Mention the Branch Davidians and almost everyone thinks of the same things – Waco, David Koresh, guns, federal agents, a burning compound, people dying on live television … etc. For most Americans, the Branch Davidian story begins on February 28, 1993, when federal agents attempted to raid the group’s Mount Carmel property outside Waco, Texas.
But that’s actually close to the end of the story. The movement was already more than sixty years old. David Koresh didn’t found it. He wasn’t even the second leader. And the original Davidians weren’t an entirely new religion. They began as a reform movement within Seventh-day Adventism.
To understand how we got to Waco, we have to go back to a man named Victor Houteff, and once again, to Adventism.
Victor Houteff
Victor Tasho Houteff was a Bulgarian immigrant who joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church after coming to the United States. By the late 1920s, Houteff had become convinced that the Adventist Church itself needed reform. He began teaching a distinctive interpretation of biblical prophecy and eventually published his ideas in a work called The Shepherd’s Rod. His followers consequently became known as the Shepherd’s Rod movement.
Houteff didn’t initially see himself as founding a completely separate religion. He believed the Seventh-day Adventist Church had become spiritually compromised and needed to return to faithfulness, so he proposed some reforms. The Seventh-day Adventist leadership didn’t accept Houteff’s teachings, and eventually his followers developed into a separate movement. Houteff later adopted the name Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. So the Davidians began as Adventists trying to reform Adventism.
Why Davidian? Because Houteff believed biblical prophecy pointed toward the restoration of the Davidic kingdom and that God’s end-time people would play a special role in preparing for the return of Christ. If that sounds apocalyptic, that’s because it was.
But remember where the movement came from. Seventh-day Adventism itself emerged from an intensely prophetic movement centered on the imminent return of Christ. The Davidians took that expectation in another direction.
The 144,000
One of Houteff’s major teachings concerned the 144,000 described in Revelation. Seventh-day Adventists already had a strong sense of themselves as God’s end-time remnant. Houteff went further, teaching that a purified group would emerge from within Adventism and fulfill a special role in the events preceding Christ’s return. The Davidians believed that judgment and purification would begin with God’s own people.
Houteff developed an elaborate prophetic system involving Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation and other biblical books. Like many apocalyptic movements, the system could become extraordinarily complicated.
Once again we encounter something we’ve already seen several times. A teacher becomes convinced that bible prophecy contains a detailed map of current and future events. The map becomes increasingly complicated. The movement becomes convinced that it occupies a special place in the prophetic timetable. And the clock is always getting close to midnight.
Mount Carmel
In 1935, Houteff and a group of followers moved to property near Waco, Texas, and established a community they called Mount Carmel Center. The settlement operated communally to a significant degree, with members farming, working and publishing Houteff’s religious literature. Waco therefore didn’t enter the story with David Koresh. The Davidians had been there for decades.
The community observed the seventh-day Sabbath and retained several practices inherited from Seventh-day Adventism, including dietary restrictions and an intense expectation of Christ’s return. Houteff exercised considerable authority as the interpreter of the prophetic message.
For his followers, this wasn’t merely a Bible study group with an unusual interpretation of Revelation. They believed they were preparing for the final events of history.
Houteff died in 1955. And that’s when things began getting complicated.
Another Failed Expectation
After Houteff’s death, his wife Florence assumed leadership of much of the movement. She eventually promoted the expectation that dramatic prophetic events would occur around Passover in 1959. Davidians from around the country gathered at the new Mount Carmel property east of Waco anticipating God’s intervention.
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Nothing happened.
We’ve been here before.
William Miller had 1844. The Jehovah’s Witness tradition had its own prophetic expectations. Now the Davidians had 1959.
When the anticipated events failed to occur, Florence Houteff’s credibility collapsed and the movement fragmented. But the Davidian story still wasn’t over.
Benjamin Roden and the Branch
One of the people who stepped into the confusion was Benjamin Roden. Roden claimed that he had received a new prophetic message and organized a group that became known as the Branch Davidians in the 1950s. The word Branch came from biblical passages referring to the Branch, particularly prophetic texts associated with the Davidic Messiah.
Roden retained important elements of both Seventh-day Adventist and Davidian theology while adding his own interpretations. So the family tree now looked something like this: Millerite Adventism → Seventh-day Adventism → Davidian Seventh-day Adventism → Branch Davidians.
By this point we’re several generations removed from William Miller. But you can still see the family resemblance.
The Sabbath remains. Biblical prophecy remains. The imminent end remains. The conviction that a particular movement possesses special insight into God’s end-time plan remains. What changes is who has the key to interpreting it.
Lois Roden
Benjamin Roden died in 1978, and his wife, Lois Roden, became an important leader of the Branch Davidians. She developed the unusual teaching that the Holy Spirit should be understood as feminine and became interested in women’s leadership and ordination. She even published a journal called Shekinah dealing with some of those themes.
By this point the movement was a long way from ordinary Seventh-day Adventism. And then a young man named Vernon Howell arrived. That name probably doesn’t sound familiar. His later one will.
Vernon Howell
Vernon Wayne Howell joined the Branch Davidian community in the early 1980s and quickly demonstrated an impressive ability to memorize and interpret Scripture. People who encountered Howell often described him as extraordinarily persuasive when discussing the Bible.
Religious leaders don’t usually gain devoted followers simply by announcing, “I’m a cult leader. Would you like to ruin your life?” They persuade people. They connect passages of Scripture. They answer questions. They create a system that makes sense to the people inside it. And Howell was very good at that.
He became close to Lois Roden and eventually developed his own following within the movement. That produced a power struggle with Lois’s son, George Roden. And this wasn’t merely a disagreement over who got to lead Wednesday night Bible study.
Things became violent. Howell and his followers eventually gained control of the Mount Carmel property after a bitter conflict with George Roden that included an armed confrontation. Vernon Howell was now in charge.
Eventually he changed his name to David Koresh.
David Koresh
The name itself told a story. “David” connected him with King David and the Davidic expectations already important within the movement. “Koresh” is the Hebrew form of Cyrus, the Persian king described in Isaiah as God’s anointed instrument.
Koresh increasingly came to understand himself as occupying a unique role in God’s prophetic plan. His teaching centered particularly on the seven seals of Revelation. To his followers, Koresh wasn’t simply another preacher offering an interpretation of Revelation. He was the person uniquely qualified to open its meaning. That’s an enormous shift in religious authority.
Once a leader becomes the indispensable interpreter of Scripture, disagreeing with the leader can easily become equivalent to disagreeing with God. And that is a dangerous place for any religious movement to arrive.
Koresh and the Messiah
Koresh’s understanding of his own role was complicated. He used messianic language and interpreted biblical passages as referring to himself, while still distinguishing himself in various ways from Jesus Christ. His theology developed around the idea that he had a unique end-time role associated with opening the seven seals and producing the people who would participate in God’s coming kingdom.
Eventually that theology affected almost every part of life at Mount Carmel. Koresh claimed sexual access to women within the community, including women married to other men. He taught that he was to father children who would have a special place in the coming kingdom. The other men were expected to remain celibate. That’s a remarkably convenient revelation if you happen to be David Koresh.
At this point, whatever historical connection remained with Seventh-day Adventism shouldn’t confuse us about what the movement had become. The Seventh-day Adventist Church didn’t teach this. Victor Houteff didn’t teach this. Benjamin Roden didn’t teach this.
These were developments under Koresh. That’s an important distinction whenever we’re tracing the genealogy of religious movements. A descendant can inherit ideas from its ancestors without everything the descendant does being blamed on the people who came before it.
The Guns
The Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel accumulated a substantial collection of firearms. That fact has sometimes been reduced to “religious fanatics stockpiling weapons for Armageddon,” but the situation was more complicated. Members bought, sold and traded firearms, and guns were also part of life in Texas.
The legal issue that attracted federal attention involved allegations concerning illegal firearms and weapons modifications. On February 28, 1993, agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to execute warrants at Mount Carmel.
Nobody agrees completely about everything that happened next. What we know is that shooting began. Four ATF agents and several Branch Davidians were killed. The raid had failed. And the entire country was about to learn the name David Koresh.
Fifty-One Days
The failed raid became a siege. For the next 51 days, the FBI surrounded Mount Carmel while negotiators attempted to persuade Koresh and his followers to surrender. Some people came out, but most remained inside.
Koresh continued discussing Scripture and prophecy with negotiators. From inside his theological world, the confrontation with federal authorities could be interpreted through the apocalyptic passages he had been teaching for years.
That’s one of the tragic dimensions of Waco. If people already believe they’re living through the final confrontation between God’s people and the powers of evil, surrounding their home with armed government agents probably isn’t going to convince them that their prophetic interpretation was mistaken. It may convince them that it was right.
April 19, 1993
On April 19, federal authorities moved to end the siege. Armored vehicles were used to insert CS tear gas into the building in an attempt to force the occupants out. Instead, fires broke out. The Mount Carmel complex burned. Koresh and scores of his followers died, including children.
The exact sequence of events and responsibility for various decisions surrounding the siege became the subject of investigations, congressional hearings and decades of argument. The Texas State Historical Association records the raid, 51-day siege, final federal operation and fire as the catastrophic culmination of the confrontation.
And here we need to be careful. It is possible to believe that David Koresh exercised destructive and abusive religious authority while also questioning decisions made by federal authorities. Those aren’t mutually exclusive conclusions.
You don’t have to turn Koresh into a martyr to ask whether the government handled Waco badly. And you don’t have to defend every government action to recognize what Koresh had done to the people who trusted him.
Were the Branch Davidians Christians?
This is more complicated than simply asking whether Seventh-day Adventists are Christians. The original Davidians emerged from a Christian tradition and retained recognizably Christian and Adventist beliefs. Their disputes with Seventh-day Adventism initially involved prophetic interpretation and claims about the purification of God’s people.
Under Koresh, however, the movement became centered increasingly on Koresh’s unique prophetic and messianic authority. That’s where I think the central problem lies. Christianity points toward Jesus. A destructive religious movement eventually points toward its leader. The leader becomes the indispensable interpreter. Then the indispensable prophet. Then the person whose commands can’t safely be questioned because questioning him means questioning God.
Once that happens, it almost doesn’t matter how many Bible verses appear in the sermon. The Bible has ceased functioning as the final authority. The leader has become the final authority.
The Davidians Didn’t End at Waco
One other misconception is worth correcting. Not every Davidian was a follower of David Koresh. Davidian Seventh-day Adventist groups descended from Houteff continued separately from Koresh’s Branch Davidian faction. Small Davidian and Branch Davidian communities also survived after 1993. That’s another reason we shouldn’t use Davidian and Branch Davidian as though they were interchangeable.
Victor Houteff founded the Davidian movement. Benjamin Roden established the Branch Davidian offshoot. David Koresh eventually took control of one Branch Davidian community and transformed it around his own prophetic claims.
Without acknowledging all of that, seventy years of religious history gets compressed into one photograph of a burning building.
The Lesson of Waco
The story began with William Miller trying to calculate the return of Christ. Then came Seventh-day Adventism and its interpretation of 1844. Then Victor Houteff concluded that Adventism itself needed an end-time purification. Then Benjamin Roden announced another prophetic message. Then David Koresh became the man who could unlock the seven seals.
Each step added another interpreter between the believer and the text. That’s what makes the Davidian story worth studying. The strangest religious movements don’t necessarily begin with something obviously strange. Sometimes they begin with people reading the Bible, taking prophecy seriously and believing that God is about to do something extraordinary. The danger comes when one person becomes convinced that he alone knows what it means.
By 1993, people at Mount Carmel weren’t merely waiting for Jesus to return. They were waiting for David Koresh to explain the Book of Revelation to them. And when your understanding of God reaches the point where one man holds the key to the Bible, your marriage, your children and your future, you’ve handed him far more than religious authority. You’ve handed him your life.