Last year, Iwan Russell-Jones went to Waco in Texas and visited what remains of Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian compound destroyed by fire just over five years ago. Eighty people, including children, died in this American holocaust. What he found there shows that the dangerous dreams of apocalypse can not merely survive, but feed on disasters as great as this.

But once out in the bleak countryside, there are few people to ask. We pass a couple of tough-looking men and a mean dog, and cowardice gets the better of us. We have seen too much news, watched too many road movies. In this apocalyptic place, anything might happen.

We drive on further than we should until we see a woman pottering in her garden. 'Can you point us in the direction of Carmel?' we inquire. She turns and exchanges glances with a man who is sitting on the veranda. Their expressions suggest frustration, weariness and contempt. They've grown accustomed to our kind in the last few years – pain tourists, end-time groupies, journalists in search of the crazies.

But politely, she points us back the way we've come. 'About four miles along the road, opposite the two water towers, there's a track up to the right. That's Carmel. There's nothing much there – just a heap of trash.'

We find it, just as she had said. By now, the late afternoon sun is sinking red and low over the horizon, and a restless wind is blowing through the long grass. 'Welcome to the world's most persecuted church', the sign at the entrance to the field says. And so it must be… Where once a thriving religious community of 150 people stood, there are now only a few burned-out vehicles and the sound of the crickets.

David Koresh and his followers were extreme premillennialists. They understood themselves to be the righteous community of God who would shortly undergo a period of suffering and martyrdom at the hands of the wicked world, before finally being vindicated by God.

It's a mentality that most people today find foreign and utterly incomprehensible. Mount Carmel has become a symbol – the symbol – in our world of the madness of belief. It is the nadir of Christian eschatology.

But I am a Christian. I am here with a colleague who is also a Christian. Together we have been trying to understand this premillennial strand in American Christianity – the belief that we are on the verge of a terrifying period of history known as the Great Tribulation, in which hatred and evil will increasingly come to dominate the world, before Christ returns to earth to establish a perfect society of truth and justice that will last a thousand years.

We have interviewed some of the leading exponents of this theology – Hal Lindsey, Jack Walvoord, Jack and Roxella Van Impe, Irvin Baxter Jr. Having to think so long and hard has been an extraordinary and largely enjoyable experience. Until now.

At Waco, belief is no laughing matter. It is life and death. But mostly, it seems, death. Who wants to be a believer after Waco?

But as the shadows lengthen in this bleak, God-forsaken place, the world seems to hang in the balance, poised between desire and hatred, hope and despair, fire and ice. And I am unsure as to which is worse – an excess of expectation, or its complete absence.

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