Treating the Cultists Right

I read in my daily paper this morning that Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran, who organized last Saturday's raid on a compound used by a Fundamentalist Latter Day Saint group in El Dorado, TX, is coming under some fire for not having acted quickly enough against the cult. He argues that he and others were familiar with the group, had visited the compound (called the YFZ ranch) more than a few times over the years, even had an informant that had kept him aware of the group's various activities. They were aware of the plural marriages and other unseemly practices, and had suspicions of worse. But until a specific allegation--a self-identified 16-year-old girl calling into a family-violence shelter, speaking of forced marriages, sexual abuse, and rape--had been received, they were unwilling to act. "[T]his is the United States," Doran said. "We are going to respect them. We're not going to violate their civil rights until we get an outcry."

Exactly correct. I'm glad that they did it that way, and I'm glad that he said it. Not that this settles all the questions about the raid: as one of my fellow Mormon bloggers has documented over the past several days, there are very serious ethical and constitutional question about how this raid was conducted, and especially about the results (specifically, 419 children removed from the ranch and placed in state custody, some accompanied voluntarily by their mothers, but most having been taken from their parents; meanwhile, their 16-year-old who made the original complaint hasn't yet been identified and no arrests have been made); still, things could have gone the same way as the raid on the Branch Davidian compound did in Waco, TX, years ago, and that they didn't is something we should all be grateful for, Mormon and otherwise.

Why? Well, obviously because no one wants to see gunfire and flames and needless deaths, if they can at all be avoided. And also because, generally speaking, we all ought to hope that constitutional protections and procedures will be followed--and that when force is necessary, it will be used judicially and carefully. (The officers which Sheriff Doran led thankfully took four days to work their way through the ranch, rather than rushing violently through the job.) But most all because, frankly, I can see myself in those people--I have ancestors who found themselves facing the same impossible situation: an unpopular and suspected faith on the one hand, the barrel of a gun on the other.

I don't want to overstate things: of course there are numerous differences between the situations and accusations that characterized the lives of Mormons in the 19th-century, and those which characterized the Branch Davidians fifteen years ago, or the FLDS today. And to lay my communitarian, occasionally-interventionary cards on the table, I'm by no means convinced that the hostile treatment which Mormons like me received back then was always and in every way an unjustifiable or without ultimate benefits, to the Mormon community or the American community or both. But all that being said, stick with the facts. A charismatic and authoritarian leader? Check. Antinomian rhetoric and actions, sometimes bordering on violence? Check and check. Unconventional (to say the least) marriage arrangements? Check again. The truth is that, as abused and misleading a word as it may be, my faith began as a cult--an avowedly and (I think, at least, in every way that matters to personal virtue and behavior) thoroughly Christian cult, one which actually absorbed and reflected much of what was typical in Protestant evangelicalism and revivalism at the time...but still, a small group, a "cult," nonetheless. And not just any cult, but a cult that faced hostility and repression. Seeing as how I'm glad that the great majority of our popularly so-called cult-like practices are no longer part of the Mormon package (though admittedly some of them I still miss...), thus no longer something I need to decide upon when affirming my particular kind of Christian faith, you might think that I could disassociate myself from splinter groups and other borderline Christian cults without difficulty. But that's not the case--as another Mormon blogger, one of my compatriots at Times and Seasons points out, the parallels in how we and they were treated and talked about are just too clear to deny.

And to tell the truth, the Branch Davidians haunt me. Back in the spring of 1993 I watched that catastrophe play out on television, watched Jay Leno make jokes about "whacko" Texas, watched the U.S. government authorize a completely over-the-top invasion of the compound, complete with tanks and helicopters, all searching for stockpiled automatic rifles (oh, how rare in east Texas) and signs of sexual abuse (never proven, but then most everyone was a corpse by the time they were done), watched Attorney General Janet Reno talk about "talking responsibility" for the massacre but never apologize...and I burned. Forget the tangential historical or doctrinal ties, forget the Constitution: what about this astonishing ignorance of, this completely dismissive attitude towards, anything which is both religious and strange? Was there to be no acknowledgment of, no recognition of, a difference that just didn't fit into anyone's nicely pluralistic and secular categories? I guess not. Fortunately, someone far more eloquent and thoughtful than I was then (and am today, despite my best efforts to improve) burned with a similar indignation: Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. His terrific essay from May of 1993, "The True Fire: In Defense of Spiritual Strangeness," isn't anywhere online so far as I know, so let me share a bit here:

The people who followed the deranged man who called himself David Koresh [the prophet-leader of the Branch Davidians] into the gray scrub of eastern Texas were, it is easy to say, losers: and of course they were losers. But they were not the kind of losers that liberals love. They, the Branch Davidians, described their position in the world too weirdly, in a way that put them beyond the reach of politics; and the Balm of Gilead is not a government program. They could not be engaged in their own terms, which were not, and must never be, the terms of a liberal order. Thus the saga of Waco was characterized, first and last, by an irreconcilability of meanings. One side experienced the siege secularly, the other side religiously. Both sides treated the other as if they lived in the same universe: the Feds treated the believers as criminals, for they could be nothing else, and the believers treated the Feds as the forces of Satan, for they could be nothing else. For fifty-one days, the misunderstanding was darkly comic. Then the comedy ended. And its ending only confirmed each side in its analysis, except that one side also died....

It is not Koresh that deserves to be defended, but the possibility of Koresh. The failure to understand the Branch Davidians was not just a tactical failure, which issued in an attack on people who were metaphysically gratified to be attacked, and not just a human failure, which issued in the astonishing inability of the president to utter a syllable of sorrow....The response of the American government to the catastrophe in Waco represents a misunderstanding of spiritual live, and American spirituality, and alienation in America....Can there be any doubt that the men and women of Ranch Apocalypse [the home base of the Branch Davidians, which was eventually burned to the ground during the siege of ATF agents and national guard troops which left seventy-two people dead] were wounded by, and afraid of, the world? Is it really so difficult to see how easy it is to get lost and lonely in America, to feel sapped of significance by its scale and speed, and housed, and diminished by its indifference? Must it really be said again that many of its citizens do not experience this country as a land of opportunity? In a state this huge and frantic, in a society this byzantine and technological, the self is no longer secure, and longer the certain master of its situations; and it is inevitable that there will be individuals who will wish to withdraw.

They have a right to withdraw, and they have the reason. Withdrawal from the world, moreover, is an old and respectable reaction to it. Alienation is one of the soul's great instruments. (It is amusing...to hear Christian friends puzzle over this Texan simulacrum of the desert.) Those who rule, of course, must be worldly people; when they hate the world, others suffer. But it is not asking too much, I think, to ask of those who are happily engaged with the world, and think that they can better it, that they acknowledge the existence in their midst of those who are unhappily disengaged from the world, and think that the world can be bettered by its end. Despair in not a common emotion in eliteland, which is where most of our politicians and journalists live; but elsewhere it is as common as weeds.

Let me reiterate: I am not saying that I disapprove to the police moving into the FLDS ranch; on the contrary, I'm glad that they did--cultists accused of the exploitation of underage girls need to be investigated and stopped. But I am even more glad that they did it the way they did, even with all the questions which still exist about the raid. It showed some humility, it showed some reasonableness, it showed some caution. Maybe all that doesn't quite add up to a "respect" for strangeness...but for those of us who are strange, or at least who have roots in and a connection to that which is strange, a little more caution is a good thing. (Now if the media could only learn the same.)