Trying to make some sense of Mount Carmel, we seek out Professor Dan McGee of the religion department at Baylor University in Waco. He knew the Branch Davidians well. They were, he says, remarkably likeable people, known and respected locally. Prior to George Roden's introduction of guns to the community in the 1980s, they had been principled pacifists. Then, when Koresh became leader, things deteriorated further, and they became much less open to the outside world.

Professor McGee concedes that Koresh had his own distinctive and often weird beliefs. But he maintains that his essential vision was broadly the same as that of an estimated 80 million American Christians who interpret the Bible in a premillennial way.

Koresh, he explains, 'used the same biblical material that your typical premillennialists will use, that is, that the world is getting worse and worse, and will do so until Christ's coming. And they typically look out there and see all the bad things possible in the world as evidence that Christ is about to come.' When the community originally moved to Waco from California in 1935, their leader, Victor Houteff had said to them, 'We will not be there over a year before Christ returns again.'

There are, of course, many real differences between the Branch Davidians and the mainstream Christian premillennialists. The genial Hal Lindsey, author of The Late Great Planet Earth and other best-selling prophecy books, is no David Koresh. John Walvoord, doyen of premillennial theologians at Dallas Theological Seminary, and author of Armageddon, Oil and the Middle East Crisis, is certainly no cult leader.

But I find myself agreeing with Dan McGee. What unites them is their bleak estimation of human history, their belief that God has abandoned the world to its satantic fate.

If the premillennialists are right, if this is, in fact, the way that God is going to deal with the world, rigidly enacting the kind of fiery, apocalyptic scenarios that they love so much – inevitable hatred between nations and races, blood up to the horse's bridle, two-thirds of the world's population wiped out – then I have to say, I don't want anything to do with him. This is a deeply immoral God, a puppet master, playing with his creatures on the stage of world history.

Does my rejection of premillennialism, and all that Mount Carmel stands for, leave me with nothing but an icy and deadening nihilism, in which, along with the rest of my generation, I am, in the words of Jean Baudrillard, 'condemned to an absence of destiny'?

I don't believe that it does. On the contrary. For me, the glory of the Christian vision of history is the tension it so brilliantly describes between past, present and future; between what God has already accomplished in and for the world he has made, what we experience daily in our restless, rebellious lives, and the promise of what shall be – the realization in Christ of all that we hope for, all that we have loved.

HEARING THE BIRDS SING

The morning after the fire at Mount Carmel, Dan McGee was asked to go into the local television station and do an interview for CBS. I find his reflections on that morning deeply moving and profoundly hopeful.

'As I went out of my house, it was still dark. The birds were just beginning to sing. And I thought to myself, that's what the Branch Davidians were unable to do. The world was so dark for them that they couldn't hear the birds singing. There was no hope for the world as it existed – they had to find some way to escape it, or destroy it, or deny it. The world is going to hell, and it can only get worse until Jesus comes and starts anew. That is central to the theology of premillennialism.

'No I critique that theologically from what I think is orthodox Christianity with the claim that what they fail to understand and appreciate is the first coming of Christ.

'They fail to understand that God's answer to the evil out there in the world is not military or physical conquest, but that it is taking the suffering upon himself. Those of us who are people of faith will continue to do the same thing, and it is in this way that we will be victorious.

'With this kind of faith, then, the bogeymen out there don't scare you into the cave. You stay out there and you fight the battle. But you fight it with faith and hope. You hear the birds sing.'

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