings of man and one on the writing of God,” LaHaye explained to one interviewer. “Those two views of what is going to help America and the world are 180 degrees in opposition.”
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That’s exactly why the books in the Left Behind series embrace the same dualistic theology—and the same revenge-seeking rhetoric—that burn so hotly in the book of Revelation. All of the complexities of the modern world are swept away and replaced by the simple conflict between God and Satan—another borrowing from the book of Revelation. As the Tribulation begins, according to the plot line of the Left Behind series, a handful of Christians who missed out on the Rapture are inspired to join the struggle against the Antichrist, who is depicted as a slick Jewish politician with headquarters in modern Iraq, the site of ancient Babylon.

“They promote conspiracy theories; they demonize proponents of arms control, ecumenicalism, abortion rights and everyone else disliked by the Christian right,” complains Gershom Gorenberg in a review of the Left Behind series that appeared in the
American Prospect.
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“Their anti-Jewishness is exceeded only by their anti-Catholicism. Most basically, they reject the very idea of open, democratic debate. In the world of Left Behind, there exists a single truth, based on a purportedly literal reading of Scripture; anyone who disagrees with that truth is deceived or evil.”
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Not coincidentally, the Left Behind series peaked at the very moment when the Western world awakened to the new peril that had replaced the “evil empire” of the Reagan era—the challenge of militant Islam and, especially, the spectacle of religious terrorism on an unprecedented scale. Suddenly, everything old was new again; after all, the prophet Muhammad had been seen as a candidate for the Antichrist by the Christian world more than a thousand years before the Bolshevik Revolution. And when America went to war against Iraq, the struggle that George W. Bush called a “clash of ideologies” could be readily seen, yet again, as the war between the Lamb and the Beast.