Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics

State Intervention and Holy Violence

Timgad / Paleostrovsk / Waco

Version 1.3

June 2009

Brent D. Shaw

Princeton University

Abstract: The investigation attempts to analyze the role of state violence in the particular circumstance of a religious community that is put under siege by state military forces. It does this by comparing three type cases: two pre-modern instances, those of Timgad in early fifth-century north Africa and the sieges of dissident monasteries and churches in mid-seventeenth-century Muscovy; and the modern-day siege at Waco, Texas.

© Brent D. Shaw bshaw@ princeton.edu

2

STATE INTERVENTION AND HOLY VIOLENCE TIMGAD / PALEOSTROVSK / WACO

In the panorama of holy violence, there are special cases of violent confrontations that involve the state as one of the main protagonists. In this investigation, I shall focus on three historical cases where the violent force of the state was involved in the repression of religious communities that were within its normal sphere of jurisdiction. The first is the standoff that occurred in the year 419 in which armed forces of the Roman imperial state surrounded the great basilica complex at Timgad, ancient Thamugadi, in what is today central Algeria. A large number of Christian dissidents, so-called Donatists, were hold up in the basilica with their bishop Gaudentius, refusing to surrender to the demands of the authorities.1 The second case concerns another marginalized Christian group, the ‘Old Believers’ as they were called, or Raskolniki, religious rebels of seventeenth-century Muscovy.2 The analysis here is centered on incidents that occurred in 1687 and 1688, in which forces of the Tsarist state surrounded the large monastic compound at Paleostrovsk, located on the shores of Lake Onega on the Russo-Finnish borderlands.3 And, finally, Waco, Texas, where in 1993, another marginal group of Christians, the Branch Davidians, had taken refuge in a compound named Mount Carmel, as they awaited a final assault by the armed forces of the federal government of the United States.4

These are far from the only examples of attacks on barricaded religious groups that involved the mobilization of state forces in episodes of violent coercion. There are many such cases, including the assault by the military forces of the new Brazilian Republic on the holy city of Canudos or Belo Monte in the Brazilian northeast in 1897.5 They also include, famously, the siege directed by the Prince-Bishop Waldeck against the Anabaptist kingdom in the city of

3

Münster in northern German lands in 1534-35.6 And, more recently, the siege of the Lal Majid or ‘Red Mosque’ in Islamabad in July 2007 by the armed forces of the Pakistani state.7 At a less dramatic, and much less violent level, we might also include the siege of a convent of rebellious nuns at Kazmierz, Poland, in October 2007.8 The three particular cases that I have selected have been chosen because they involve structurally similar elements of a dissident group of Christians under siege in which the military forces of the central state were marshaled against them. In all of them, the besieged were confined in a sacred sanctuary that was, in a manifest sense, their last place of refuge on earth. The example of the Old Believers of seventeenth-century Russia was chosen for elements of similarity in a premodern state that might permit comparison with events in the later Roman empire. Waco, on the other hand, was selected because of its temporal and cultural proximity and because of the greater depth of the day-to-day documentation of the events of the siege. It was chosen for purposes of contrast: a contemporary case that would enable the comparison of the response mechanisms of a modern government with those of two premodern empires. Finally, although we cannot be absolutely certain that the dissident Christians at Timgad in 419 met their end in a fiery conflagration, this fate was expected by all concerned.9 Such was certainly the result at Paleostrovsk and also at Waco. Competitive Salience The violent incidents at Waco, Paleostrovsk, and Timgad raise the question of under what conditions states have intervened with violent miliitary force in religious divisions and disputes within their borders. Among the basic factors involved in the mobilization of state force were serious pre-existing internal conflicts within the religious groups concerned—disputes that provoked competitive bidding for the government’s attention. In each of the three cases, the degree of integration and prior involvement of the state with the whole of the religious group concerned was significantly different and so affected the nature of the armed repression by government forces. In Muscovy, the Tsarist state had long-term close connections with the Orthodox Church. In the seventeenth century, these ties became especially intense since the founder of the new Romanov dynasty, Filaret, was himself, from 1619, Patriarch of Moscow. Waco is

4

at the opposite extreme, since any formal connections between the United States federal government and the Seventh-Day Adventist Church—or groups that were splinter offshoots from it—were fortuitous and occasional in nature. The Roman state lies between these two extremes of connection and distance. For over a century before the siege at Timgad, the imperial state had been ruled by emperors who were Christian and who supported one type or another of a limited number of ‘orthodoxies.’ The relationship of the imperial court to Christian churches was close and yet technically separate; in most cases, its interests and involvements were remote from the local exercise of secular power. The particularities of each set of relationships conditioned the ways in which each state intervened. In the case of the siege of the dissident basilica at Timgad in 419, earlier imperial decrees issued by Roman emperors, beginning in 412, that sanctioned the use of state force in matters of religious affiliation had been the result of intense efforts by Catholic bishops in lobbying the imperial court at Ravenna. Their embassies had petitioned the state to use its armed resources to force the dissident Christians in Africa to surrender their churches and to rejoin the Catholic church. A critical turning point, as far as direct state intervention was concerned, was the holding of a great church conference at Carthage in the year 411 in which an imperial plenipotentiary in the matter, the tribune and notary Marcellinus, heard the case for legitimacy argued by both the dissident and the Catholic churches. At its conclusion, he issued his final decision that declared in favor of the Catholics and against their rivals, the so-called Donatists.10 It is important to note that this impressive hearing at Carthage, conducted in the manner of a Roman civil trial, provided the state with the formal declaration that was the basis for its subsequent involvement in the heavy-handed repression of the dissidents. But it is equally important to remember that the conference was the end-point of a decades-long campaign of lobbying the imperial court at Milan and at Ravenna to see the dissenters in Africa not just as schismatics or heretics, but also as dangers to the secular public order. One important aim of the lobbying was to get the state to accept the pejorative label of ‘Donatist’ as an officially sanctioned name for a specific type of heretic, a step that the state finally took in 405, but which it only began fully to enforce after 414, at a rather

5

late point in the history of the history of the conflict. It is in this context that soldiers of the Roman state came to surround the basilica complex at Timgad. Like the Donatists in Roman Africa, the religious rebels, the Raskolniki, or the Old Believers, known as Staroobriadtsy or ‘old ritualists,’ of seventeenth-century Russia were labeled as heretics by their enemies and successfully castigated as dangerous religious deviants. The terms Raskol, meaning rebellion, division, or schism, and Raskolniki, meaning rebels or dissidents, were at first general ones applied to a broad range of disobedient and unacceptable persons from the perspective of the Orthodox Church. As in the case of ‘the Donatists,’ the pejorative labeling was imposed by outsiders and was first formally applied to a specific kind of dissenter long after the original division had emerged.11 When the term Raskol first appeared in the 1650s, it was not applied to the Old Believers as such, but was used to designate a broad spectrum of disobedience and dissent. Coming into more frequent use in the 1660s, it was used by both sides, the one to accuse the other of being the real schismatics. It took the action of a large official forum—the great church council of 1666-67 that declared the Old Believers to be heretics—to make the term both an official and a technical one to designate illicit dissent.12 The dissenters, on the other hand, thought of themselves as preserving the true traditional church and so referred to themselves as ‘the elect,’ ‘the true brothers,’ or, more usually, simply as Christians.13 The external label of ‘Old Believer’ was only introduced into the dissidents’ own texts in the 1720s, two generations after the events described here (Michels 1999: 17). In both the cases of ‘the Donatists’ and ‘the Old Believers,’ the invention of the disparaging labels was integrally connected with the campaigns directed by their sectarian enemies to get the state to act. The move ‘to jump’ the struggle to the level of the state resulted from prior internal struggles that had compelled both sides to solicit state support. The proximate origins of the use of state violence in Muscovy were rooted in an internal struggle within the Orthodox Church that pivoted on modernizing ‘reforms’ championed by the Patriarch Nikon in the mid-1650s. The reforms sparked a myriad of points of resistance in which local communities and individuals insisted on the continuing validity of traditional forms of worship. The Orthodox Church did not have instruments of military force at its command

6

to repress these threats to its authority. Early on, therefore, its officials began a campaign of warning government authorities that the dissenters represented a threat not just to the church but also to the state itself. There appear to have been two converging currents of pressure on the court. On the one hand, from the 1640s to the early 1650s, well before the Patriarch Nikon’s reforms, the state had already been collaborating with the Orthodox Church in encouraging internal reformist elements to refashion the church into a more state-like institution. The government was more at ease with changes, construed as ‘reforms,’ that would make the church more uniform and more coherent with the new imperial state. On the other hand, once a concerted program of reforms emerged in 1653 that were closely identified with the contentious figure of the new Patriarch Nikon, the changes provoked resistance and division. From this point onward, both sides—the pro-reformers and the traditionalists—began lobbying the Tsarist court, since neither had the power needed finally to trump the other (Lupinin 1984: 143-44). The lobbying was perceived to be necessary since it was not wholly clear where the state would stand on these matters. On the one hand, quarrels between Tsar Aleskei and the aggressive and forceful Patriarch Nikon led to Nikon’s ‘resignation’ in 1658 as the figurehead of reform, even as the very reforms that he championed were accepted and pushed forward. The changes were structural ones only conjuncturally connected with a given personality. Indeed, some of the first proponents of reform, like Vonifatiev, Neronov, and the archpriest Avvakum, broke with the program and became virulent opponents of modernization. Through the late 1650s and into the early 1660s, however, the repression of the dissenters by the Orthodox Church was limited; at worst, punishment involved exile and corporal punishment. And these disciplinary measures were balanced by persistent negotiations and efforts at reconciliation. Something more would be required of the proponents of reform to push the state to more forceful and violent action.

Each side was therefore involved in long-term petitioning of the state primarily because neither possessed the force finally to settle the issue. Although it took persistent lobbying to achieve a salience of violence in the seventeenth-century Muscovite state—that is to say, the ‘jumping’ of violence from one level

7

to another of state repression—occurred more quickly than in the Roman case for at least two reasons.14 First, the bureaucratic distance between the central Tsarist court and local official power was not as great as in the later Roman empire. In Roman Africa there existed intermediate provincial and supra-provincial layers of government and, below this level, a large number of municipal and submunicipal institutions of government, including ubiquitous local civil courts—all of which had to be moved first before the imperial court would ordinarily entertain appeals to its level of power. This was not generally the case in Muscovy. Here even an archpriest, like Avvakum, could hope to have direct access to powerful political figures at the court.15 The Tsarist state of the time did not have great depth of administration. The court itself was very much a personalized center of power and the numbers of aristocratic servitors and bureaucrats it had to effect its wishes were relatively few (Poe 2006: 435-39). So when dissenters gained possession of regional centers of ecclesiastic power in Muscovy, namely the monasteries, they acquired threatening defenses against the Orthodox Church. Dissident centers, such as the Solovki and Paleostrov monasteries, were wealthy, landed, and powerful in their own right.16 These big monasteries had a degree of autonomy that was already vexatious to the church and which, under its new reform program, was to be restrained. This was surely part of the grounds for the church’s desire to acquire the help of the state, but it was a reason that appealed to the interests of the state as well.

As the state engaged in systematic attacks on the Old Believers, the ideals of a hardened asceticism, personified, say, by the monk Kapiton, and of martyrdom came to the fore. Faced with the intransigent figure of the martyr, the Orthodox Church found itself lacking the instruments of force to ensure the elimination of the new threats to its authority. Early on, therefore, its officials, like the Metropolitan Ilarion of Riazan, began a campaign of warning government authorities that the dissenters represented a threat to the state, and not just to the church (Vernadsky 1969: 697, citing Pascal 1938/1969: 367).

They are trying to escape the Antichrist and his precursors [meaning the Tsar, the Patriarch, and their officials]. They utter abominations against the Tsar which may not be repeated. They

8

announce that the end of the world is to take place this year… they urge people not to wait for the coming of the Antichrist, but to starve themselves to death. Many men, women and girls have thus perished.

As early as 1665-66, isolated groups of Old Believers, feeling that they had no way out, began taking their own lives by burning themselves to death.17 When the archpriest Avvakum praised these early suicides, other groups of dissidents took his comments as placing a high value on this kind of martyrdom. In the decade of the 1670s, following the great council of 1666-67 and the condemnation of dissenters, communities of Old Believers followed the example set by these first groups and took their resistance to the point of self-killing, not infrequently, it seems, in acts of fiery self-immolation. Whatever other factors might have been involved, it was the great church council of 1666-67 that finally delegitimized the status of the ‘rebels’ and provided the Tsarist government with acceptable grounds on which to send military expeditions against large centers of resistance, such as the monks and their supporters established in the Solovki Monastery in the far north, on an island off the coast of the White Sea. The state’s position was now defined in such a way that the rejectionist responses of the monks ‘left the authorities with no choice but to accept a humiliating setback to use force.’18 But this must be seen against a long backdrop of internal quarreling within the church in which churchmen who were hostile to the monks at Solovki, including Nikon (in the 1640s, long before he became Patriarch), had been feeding information to state authorities about intolerable acts of dissidence, including the sexual abuse of youths, in the northern outpost (Michels 1992a: 8-10). It is important to emphasize that the inhabitants of the Solovki monastery did not initially see things in this way. In their petitions to the Tsar, they emphasized their complete traditional orthodoxy. They insisted that they were following both apostolic tradition and the religious beliefs and practices of their forefathers. From their perception, no state intervention was even remotely necessary. Perceived threats to state power are just as evident in the modern case. Janet Reno, the Attorney General of the United States in 1993, stated that once

9

federal agents had been killed and wounded at Waco, the government could not back down.19 Any serious armed resistance to initial state intrusions triggered automatic salience within the substructures of the modern state. But how did the parties reach this fatal point in March of 1993? The incident at Waco is too well known to need much by way of introduction, but a brief sketch of some of the background to the events in 1993 might be useful. The Davidians were a splinter group who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, under the leadership of one Victor Houteff, had separated themselves from the main Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and established an independent center at Mount Carmel, outside Waco, Texas.20 One of the main types of crises faced by this group from the 1950s to 1980s were ones of leadership succession. The first was created by the death of Houteff, in 1955, when leadership passed to his wife Florence. When the great event of the Second Coming of Christ failed to happen on 22 April 1959, according to Mrs. Houteff’s prediction, another split occurred. A majority of the Davidians chose to follow a new convert, Ben Roden, and came to be labelled the ‘Branch’ Davidians. On Roden’s death in 1978, leadership passed to his wife Lois. Three years later, in 1981, Vernon Howell, who later renamed himself David Koresh, joined the group.

At this point events occurred that eventually led to the involvement of the armed forces federal state. A split developed within the Branch Davidians between David Koresh, who had a particularly close relationship with Lois Roden—an ‘informal marriage’—and her son, George Roden, who regarded himself as the natural successor to his mother’s power and position. The contradictory situation that emerged in this struggle by early 1987 was that Koresh had control of the people while Roden had control of the property (Newport, 2006: 194). The battle over church possessions culminated in the use of firearms in a gunfight that took place at the Mount Carmel complex on 3 November 1987. This violence, however, was of a low-level kind that was usually dealt with by local police and courts, as it was in this case. Koresh and his followers were arrested by officers of the McLennan County Sheriff’s department and charged with attempted murder (Tabor & Gallagher, 1995: 40-43). Much to the chagrin of the local law enforcement officials, at the trial in April 1988, the jury could not make a decision on guilt or innocence, and Koresh went free. By

10

the following year, he had established undisputed leadership over the whole group and control of the New Mount Carmel center.

It is important to note that agencies of the state had already been central to the whole of this local drama, including David Koresh’s final success in asserting his claim to the property at Mount Carmel. In March 1988, state authorities further intervened with the arrest and jailing of George Roden on charges of contempt of court; they later had him placed in an insane asylum, where he died in 1998 (Newport, 2006: 195). The succession of David Koresh, a complete outsider, to paramount power within the group in the late-1980s, was an internal conflict within the Branch Davidian community, it was one that involved intense dislikes and violent confrontations and involved agencies of the state. These internecine struggles produced deeply embittered splinter groups whose members either left or were cast out of the main group of Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel. The important point that this history makes is that wherever the state was present, even at it most elementary levels, it was already involved in this prehistory, as it were, of what would later happen. Long before the federal government agencies of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (henceforth, BATF) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (henceforth, FBI) became involved, secular state power was already implicated in the struggles within the Branch Davidian community.

What can be more easily seen in the much better documented modern incident is a process of which more obscure origins of a phenomenon can be discerned more readily than they can in the cases of the premodern states. The mode by which this happened was by the replication of government-group relations that involved the competitive bidding for the state’s power even at the most elemental local level of state power. The gunfight of early November 1987 involved members of the local Sheriff’s Department of McLennan County, Texas. But appeals to state power actually predated the gunfire incident, and they, too, must have influenced the attitudes of local authorities to the Branch Davidians. In an internal confrontation redolent of the finest wonderworking of a Simon Magus, George Roden stage managed a dramatic showdown with David Koresh to demand a divine demonstration of who had the right to leadership. In October 1987, Roden had disinterred the long-dead corpse of a member of the church, one

11

Anna Hughes, and had publicly challenged Koresh to bring her back to life (Newport, 2006: 195; Tabor & Gallagher, 2995: 43). Instead of taking the route of religious power, Koresh went to the secular authorities—to the Sheriff’s Department of McLennan County—to file charges of corpse abuse against Roden.

Because the state was always a potential player at every level down to the most local, a potentially fatal triangle of force was already being forged at a very early stage of intra-communal conflict. And in this record of minute beginnings, we can see that one kind of salience found in the premodern states—indeed, precisely as found at the heart of the incident at Timgad where decades of the involvement of local municipal officials and courts had preceded the siege—was also present here. When the members of one side reached the upper limits of their coercive force—in the Waco case small fire-arms, semi-automatic rifles, an Uzi submachine gun, and the power to raise the dead—they realized that they did not have the resources in their hands to impose a final settlement on their sectarian enemies. They had reached an upper ceiling of power. To raise the sum of force at their disposal to a higher level, they had to appeal to sources of greater power and authority that they could recruit for their side—in this case those in the hands of the state represented by the Sheriff’s office of McLennan County. Such early appeals to secular authority might later be portrayed as a vile breaking of the rules of the internal sacred game, hypocritical actions to which the original appellants would rather not admit. In the case of the early Muscovite dissidents and the Christian dissenters in north Africa, however, as at Waco, these primordial solicitations did exist. If the power was present, everyone was playing the ‘state game.’

Decision Making The step-by-step process by which the central state became involved with heavy force varied considerably in the mechanics of each case, but some broad patterns are discernable. Despite the close involvement of the states with their respective churches, and the integration of ideologies and interests in both premodern states, there appears to have been a real hesitancy to involve themselves in extreme measures of direct violent enforcement in sectarian

12

disputes. The siege at Timgad in 419 represents a kind of response in which the state’s armed forces were deployed against religious dissidents not in a minor policing role (in which they were frequently found), but in mounting a direct armed attack on a group of believers, the consequences of which were likely to be deadly for large numbers of them. Similar lethal state sieges of dissenting groups are well documented in seventeenth-century Muscovy. A period of brief respite of attacks on Old Believers was brought to an end by the Ukaz of December 1684 when the central Tsarist government issued orders to its agents to hunt down all Raskolniki to compel them to re-enter the Orthodox Church by means of forced rebaptism. By this point in the conflict, the dissenters were armed with a long tradition of literature, a history of martyrdom in which they were able to appeal to the ‘heroic resistance’ of the ‘martyrs’ at the Solovki Monastery. The resulting siege of the monastery at Paleostrovsk on the shores of Lake Onega reflects a scenario that was to be replayed time and again in the new atmosphere of heightened apocalyptic expectations. The incidents of resistance led to typical, and lethal, finales that ended in fiery conflagration. A local group of armed dissidents, at least some of whom were led by the deacon Ignatii, had taken over the Paleostrov Monastery in January 1687. They threw out the monks and established themselves in their place. In response to appeals from the Metropolitan of Novgorod, troops of the Tsarist state surrounded the compound. According to state sources—from which elements of bias are not absent—it is reported that the dissidents were apparently prepared to set fire to the chapel in which they were hold up. When the troops finally assaulted the complex, a fire broke out. On 4 March 1687, Ignatii died along with a large number of his followers. As far as prior experience counted, it is interesting to see that Ignatii had escaped from the Solovki Monastery just before its fall.21 In the same year, another monk, named Primin, gathered his followers into a complex on the shores of the White Sea. Once again, the imperial troops of the Tsarist state surrounded the compound. Once again, a fire broke out. The believers are represented by the authorities as having burned themselves to death in a great conflagration in which thousands perished rather than surrender to the besieging forces and to the dictates of the Orthodox Church.

13

Dramatic re-enactments of earlier traumatic events continued to mark the resistance. Just so, dissenters occupied the Paleostrov Monastery in 1688, and the government sent in troops again. At first, a strategy of negotiation was attempted by sending in an agent who tried to persuade the dissidents that their beliefs were in error and that they ought to surrender. This failed, and in mid-October, the local military commander, Anieki Portnovskii, attempted an initial attack on the compound. The defenders, steeling themselves for martyrdom, put up what resistance they could. After the attacking force took unexpectedly heavy casualties, Portnovskii was forced to back off. He waited and requested more men and cannon. The defenders, realizing their desperate situation, withdrew into the church and, it is said, were prepared to immolate themselves. On 23 November 1688, fire broke out in the building. It is said that one and a half thousand of them perished in the flames that consumed the church. And so it went on. In the flood of self-immolations that took place between the beginning of the Raskol and 1689, the year that marked the end of systematic military persecution by the state, it has been estimated that some 20,000 dissidents burned themselves alive.22 The question is how did the late Roman imperial state and the seventeenth-century Tsarist state reach the point where these kinds of direct armed interventions were deemed to be ‘necessary’? In both cases, it is important to note that the state relied on the issuance of secular laws to justify their use of armed force.23 The violent actions in 419 at Timgad can be traced back to imperial decrees issued by the emperor Honorius and the imperial court in 412 and 414. In the case of Tsarist Muscovy, the actions relied, similarly, on a series of imperial decrees that were issued in the late 1660s. It is important to note that these large premodern states drew a line between a public sphere of authority and that of the church that was strong enough to require the deliberate passing of special laws under which its agents were enabled to act. Equally important, however, is the fact that the division was sufficiently different and marked that the measures required to move the premodern state to this point were relatively long and arduous. In both cases, these efforts were marked by at least two processes. First, there was a long period in which various high-ranking officials and superior levels of the state had to be lobbied directly, sometimes intensely, to urge them to

14

use violent force against one’s religious opponents. Second, in both cases, the premodern states were moved to action only after the holding of a great church conference or council on the matter. Such councils issued formal judgments that formally condemned the dissidents and in this way justified violent repression of them by state authorities. In the case of Africa in the later Roman empire, despite all earlier contingent circumstances, it was the authority of the church council held at Carthage in the year 411 that pronounced the Catholic Church to be the sole legitimate church in Africa and ‘the Donatists’ to be an illicit sect, indeed formally heretical, that platformed the imperial laws of 412 and 414. But it must be remembered that Catholic bishops had spent a good two decades, and more, intensely lobbying imperial officials and the court at Ravenna, to reach this point. Similarly, in seventeenth-century Muscovy it was the great church council of 1666-67 that formed the watershed in terms of the direct military involvement of the Tsarist government in the military repression of the dissenting elements in the Orthodox Church (Bushkovitch, 1995b). As in the case of the Donatists in north Africa, the forum that provided both the necessary focus for the senior officials of the government and the formal enunciation of the ‘wrongness’ of the opponents that gave the state grounds for action, was a great church conference. In both premodern states, these church councils represented the culmination of a long period of petitioning the state concerning the threat posed by religious dissidents. It was not without purpose that the final session of the 1666 council not only excoriated the Old Believers as ignorant, but also labeled them as dangerous, citing incidents of their violence as evidence in support of their deserved repression. Most importantly, the final session of the council in 1667 that anathemized the dissidents also formally made them liable to the civil law for their ecclesiastical crimes, thus making them subject to trial and corporal punishment by the secular state. This action made the Raskol ‘real’ in the sense that ‘the Old Believers were now to be considered enemies of the state as well’ (Lupinin, 1984: 168-72, quotation at 172). In the Waco siege, similarly, it was not matters of internal religious dissident that furnished the immediate formal grounds for the involvement of the federal government of the United States. It was, rather, assertions about the

15

possession of improperly registered firearms, or the possession of elements of weapons that could be turned into illegal firearms or explosives.24 Although other related matters were averred to in the warrants, the sum and substance of the formal charges were secular in kind.25 The charges seem to have derived, ultimately, from the zealous pursuit of the Branch Davidians by members of the McLennan County Sheriff’s department that had failed to convict Koresh and his followers in the trial that followed the 1987 gunfight.26 These minor happenings, including the delation of information about suspicious deliveries of armaments, provided the local sheriff’s office with grounds to involve the BATF.27 This was one part of an internally state-produced salience. The local authorities, having failed to bring Koresh and his followers to heel, pushed one level up to involve superior force on their side. Even though the information furnished the formal justification for the salience, there was surely something bigger that motivated all of these actions. The arms charges have the air of a cause that is not fully sufficient, especially since other concerns were given such repeated emphasis. The way that the warrant for the illegal possession of improperly registered weapons was served would indicate that the BATF never intended simply to present a simple search and arrest warrant. Rather, from the beginning, it made elaborate preparations to launch an organized armed assault—a ‘dynamic entry’—on the Mount Carmel compound. In addition to reports about possible illegal weapons, there was a different and complex set of other matters that affected the actions of the BATF, but the main ones can be traced back to the Branch Davidians who had separated themselves from David Koresh, often with considerable hostility and bitterness. At this point, the one source of salience fed into the other. The internal process of the transfer of violence to a higher level state agency had been caused, in part, by conflicts inside the religious community. Parallel but separate streams of salient producing behavior began to feed on each other. Among the dissidents within the religious community, the persistent lobbying of government authorities by some of them, including one Marc Breault, had a role in the decisions made by the BATF.28 He and other dissenters from David Koresh’s church had started a purposeful campaign to convince state authorities that Koresh and others at Mount Carmel were engaged in illicit activities. As early as September of 1990,

16

they had involved not only the same local state authorities already involved with the internal disputes—the McLennan County Sheriff’s Department—but also officials from the state of Texas and federal officials, including the FBI. Although these initial prompts were disregarded or rejected by the state authorities, persistent lobbying paid off by March and April of 1992 with more successful responses from state authorities (the Texas Department of Human Services) and from federal ones: members of Congress and the FBI. Although these investigations, too, were finally closed, a new avenue opened with the interests expressed by another federal agency, the BATF. Interviewed by the BATF in late December of 1992 and in January of 1993, Breault and his supporters continued to insist on damaging claims that were much broader than the specifics of the illegal possession of arms. These were the same charges that had already been ventilated with other state authorities that portrayed David Koresh as guilty of aberrant social practices, including multiple marriages and illegal sexual relations with minors.29 Although these problems did not fall under the jurisdiction of the BATF, they provided a useful and ever-present background in reports about the ‘bad situation’ at Mount Carmel.

These oral reports, even if from self-interested sectarian hostiles, seemed credible to state officials precisely because the informants had been members of the group and had been participants in its rituals and its daily operations. For our purposes, it is only necessary to note that these other matters of sexual deviance were included in agent Davy Aguilera’s ‘Probable Cause Affidavit’ that was part of the search warrant signed by Dennis Green, the United States Magistrate Judge, on 25 February, 1993.30 In short, the hostility of members of this anti-Koresh faction of Branch Davidians ‘shaped… the agent’s expectations and opinions.’31 These other matters did indeed form a broader part of the justification for the violently aggressive pursuit of the firearms charges—charges that were under the jurisdiction of the BATF. The frightening picture of the Mount Carmel community as a sinkhole of deviancy was ‘confirmed’ for the public not by these covert governmental communications, but by a series of articles in the local newspaper, the Waco Tribune-Herald, published as a series on ‘The Sinful Messiah.’32 From here, these hostile views quickly spread to the national media and became part of public knowledge of ‘the cult’ that arguably

17

colored further actions towards the people in the compound in the period of the prolonged 51-day siege in which public pressure was clearly felt by government officials.

More serious grounds for the use of large-scale violent force were finally provided for the state when, in the attack-cum-serving-of-warrant on the Mount Carmel compound on the morning of 28 February 1993, grandiosely, if somewhat strangely dubbed Operation Trojan Horse, four BATF agents were killed and fifteen more were wounded by gunfire coming from the defenders inside. This violent incident by itself led to further state salience. From 1 March onward, the power to direct government actions at the site could be—and was—shifted to the superior authority of the FBI. There now ensued a fifty-one day siege of the compound. During the siege, no fewer than 700-800 state enforcement personnel were involved, including men from the BATF, the Texas Rangers, the Texas National Guard, and the U.S. Army. The lower levels of the federal state went so far as to manage and escape from the restrictions of posse comitatus in order to acquire heavy federal weaponry.33 The grounds claimed were so adventitious that one must suspect an accepted overriding sentiment for granting the exemption.34 The attack equipment involved types of military armaments normally only available to the federal state, including two Blackhawk attack helicopters, four Bradley armored fighting vehicles, two M-60 tanks, and chemical reagents, including CS gas. Exactly as in the siege of the Donatist compound at Timgad, during the course of negotiations at Waco the state officials in charge of the police and the military forces surrounding Mount Carmel sought the advice of external technical authorities. Given the dominant ideologies of the time, during the sieges of the great monasteries in Muscovy and the basilica at Timgad, the outside advisers were religious authorities. In the case of Timgad, the imperial commander Dulcitius sought the advice of Augustine, the Catholic bishop of Hippo Regius, who assured him of the madness or insania of those hold up inside the basilica. In late twentieth-century America, the experts were not so much religious experts of the soul as different kinds of mental specialists—doctors of psychiatry and professors of psycholinguistics. These authorities provided the required ‘insights’ that the leader was a ‘psychopath,’ suffering

18

from ‘rampant, morbidly virulent paranoia.’35 In both cases, the analyses provided by the requisite technical authorities were interpreted as giving a ‘green light’ to the enforcers on the ground. The second element that was present in both these cases (but not clearly attested, to the best of my knowledge, at Solovetsk or Paleostrovsk) was the accusation that the inhabitants of the sacred compounds were being held against their will as hostages by their religious leaders—a fact vigorously denied both by the dissident bishop at Timgad and by David Koresh at Waco. In the final attack on the Mount Carmel compound on the morning of 19 April 1993, a fire broke out that quickly consumed the main buildings. Although evidence proffered by the state indicates a self-immolation planned by the leaders inside the compound, the subsequent rhetorical construction of the fiery conflagration was one of denial by both sides. In the fire that burned their last refuge to the ground, seventy-four Branch Davidians died, including twenty-one of the children whom state officials had set as their aim to protect. Imperial Hesitations

Most often, states have hesitated to fulfill the specific requests or demands for violent action urged on them by church factions in their midst. One sign of this wariness is the special way in which state enforcement is framed. In these cases, governments often use special officials, local plenipotentiary agents who are directly answerable to the topmost power holders in the state. So the late Roman emperors appointed special agents, tribuni et notarii, to carry out the acts of violent enforcement. One of them, Flavius Marcellinus, presided over the great church conference in 411. Another of them, Dulcitius, was the official in charge of enforcing the laws against the dissidents. In fulfilling his mission to seize dissident basilicas in the late 410s, Dulcitius had instituted a campaign of enforcement in southern Numidia. What was happening ‘on the ground’ in these individual seizures, we do not know. In the Timgad case, we are fortunate to know some of the important details about the siege from the writings of Augustine, the Catholic bishop of Hippo Regius—most specifically, from an exchange of letters between himself and the imperial enforcer, the tribune Dulcitius. We know that Dulcitius met with determined resistance from

19

Gaudentius, the dissident bishop of Timgad. The dissident bishop was imitating the examples of self-sacrifice he surely knew from the martyr narratives of his own church.36 Faced with the imperial order to surrender his basilica to government authorities, he had barricaded himself in his church and had threatened to surrender his life along with those of his parishioners rather than hand over his church to the military.

Like the taking of the compound at Waco or the dissident armed monasteries of Muscovy, the seizure of the basilica complex at Timgad would have been a difficult undertaking. The city of Timgad itself was a great regular-planned Roman colonial settlement that dominated the southwestern frontier of Numidia. The basilica had been constructed over several preceding generations on a rise of land overlooking the southwestern quarter of the colony and dominated the southern skyline of the town. Within its impressive outer circuit walls, the basilica area comprised, in addition to the huge church itself, a large open forecourt, a baptistery, a special residence for the bishop, and a host of ancillary reception facilities and storage rooms (Courtois 1951: 72-75; Albertini 1939). Not only did the church present a looming silhouette, it was the single largest structure in the entire city. The storming of such a complex and its potential destruction in the process—especially if those barricaded within it carried out their ostensible threat to fire the place—would have had considerable social and political repercussions. As with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians at Waco, the constant fearful specter that was raised with state officials by their sectarian opponents was that of mass suicide, including self-immolation. In the Waco case, these claims clearly originated with members of the hostile Breault faction who ventilated them with both state authorities and with public media for about a year preceding the final assault by the federal forces (Hall 2002: 156-59).

As with David Koresh’s attitudes, however, the actions that the dissident bishop Gaudentius was actually willing to take are somewhat unclear, since the motives and aims ascribed to him impute a more belligerent and aggressive behavior than might actually have been the case. Once again, according to the hostile sources, the official and Catholic ones, that were feeding both public opinion and official powers, Gaudentius was threatening to burn himself and his

20

congregation alive inside the church in what was claimed to be a typical ‘Donatist’ act of self-immolation. The mis-en-scène can be understood from Augustine’s summation, written some seven or eight years after the event (Augustine, Against Gaudentius, 1.1 = CSEL 53: 201; the same view in his Retractions 2.59.86 = CCL 57: 137).

Gaudentius, bishop of the Donatists at Thamugadi, was threatening to burn himself alive in his church along with some of the demented persons who were attached to him. The vir spectabilis, tribune and notary, Dulcitius, to whom the most pious emperor had given the task of enforcing his laws for the sake of bringing Unity to a completion, was acting with gentleness (as was only right, of course) towards these madmen.

If all that we had to assess the situation at Timgad was this brief of Augustine’s, we would be right to deduce a deliberate plan by the dissident bishop Gaudentius to burn himself and his followers alive in his church. But the details of the correspondence to which Augustine avers, and the negotiations between Gaudentius and the imperial official Dulcitius, some of which survive, reveal a rather different story. In Gaudentius’ first letter to the tribune, the bishop courteously addressed the imperial official as ‘Your Faithfulness’ and pointed out what he believed to be errors in the tribune’s theological discussions with him. In his first communications with the dissident bishop, Dulcitius had proffered a possible ‘Christian solution’ to the crisis. He had advised Gaudentius ‘to flee persecution,’ that is, to walk away from the confrontation and to abandon his basilica. In his reply, Gaudentius tried to explain the meaning of actions taken by himself and his partisans barricaded in the basilica as he himself understood them (Augustine, Against Gaudentius 1.6.7 = CSEL 53: 204).

We, the living, shall remain in this church as long as it might be pleasing to God, a church which in the name of God and of his Christ—as even you yourself have said—has always been crowded in worship of the truth. As is only right for a family of God, we

21

shall set a measure to the end of our life here in the army camp of our Lord—but only on this condition: only if you begin to use violence [against us] will this then happen. No one is so demented that he would rush to death with nothing compelling him to that end.

In uttering the words ‘here in the army camp of the Lord,’ Gaudentius

was echoing the words of Cyprian, enunciated over a century and half earlier to a fellow African bishop. He was using the phrase as an example of the kind of exhortations that would be needed by Christians who were facing an impending apocalyptic battle with the forces of persecution (Cyprian, To Fortunatus, 2 = CCL 3: 183). This attitude to taking one’s own life, as seen through Gaudentius’ eyes, reflected a willingness to die if the forces of authority should launch an assault on the church in which the Christians had gathered. Gaudentius does not envisage himself or his flock as deliberate provocateurs or as violently aggressive persons who were going out of their way to challenge or to confront imperial authorities. There is no sign that the Christians inside the basilica with him were actually going to set fire to the church. More probably, they expected that firebrands would be used by their attackers—as had happened in other attacks on basilicas in Africa—and they were willing to die a death of virtual self-immolation in the process.37 The elements of hesitation in the actions of state officials therefore centered around the known effects of mass self-killing—which they both feared and preemptively imputed to the besieged as a tactic that they would use. Closely allied to this, as we can see from the negotiations, was the claim that many of the Christians in the basilica were being held as hostages against their will—a claim that was probably largely untrue and which was stridently denied by the bishop.

In a similar fashion, the suggestions about a fanatical suicidal final stand at Waco were accepted by federal authorities.38 But the fatal assertions had been fed to government officials and the popular media by the sectarian opponents of David Koresh, who constantly played on the apparition of second ‘Jonestown’ mass suicide (Hall 2005: 156). State officials were alarmed by the prospect. When specifically asked about this matter, however, Koresh explicitly stated that such a

22

violent finale was not at all in his plans for the people in the Mount Carmel compound.39 The problem, as with the so-called Donatists hold up in the basilica complex at Timgad and as with many Raskol communities in seventeenth-century Muscovy, is that this was probably the wrong question to ask and the wrong concept with which to work. These kinds of holy deaths, configured as a type of martyrdom, have a mental firewall built between them and the secular concept of suicide. In saying that no one was planning to commit suicide, Koresh was probably speaking a truth that he believed. Gaudentius was no less willing than Augustine to castigate as mad or deranged persons who would gratuitously kill themselves. In the conclusion of his initial letter to Dulcitius, he was at pains to emphasize the completely voluntary nature of the commitment of the Christians who were with him in the basilica (Augustine, Against Gaudentius, 1.7.8 = CSEL 53: 205).

As for those who are with us, I call upon God as my witness, as well as on all of his sacraments, that I have exhorted and that I have urged with the greatest vehemence possible that anyone who has the desire to leave can say so publicly and without any fear. Nor would we be able to restrain such persons against their will, we who, of all people, have learned that one must not force anyone to believe in God.

But the imperial official who was conducting negotiations at the site, suitably primed by Augustine and other sources hostile to the dissidents, felt that he was faced with a volatile situation in which a bishop and his followers who were ‘being held hostage’ by him, and barricaded in the basilica, presented the threat of a mass suicide. The prospect had certainly rattled his composure and had caused him to have second thoughts. Doubtless, as with the federal officials at Waco and as with the Muscovite officials at Paleostrovsk and Solovetskii, Dulcitius had had orders to the effect that he was to effect the closure of the situation but without ‘doing anything that would provoke mass suicide.’40

As at Waco, the extremity of the response of the besieged was largely of the government’s own making. Gaudentius and his flock at Timgad had every

23

reason to view their situation in terms of desperate extremes. In his first official decree issued against them, Dulcitius had used strong and frightening language: ‘Let them [i.e. the persons hold up in the basilica] be well aware,’ he announced, ‘that they will pay the debt that they owe to the law with their own deaths.’ The dissidents in the basilica not unnaturally interpreted this decree to mean that he was threatening to put to death those who would be captured in the assault on their church (Augustine, Letter, 204.3 = CSEL 57: 318-19). In his later letter to Dulcitius, Augustine attempted to re-read entirely the harshness of these words, telling the tribune what it was that he must have meant. Of course, he says to the official, you didn’t really mean to say that you would kill them—after all, you were not armed with the ius gladii or the power to execute by the terms of the law under which you are operating. What you really meant to say, says Augustine, is that these people were going to bring richly deserved self-inflicted deaths upon themselves (Augustine, Letter, 204.3 = CSEL 57: 319). The fear that the people in the basilica might engage in an act of self-immolation was not completely without grounds. Such cases were ‘known’ from both earlier and in later times—like that in sixth-century Phrygia involving remnants of a Montanist church who took refuge in one of their own churches and, rather than surrender to authorities under the terms of Justinian’s anti-heretical laws, sacrificed their own lives in a fiery conflagration.41

By this point, however, important elements of the salience were now lodged internally, within government apparatuses whose personnel interpreted this kind of resistance as threatening to the stability of the state. Much the same response can be seen in the case of the Tsarist state. The reason for the Russian imperial government’s concern with the phenomenon of religious dissidence was not just the objections raised by its own Orthodox Church, but the fact that the dissent was interpreted as a widespread rejection of the legitimacy of the state itself (Crummey, 1970: xiii).

The course of the movement’s history, moreover, reveals almost as much about the policies and administrative methods of the imperial government as about the aspirations and achievements of

24

its own members. Old Belief was a photographic negative of official society.

Central to the creation of a mythology of resistance among the dissidents was the government’s eight-year siege of the large monastic complex at Solovetskii, located in the extreme north of Muscovy on an island in the White Sea (Vernadsky, 1969: 708-09). The monastery itself was a kind of embodied reflection of the marginal position of the Old Believers in this period since the site itself was literally on the frontier of the state. It was for this reason that the monastery had been constructed like a fort and was furnished with canon and gunpowder, as well as large stores of provisions, that would allow it to hold out for long periods of time against foreign raiders (Lupinin, 1984: 152). The monastery always had a considerable degree of de facto autonomy. In this context, existing grievances and others sources of discontent with Moscow took on added significance, especially in a situation where the government was attempting to make more uniform its control over land and taxes. It was the skillful manipulation of the state’s own program by one of the church factions that compelled the imperial court to act. But the court only reacted with real hesitation. The persons conducting the operations must have sensed that there was not any intrinsically important interest of the state in them. The actions of the government, especially the systematic deployment of its instruments of force, could be interpreted as having ‘turned the rebellion from a purely religious one into a total one’ (Lupinin, 1984: 152); or, perhaps, more probably, the complete reverse of this: of have taken ordinary ‘secular’ power struggles and having driven them to the extreme of religion, of apocalyptic expectation and suicidal martyrdom (Michels 1992a: 11-13). These were the bigger risks, the greater dangers that the court might well have sensed. Concerns over the appropriateness of what the state was doing were surely responsible in part for the hesitation that we witness in the government’s actions. In this case, the Tsarist regime did not wish to stage a full frontal military assault on a holy monastic compound. From the very beginning, orders were given to the local army commander, Volokhov, not to fire on the monastery, probably in the hope that a prolonged siege would lead to the surrender of those

25

who were hold up inside. This tactic, however, led to an even longer standoff which cast further doubt on the effectiveness and legitimacy of the state. In 1672, after four long years of siege, a new commander was appointed to replace Volokhov, with instructions to apply greater pressure on the monks. But tightening the noose only worsened conditions. The monks reacted in the next year, 1673, by taking a step that they had never previously considered: the outright rejection of the authority and legitimacy of the state by refusing to intone prayers for the Tsar and his family. This action, in turn, forced Tsar Aleksei’s hand. He now proceeded to a summary demand for an end to the siege at the monastery. Even so, this goal was not achieved until three years later, in 1676, and then only by the betrayal of a secret way into the complex. All but fourteen of those in the monastery at the time were killed by the besieging government forces (Crummey, 1970: 20). Historians and Explanations States that contain disputatious autonomous religious organizations are open to persuasive and successful lobbying by sectarian interests to acquire the resources of force that they themselves ordinarily lack. Such lobbying is usually driven, in the first instance, by dimorphic conflict within the religious community; one or both sides within it engage in intense self-interested petitioning of state authorities precisely in order to acquire the secular force and powers of physical compulsion which they themselves do not have. But why do states permit themselves to be so lobbied, often, it might appear, against their own self interest—or, at least, to no manifest advantage? Or do governments have latent, less obvious reasons for allowing themselves to be so persuaded? As any state undergoes the expansion or contraction of its resources and authority, it almost necessarily experiences variable relations with other corporate bodies in its sphere, including religious ones. The resurgent late Roman imperial state that had to incorporate new Christian communities was emerging from its time of troubles: the so-called Third Century Crisis and its immediate aftermath. Imperial Muscovy, with the new Romanov dynasty, was attempting to found its authority in the aftermath of its Time of Troubles. One reason for the Russian state’s concern with any major signs of dissidence was that the newly born

26

Romanov dynasty was engaged in a long-term program of consolidating state resources which required not only the uniformity and expansion of its instruments of control, like the bureaucracy and the civil law, but also of its armed forces. All of these sectors of the state experienced major build-ups throughout the course of the seventeenth century.42 What both states manifestly wanted and encouraged was a symbiotic church that would mirror the state’s greater centralization and uniformity. Any real deviation from this conformity could be interpreted as a threat to the program of state authority. I say could, since the general response of these states was to keep at arm’s length the sort of strong intervention in religious conflicts that would require armed force, which its managers conceived as reserved for more serious secular threats. Hard coercive intervention against groups like the Donatists, the Raskolniki, or the Branch Davidians required that the state be persuaded to this end. Another small sign of this element of distancing is the geopolitically peripheral location of the incidents of violent enforcement. When the late Roman state attempted heavy enforcement against Christians barricaded in basilicas, as at Milan (Mediolanum) in 386, we see that the closer such actions were to the imperial center, the less likely it was that they would be pressed to the point of a full-scale attack involving violent force. Successful negotiations were preferred. At Timgad, at Paleostrovsk (and at Solovetsk), as at Waco, on the other hand, hyperviolent action was out on the periphery as far as the state was concerned. Almost by definition, their frontier locations had pre-programmed these places as potential sites of dissidence.43

What is reasonably certain in all three cases is that the extremity of the violence that occurred would not have happened had it not been for the intervention of the state. The deployment of the government’s much superior, concentrated, and lethal instruments of force caused an equally extreme response (Hall 2002: 166).

It seems incontrovertible that the fire that did occur [i.e. at Waco] would not have happened in the absence of the FBI assault. Even if the FBI assault was not the sole cause of the fire, the assault was an antecedent condition causally necessary for any explanation of the

27

subsequent fire, the deaths that ensued, and the obliteration of Mount Carmel.

The religious opponents of the besieged groups: the Catholics in Africa, the Orthodox in Muscovy, and the outcast Branch Davidians did not themselves possess the instruments of violent power to produce such extreme outcomes. It is improbable that they alone would ever have been able to create the violent situations witnessed at Timgad, Paleostrovsk, or Waco. It is for this reason that one ecclesiastical faction set about systematically lobbying the state to get it to do their ‘dirty work.’ The question that arises is: Why did the governments concerned respond? In all three cases, it was never once averred that there was a fundamental issue of religious belief as such that was at stake, much less one that should concern the state. It is well known that Augustine, the most famous and effective opponent of the Donatists, repeatedly stated that there were no significant theological differences between the Catholics and their sectarian enemies. Similarly, the foundations of Old Belief in seventeenth-century Muscovy were rooted in a defense of traditional institutions, rituals, and ceremonials, and not in any basic differences of theology.44 The opponents of David Koresh at Waco were opposed to him for matters of organization, succession to power, legitimacy of leadership, and social control over believers, but not, substantially, over issues of belief. In all cases, what was at stake were issues of inside power. So the problem remains: Why—or perhaps better, How—did state-level governments become implicated in power struggles that ostensibly had little to do with their own interests? Because of the evident nature of power in these connections, the interests of the state have been sought not in any of its interests in matters of theology, but rather in background social forces that ‘really’ informed the disputes. For late fourth century north Africa, the usual claim is that the dissident church was subversively linked with socially disruptive forces that were of a concern to the Roman state—that the so-called Donatist Church was, as one well-known historian has expressed it, ‘a movement of social protest’ directed against the wealthy landlord class and their interests. Much the same kinds of argument have been proffered for seventeenth-century Muscovy. It has been claimed, for

28

instance, that the ‘real danger’ for the government was not as much any matter of theology as it was the ‘sympathy and support’ that the Old Believers were acquiring in the society at large (Vernadsky 1969: 696). To make this connection seems both sensible and persuasive. There is little doubt that the measures taken by the new Romanov dynasty in terms of organization, bureaucratization, the enforced centralization of its institutions, the increase in the extent and scale of its armed force, and the reforms in the tax and currency systems necessary to this new infrastructure, caused considerable social distress. It is not accidental that seventeenth-century Muscovy was marked by violent movements of peasant and rural protest, sometimes as great as anything witnessed in the preceding Time of Troubles. One of these revolts, that of Stepan (Stenka) Razin, took place in 1670-71, right in the midst of the most intense period of the emergence of Old Belief and in the immediate aftermath of the council of 1666-68 that anathemized the Raskolniki. Why not connect the two? The problem for the historian is that this neat idea does not seem to work. In the cases of Roman Africa and of Tsarist Muscovy, indeed, there are considerable difficulties in making the general ideological interest explanation stick, either as a legitimate claim of the secular states at the time or as an historical explanation used by modern scholars. Such explanations do not work as more (at best) than background information, since the Waco’s, Timgad’s and Paleostrovsk’s were unusual even in their own times and, in general, they are rare or extreme happenings of their kind. It is true that possible connections with the general concerns of the state can be seen, for example, in north Africa. In this case, the critical elements that finally persuaded the late Roman imperial state to act had less to do with elements of Christian belief as such than they did with the continued petitioning of various levels of the Roman state by the Catholic church, from the 390s, if not earlier, about the presence of armed gangs connected with the dissident church—often designated by the technical term ‘circumcellions’—that were claimed to be a serious threat to social order in the African provinces of the empire. The problem, as evident in this case, is that most of the evidence for both north Africa and Muscovy reposes on statements and claims made by the hostile lobbyists who were the very ones attempting to

29

persuade the government that their religious opponents were linked with instances of violent political insurrection. The weight of all research done since the late 1970s for Roman Africa has demonstrated conclusively that the evidence for peasant revolts or rural rebellions in the late fourth-century is at best slight, and that the hard evidence that would link the so-called Donatists to movements of social protest is almost non-existent. Far from identifying with the forces of social dissent, the local leaders of the dissident church tended to side with the existing forces of law and order. Indeed, the one hard datum on an apprehended rural jacquerie, an upheaval in south-central Numidia in the early 340s, which was headed by two ‘Leaders of the Saints,’ Axido and Fasir, points in this other direction. In this violent episode, the local dissident Christian bishops did not hesitate to call on the military authorities of the Roman imperial state—including the general commander of all Roman military forces in Africa—to use their soldiers to put down a dangerous insurrection. Far from identifying with the forces of social revindication, the leaders of the dissident church identified with the existing forces of law and order. Similarly, in the Tsarist government’s siege of the Solovki Monastery, there were later attempts by the government to justify its own actions by claims that tied the religious dissidence of the Old Believers to political dissidence that might more properly concern its mission. It was suggested that elements of Stepan Razin’s rebellion had been drifting northwards to join the religious dissidents. But there is no convincing evidence that this was so, or that such connections with secular rebellions were ever at the heart of what the monks at the Solovki Monastery were trying to achieve.

One of the better detailed analyses of the local violence connected with the occupations of monasteries in Muscovy, such as that at Paleostrovsk, has indeed demonstrated the existence of certain links with existing currents of rural violence. This violence, however, had its own secular causes, trajectories and aims, and its own history. We seem to be faced more with an occasional and fortuitous intersection of the violent actors in peasant communities with religious dissent that sometimes ended in violent confrontation than with any systemic set of connections between the two (Michels, 1992b: 213-19; 1999: 201-16). This seems also to be the case with the so-called circumcellions, and their holy leaders Axido

30

and Fasir, in fourth-century north Africa. But if no serious and real links between religious dissent and dangerous secular subversion can be demonstrated, then so what? Governments are often made up of fallible, less than brilliant humans. Perhaps their leaders believed that such links existed and they acted on belief. It is rather a matter of perceptual realities. Such seems to be the case not only at Waco, but also in late Roman north Africa and seventeenth-century Muscovy. Although there is little evidence to show that the Old Believers were connected in any special way with Stepan Razin’s rebellion, for example, there is some evidence to show that Tsar Alexei ‘feared that the Russian masses were slipping from his control’ (Bushkovitch, 1992: 71, my italics).

Sporadic and occasional connections like these, however, cannot be said to have been that obvious to the managers of state power. Being attentive to their secular advantage and alert to threats to their interests, if the dangers presented by these sectarian disputes were manifest, it is difficult to explain the central government’s general hesitation to involve itself directly in religious quarrels. The emerging Romanov dynasty in seventeenth-century Muscovy was characterized by a general reluctance to act in this fashion. The later Roman empire was no different. The emperor Arcadius, scion of the rigorously religious Theodosian dynasty, when vigorously lobbied to use government force to launch violent attacks on ‘pagan’ temples in the region of Gaza, refused to do so (Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyry of Gaza, 41 = Grégoire & Kugener 1930: 35; see Gaddis, 2005: 194, and Hahn 2004: 210-11). The people of the region, he said, were loyal and peaceful subjects and good taxpayers. Why on earth should he attack them? If the government began to terrorize them, he remarked, the result would only be an economic loss for the state. He advised, instead, a slow step-by-step process of legal and institutional intervention.45 It is this reluctant background attitude of the holders of state power that is to be noted.

This general attitude is consistent with the record of attempts and preferences by governments to negotiate their way out of potential religious confrontation. It is confirmed by the need on the part of the ecclesiastical officials in premodern states intensely to lobby courts extensively to get them to act. Despite certain apparent differences between premodern and modern states, structural similarities remain. In the religious empires of the later Roman empire

31

and Romanov Muscovy, the official charge of heresy or schism was a formal one that could be used to mobilize state action, even if infrequently and with difficulty. The modern secular state could not be so mobilized. It is not very likely that a charge of heresy would be taken by the federal government of the United States in the 1990s as direct justification for legitimate military action. But the label of cult served an analogous tangential function, since the charge of ‘being a cult’ evoked public sentiments of a vague and ill-defined social danger to which the government was sensitive.46

The Secular State and Holy Violence Since the state is potentially the most powerful actor at local level in terms of violent force, by the deployment of its superior power it can compel dissident believers into situations of a theatrical kind that enact their apocalyptic expectations. This was certainly true at Waco where, unlike in the other two examples, one can document the day-by-day drift to a final conflagration.47 In such circumstances, the discussions between the besieged and the besiegers reflect two solitudes—the one religious and the other secular. The discussions between Dulcitius and Gaudentius, even though the former was also a Christian, need not have been very enlightening or useful for the purposes of either. The secular state and the dissident religious group, although centered on similar problematics of power, were often speaking in different discourses. The later assessment by the FBI of their own negotiations with David Koresh is a good case in point.48

FBI negotiators spent the entire 51 days of the stand-off attempting to talk Koresh into leading his followers out of the compound. The negotiations were frustrating and futile. The FBI has questioned whether its negotiations with Koresh could even be characterized as ‘negotiations’ at all, but rather as Koresh’s attempt to convert the agents before it was too late and God destroyed them.

As with the dialogue between the tribune Dulcitius and the dissenting bishop Gaudentius at Timgad, this mis-cuing is important because the history of this

32

type of religious violence demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt the necessary role played by government forces in creating episodes of hyperviolent destruction. Before the state involved itself in these disputes and after it withdrew from them, the levels of sectarian violence were not at anything like the levels during the phases of direct state intervention. In all three cases, divisions in the religious community created competing claims on the greater material and coercive power of the state. The critical point is that without the deployment of state force these crises simply would not have happened. The opponents of the dissenters or sect concerned did not themselves have sufficient tools of coercion at their command to enforce a final settlement on their sectarian enemies—which is why they had somehow to persuade the state to intervene with the armed force at its disposal. No matter how much the state was covered with a halo of august tradition and religious authority, whether very strongly as in the case of seventeenth-century Muscovy or less so as in the case of the late Roman imperial court, the basic interests of a state as a state were, by definition, terrestrial in nature. In every case, therefore, the appeal to the state had to be based on the claim of an apprehended political or secular insurgency that threatened the stability of the government and its interests. Once the state became involved, however, the process assumed an inexorable compelling logic of its own, since even modest resistance to enforcement by the state was interpreted as requiring a response of yet more repression by the government. By the time the FBI inherited the situation at Waco from the BATF in early March of 1993, the one enforcement arm of the American state had more or less forgotten the grounds on which the original agency had become involved.49 By this point, the status of the original warrant was lost from sight in further calculations; planning now revolved around a perceived challenge to the legitimacy of state power. This new situation, caused by the state itself, produced the sufficient grounds of legitimation needed by the government for more intense and summary action—indeed, compelled it to act. As in the case of the Tsarist state and the dissidence somehow connected with ‘Old Belief,’ there was a pattern to these interventions, a recurrent set of actions that were repeated again and again in a cycle that

33

implicated the Orthodox Church and the state centered in Moscow with regional communities of dissident Christians (Michels, 1999: 6). In the case of Muscovy, it is also clear that it was the authoritative actions of the great council of 1666-67 that formed the watershed in terms of the direct military involvement of the state in repression. As with the Donatists in Roman north Africa, the forum that provided the necessary focusing of all of the issues for the senior officials of the state, and which provided the formal enunciation of the ‘wrongness’ of the opponents that gave the state grounds for action, was a church council.50 In both cases, these great church councils represented the culmination of a long period of lobbying the state concerning the supposed threat posed by religious dissidents. The councils were grand occasions that produced a formally organized and spectacular kind of decision that the state would find hard to ignore. They were the result of a considerable collective effort to produce a mass or weight of voice that would be more likely to move the state to use the violent force at its command (MacMullen, 2006: 20-23). In both Africa and seventeenth-century Muscovy, they were part of a long tradition of forming and expressing collective church authority.51 In both cases, the government itself was partially complicit in the staging of a church council that was to provide it with the ‘big reason’ that would provide sufficient grounds to justify its actions.52

The incident at Waco, however, does signal significant differences between modern and premodern states. For example, despite the general record of reluctance on the part of the American federal state to involve itself militarily in sectarian disputes, and despite the presence of a formal doctrine of the separation of church and state, it seems to have taken so very little to persuade the government to engage in a violent encounter with a small and marginalized religious community. But it is very difficult to make a persuasive connection between these actions and a more general fear of social upheavals and violent insurrections that threatened the government itself. The most compelling argument of this kind has been cast at the lower level of a popular demonizing of religious groups that have been successfully labeled as ‘cults’ that are fearfully viewed by the general populace. Some additional factor of this kind seems to be required since the ostensible grounds on which the Branch Davidians were attacked—charges concerning the illegal holding of firearms or child-abuse—

34

were shown to be either baseless or not sufficiently important to explain the level of force deployed by the federal state.53

This basic fact in turn points to the gravitational centers of paranoia-like fears that seem to be differently located in each case. In the modern case, the fear turned on images of aberrant ‘cult’ activities and on fears of the sexual abuse of children.54 It has been noted of mid-seventeenth century Muscovy that 1666 was a turning point when a ‘collective paranoia’ seized the leadership of the church: unaccustomed to opposition of any kind, they greatly exaggerated the threat posed by the dissenters (Michels, 1999: 220). If critical decision-making fears are to be located in the Roman case, however, it would have centered in the internal machinations of an increasingly isolated and apprehensive court at Ravenna. So three distinct centers of fear appear: in the ranks of the court in the late Roman empire, in the upper echelons of the Orthodox Church in early modern Muscovy, and more broadly in the general public in modern America. In the case of Muscovy, the numerical smallness of state officials, the primitive administrative tools at the disposal of the court, and the simplicity of its hierarchy (when compared to the later Roman empire) meant that church factions and court institutions were closer to each other, more interdependent, and could more easily communicate their fears to each other (Poe 2006: 440-42).

There are also distinctions in the nature of state mobilization. In both the premodern states that have been considered here, the imperial government was moved to action only after extensive lobbying—campaigns of persuasion that extended over decades. Only then were the governments moved to violent action by mechanisms and institutions like large assemblies of bishops and church councils that functioned at the much the same level as the state itself. These were institutional assemblies that were in direct contact with the court and which could present themselves as legitimately speaking in a ‘state-like’ manner for the whole of their constituency. The modern state that appears more powerful and unified, in this case the United States federal government of the 1990s, was demonstrably moved by so much less—by a series of little cues and suggestions made way down at ground level that moved rather rapidly up a complex bureaucratic chain of agencies. Almost simultaneously, these prompts reached national-level through the power of mass communications that functioned

35

parallel to and outside the government. The strengths of the modern state, its ability and quickness, set it decisively apart from the slow-moving behemoths of premodern times. But these same powers made it oddly susceptible to rapid-fire mobilizations of public sentiment that implicated it in an ill-advised armed intervention.

36

REFERENCES Attorney General Report and Recommendations Concerning the 1993 Handling of Incidents Such As the Branch Davidian Standoff in Waco, Texas, to Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, submitted 10 November, 1993, Washington DC, USGPO, 1993 Congress Events Surrounding the Branch Davidian Cult 1995 Standoff in Waco, Texas: Hearing Before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Third Congress, First Session, April 28, 1993, Washington DC, USGPO, 1995 Congress United States Congress. House Committee on the 1996 Judiciary. Subcommittee on Crime: Activities of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies toward the Branch Davidians : Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, and the Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, One Hundred Fourth Congress, First Session, 3 vols., Washington, DC, USGPO, 1996 Congress Continuation of the Waco Investigation: Hearing 2001 Before the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundredth Sixth Congress, Second Session, July 26, 2000, Washington DC, USGPO., 2001 CCL Corpus christianorum, series Latina, Turnhout,

Brepols, 1954 to present CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Vienna, Tempsky, 1866 to present Department of Department of Defense: Military Assistance Provided Defense at Branch Davidian Incident: Report to the Secretary 1999 of Defense, the Attorney General, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Washington DC, USGAO, 1999

37

Department of Department of Defense: Military Assistance During Defense the Branch Davidian Incident, Washington DC, 2000 USGAO National Security and International Affairs Division, 2000 Department of Report to Deputy Attorney General on the Events at Justice Waco, Texas, February 28 to April 19, 1993, 1993 Washington D.C., U. S. Department of Justice, 1993 = http://www.usdoj.gov/05publications/waco wacoone.html, 1: Introduction. FBI FBI File: Waco, Wilmington, Delaware, Scholarly 2002 Resources. Albertini, E. “Une témoignage épigraphique sur l’évêque 1939 donatiste Optat de Timgad,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 100-03 Anderson, P. Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, NLB. 1974 Arthur, A. The Tailor King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist 1999 Kingdom of Münster, New York, St. Martin’s Griffin. Brisson, J.-P. Autonomisme et christianisme dans l’Afrique 1958 romaine de Septime-Sévère à l’invasion vandale, Paris, E. de Boccard. Bushkovitch, P. Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and 1992 Seventeenth Centuries, New York, Oxford University Press. 1995a “Council of 1556, Orthodox Church,” [in] P. D. Steeves ed., The Modern Encyclopedia of Religions in Russia and the Soviet Union, 6: 8-11 1995b “Council of 1666-1667, Orthodox Church,” [in] P. D. Steeves ed., The Modern Encyclopedia of Religions in Russia and the Soviet Union, 6: 11-15 Courtois, C. Timgad, antique Thamugadi, Algiers, Imprimérie 1951 officielle.

38

Crummey, R. O. The Old Believers and the World of Antichrist: The 1970 Vyg Community and the Russian State, 1694-1855, Madison WI, The University of Wisconsin Press. 2004 “Ecclesiastical Elites and Popular Belief and Practice in Seventeenth-Century Russia,” ch. 2 [in] J. D. Tracy & M. Ragnow eds., Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004: 52-79 Frend, W. H. C. The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in 1952/1985 Roman North Africa, Oxford, Clarendon Press (revised reprint: 1985) Gaddis, M. There is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: 2005 Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire, 2nd ed., Berkeley, University of California Press. Grégoire. H. & Marc le Diacre: Vie de Porphyre, évêque de Gaza Kugener, M.-A. Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1930 1930 Hahn, J. Gewalt und religiöser Konflikt: Studien zu den 2004 Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Christen, Heiden und Juden im Osten des römischen Reiches (von Konstantin bis Theodosius II), Berlin, Akademie Verlag. Hall, J. R. “Mass Suicide and the Branch Davidians,” ch. 8 [in]D. 2002 G. Bromley & J. G. Melton eds, Cults, Religion, and Violence, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 149-69 Heller, W. “Die Geschichte der russischen Altgläubigen und 1988 Ihre Bedeutung. Ein Forschungsberichte,” Kirche im Osten 31: 137-69 Kerssenbroek, H. von Anabaptistici Furoris Narratio: C. S. Mackay ed. & 2007 transl., Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness: The Overthrow of Münster, the Famous Metropolis of Westphalia, Leiden, Brill. Lancel, S. Actes de la Conférence de Carthage, 4 vols., Paris, 1972-1991 Editions du Cerf. Levine, R. M. Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in 1992 Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897, Berkeley-London, University of California Press, 1992.

39

Lupinin, N. Religious Revolt in the XVIIth Century: The Schism of 1984 the Russian Church, Princeton, The Kingston Press. McMullen, R. Voting About God in Early Church Councils, New 2006 Haven, Yale University Press. Michels, G. “The Solovki Uprising: Religion and Revolt in 1992a Northern Russia,” The Russian Review 51: 1-15 Michels, G. “The Violent Old Belief: An Examination of Religious 1992b Dissent on the Karelian Frontier,” Russian History 10: 203-29 Michels, G. At War With the Church: Religious Dissent in 1999 Seventeenth-Century Russia, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Muller, D. B. “The Orthodox Church,” ch. 15 [in] M. Perrie ed., The 2006 Cambridge History of Russia, 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 338-59 Newport, K. G. C. The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and 2006 Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Pascal, P. Avvakum et les débuts du Raskol: la crise religieuse 1938/1969 au XVIIe siècle en Russie, Paris, Centre d’Etudes Russes “Istina.” (reprint: 1969) Pleyer, V. Das altrussische Altgläubigtum: Geschichte, 1961 Darstellung in der Literatur, Munich, Verlag Otto Sagner. Poe, M. “The Central Government and Its Institutions,” ch. 19 2006 [in] M. Perrie ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, 1: From Early Rus’ to 1689, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 435-63 Riasanovksy, N. V. History of Russia, 7th edition, New York-Oxford, & Steinberg, M. D. Oxford University Press. 2005 Shaw, B. D. “African Christianity: Disputes, Definitions, and 1992 ‘Donatists’,” [in] M. R. Greenshields & T. A. Robinson eds., Orthodox and Heresy in Religious Movements: Discipline and Dissent, Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press: 4-34 Shlapentockh, D. V. “Avvakum,” in P. D. Steeves ed., The Modern

40

1991 Encyclopedia of Religions in Russia and the Soviet Union, Gulf Breeze, FL, 3: 150-57. Tabor, J. D. & Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Gallagher, E. V. Freedom in America, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1995 University of California Press. Tilly, C. The Politics of Collective Violence, Cambridge, 2003 Cambridge University Press. Vargas Llosa, M. La guerra del fin del Mundo, Editorial Seix Barraal, 1981 [transl. H. R. Lane, The War at the End of the World, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984] Vernadsky, G. History of Russia, 5: The Tsardom of Moscow, 1547-1969 1682, New Haven-London, Yale University Press. Wright, S. A. “Construction and Escalation of a Cult Threat: 1995 Dissecting Moral Panic and Official Reaction to the Branch Davidians,” ch. 4 [in] S. A. Wright ed., Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press: 75-94

41

1 Although the term ‘Donatist’ was used by orthodox Catholics to label their sectarian enemies as early as the 320s, the term first appears in state discourse in the year 405 in the first piece of big imperial legislation that forced the dissidents to unite with the Catholic Church. The bibliography on ‘the Donatists’ in north Africa is immense. Although somewhat dated, two standard works that provide an adequate idea of the range of possible interpretations are Frend, 1952 (reprint, 1985), and Brisson, 1958. 2 I say ‘so-called’ because the names ‘Rebels’ or Raskol’niki, and ‘Old Believers’ (Starove’ry) or ‘Old Ritualists’ (Staroobra’dsty) as with ‘Donatists,’ were ones foisted upon dissenters by their opponents. The dissidents always firmly rejected the first of these labels, and by the act of Religious Freedom promulgated by Tsar Nicholas II in 1905, the Old Believers were no longer to be referred to as Raskolniki. Again, the bibliography is immense. I have had to consult it mainly in English and other western European languages, with help for some items in Russian. Viktoria Pleyer, 1961, is useful for literature to the early 1960s, and Heller, 1988, for studies through to the mid-1980s. Other than Pascal’s renowned study of the archpriest Avvakum (1938/1969), most of the most important revisionist work has been done since the 1970s and 1980s. 3 Russian place names can be a little complex—so Paleostrov, Paleostrovsk, and Paleostrovskii—as Solovki, Solovetsk, and Solovetskii—are variously used for the same place: I use the simpler Paleostrovsk for the place and Paleostrov as defining something at the place, such as the Paleostrov Monastery. 4 Their usual name was simply Davidians. Again, the bibliography is menacingly overwhelming. Newport, 2006, is one of the better studies; some of the basic state documents on the siege can be found in: FBI File, 2002; Congress, 1995; Congress, 1996; and Congress, 2001. Specific additional items will be referred to where required. 5 Levine, 1992, offers an account and analysis, with reference to the existing studies as of the early 1990s. Like the other incidents studied here, the Canudos

42

episode has been subject to historical fictionalization, most famously Vargas Llosa, 1981. 6 See Arthur, 1999; the near contemporary history of Hermann von Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici Furoris Narratio, of 1534-35, has been edited and translated by MacKay, 2007. 7 For a current account of the siege that began on 10 July2007, see “Lal Masjid”: http://wn.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lal_Masjid. 8 The convent, in the town of Kazmierz, was being occupied in defiance of Vatican orders: “Polish Police and Nun Rebellion,” BBC News International Version: 10 October 2007: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7037762.stm. 9 Frend, 1952/1985, p. 296n5, avers to evidence for a conflagration, but dismisses it as probably of later date; so ‘archaeological evidence… suggests that the cathedral of Thamugadi was not burnt down.’ 10 The literature is large, but most of the more important pieces of research are recapitulated in the description and argument made by Shaw, 1992, pp. 4-34. The basic text of the conference and historical introduction has been by Lancel, 1972-1991. 11 Michels, 1999, p. 1, and p. 16: ‘Unlike western heretics, the vast majority of these [i.e. Russian] dissenters did not have a name for themselves.’ 12 Michels, “The Meaning of the Term Raskol,” ch. 3 [in] 1999, pp. 106-20, esp. pp. 111-12, and p. 220, where he points to the importance of a single learned interpreter, Simeon Polotskii, in this process. It is important to note that Polotskii had been serving the Tsar since 1664, and was instrumental in setting the agenda for the trials of 1666-67. He was very important in the entrenching of the labeling terminology, in which he appears to have been influenced by existing western European models in the handbook written by him—a work composed in Latin and bearing the title Demonstratio verae fidae contra schismaticos. 13 Michels, 1999, pp. 16-17; an attitude summarized by Vernadsky, 1969, p. 696: “The Old Believers continued the traditions of the national Russian church. They felt themselves the only true Orthodox. For them, the Nikonians were violators of church traditions.”

43

14 I must caution that I am using the term ‘salience’ here in a different way from a contemporary analysis of violence: Tilly, 2003, p. 13 and passim where by ‘salience’ Tilly means the extent (lower or higher) to which the infliction and reception of damage dominates a given set of social relations. I am using the term to indicate the way in which violence ‘jumps’ from one level of violent actors to the next in terms of a hierarchy of capacities to inflict harm. 15 Shlapentockh, 1991, pp. 150-57; and, especially, Michels, 1999, p. 12, citing the work of Hauptmann on the fact that Avvakum ‘had close and well-paying connections with the court.’ In his autobiography, of course, Avvakum portrays himself as once having had a friendship with the Tsar himself. 16 I mean relative to the power of the state on the one hand and of the instruments of power in the hands of the Orthodox Church on the other. There were, of course, good historical reasons for this peculiar development: see Bushkovitch, “Orthodoxy in the Sixteenth Century,” ch. 1 [in] 1992, pp. 10-31, at pp. 10-14, on the monasteries, some of them engrossing up to one-third of all populated land in their respective regions; and also Michels, “Muscovite Monasticism and Dissent,” ch. 4 [in] Michels, 1999, pp. 121-62, at pp. 121-23. 17 Bushkovitch, 1992, pp. 71-72; the first individual self-killings date to 1665-66; the first large mass suicide took place near the Siberian town of Tiumen in 1679. 18 Crummey, 1970, p. 19, referred to with assent by Lupinin, 1984, p. 151. 71. Congress, 1995, p. 173: ‘One option I rejected was withdrawing our law enforcement presence. Koresh and his followers had killed four ATF agents and wounded fifteen others. We had a responsibility to maintain a law enforcement presence until we could arrest them and bring them to justice.’ 20 A good exposition of the power struggles over internal control and leadership succession is offered by Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, pp. 33-43. For the sake of emphasizing my concerns, I have necessarily abbreviated a complex internal history, that is perhaps best recapitulated by Newport, 2006, chs. 3-5. 21 Michels, 1999, p. 184-87; the number of dead in the monastery is often put at 2,700, but Michels is justifiably skeptical. 22 Crummey, 1970, p. 57. The figure is, however, an estimate made by Pavel Miliukov. Whatever its evidentiary basis (and, I must say, I am very skeptical of

44

it), the claim appears to have become canonical: ‘It is estimated that between 1684 and 1691 no less than twenty thousand men and women burned themselves.’ (Vernadsky, 1969, p. 716); ‘It has been estimated that between 1672 and 1691, over 20,000 of them burned themselves alive in thirty-seven communal conflagrations’; see Riasanovksy & Steinberg, 2005, p. 185; cf. Lupinin (1984), p. 184-85, where the figure is repeated. 23 This is typical of other cases, even much more modest ones, such the assault on the convent at Kazimierz Dolny in Poland (10 October 2007): the government’s riot police were enabled to act based on an earlier court order that approved the eviction of the nuns: see n7 above. 24 On the matter of the possession of the firearms lacking the proper technical paperwork, see Department of Justice, 1993, p. 1: “On the morning of Sunday, February 28, 1993, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) attempted to serve an arrest warrant for Vernon Howell a/k/a David Koresh, and a search warrant for the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The warrants were Federal arrest warrant VWH Case No. W93-17m, for Vernon Wayne Howell, aka David Koresh, for the unlawful possession of an unregistered destructive device in violation of 26 USC; and a Federal Search Warrant, Case No. W93-15M, for the Mount Carmel Center, for unregistered machine guns and that destructive devices were concealed in violation of 18 and 26 USC. 25 Affidavit of Probable Cause submitted by Special Agent Davy Aguilera in Congress, 1996, pp. 996-1010, at p. 1010 (p. 15 of the original affidavit), which briefly states his conclusion: “I believe that Vernon Howell, also known as David Koresh and/or his followers who reside at the compound known as the Mount Carmel Center are unlawfully manufacturing and possessing machineguns and explosive devices.” 26 These officials and information coming from them figure very prominently in the Probably Cause Affidavit, providing all of the initial testimony to Davy Aguilera from June of 1992: Probable Cause Affidavit [in] ibid., pp. 996-1000 [= pp. 1-5 of the original affidavit]

45

27 They did this on about 4 July 1992, briefing the BATF on the ‘situation at the compound’ and the previous ‘violent history’ (i.e. the 1987 ‘gun battle’); on 9 June 1992, the BATF formally opened its investigation. 28 The evidence is collated by Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, pp. 80-93, esp. at p. 84, 86-7. The state, at least after the fact, was well aware of the nature of these internal divisions: Department of Justice, 1993, 1: Introduction, pp. 3-4 29 Newport, 2006, 199-204, provides a fair description of the evidence; by April 1992, after investigating these matters, The Child Protective Services Department of the Texas Department of Human Services closed the case. 30 Affidavit of Probable Cause, ibid., p. 9 (interview with Robyn Bunds), pp. 9-10 (interview with Jeannine Bunds); these statements, however, hardly add up to the sort of decisive cause suggested by Tabor & Gallagher: 1995, 86-88, on the impact of Marc Breault, who was ignored by the government in this respect until the interviews made with him in December of 1992. 31 The claims of Tabor and Gallagher, 1995, pp. 100-01, that these other matters ‘decisively’ shaped his judgment, however, is debatable, and their claim that the affidavit ‘summarizes at some length the efforts of the Texas Department of Human Services to investigate allegations of sexual abuse of young girls’ is misleading; the substance of the probable cause affidavit clearly focuses on the problem of illicit arms and explosives caches. 32 Newport, 2006, 244-45; the matter of the subsequent spread of ‘information’ to the mass media, of course, were more complex than this, since the Waco Tribune-Herald’s circulation alone (about 40,000 copies, almost all distributed locally) would have been insufficient to achieve a big national presence; for a useful survey, see “’A Mad Man in Waco’: David Koresh in Popular Perspective,” ch. 1 in Newport, 2006, 1-18. 33 The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the use of federal military force against American citizens. But exceptions were made in 1981 and 1989 that permitted such use if ‘the war on drugs’ was involved. As improbable as it might seem, evidence for ‘a methamphetamine lab’ was claimed to exist at the Mount Carmel compound—and it was on these grounds that the use of federal military

46

forces and equipment was permitted; in the end, ‘DOD provided support for counterdrug activities of the Davidian operation under section 1004 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1991.’ (p. 12); the documentation of the request can be found in Congress, 1996, pp. 957-980. 34 The basic documentary sources are Department of Defense, 1999; for the evidence for the supposed ‘possible meth lab’—so flimsy as to be vaporously thin—see pp. 5-11: “According to one military attendee [i.e. at the sessions where a positive response was given to the BATF’s request], the evidence of a possible drug connection was not the strongest they had ever seen, nor was it the weakest.’ (p. 11); and Department of Defense, 2000. 35 Instead of St. Augustine, therefore, we get a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences and a professor psycholinguistics: Dr. Park Dietz at the UCLA School of Medicine and Professor Murray Miron at Syracuse University, see Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, pp. 105-06, and 111. Precisely the same aspersions are made in justification of other state sieges, as in the recent raid on the Roman Catholic convent at Kazimerz Dolny in Poland (10 October 2007). A church spokesman ‘likened the group to a sect, and said [that] the nuns had been subject to mental manipulation’: see n7 above. 36 So the congregation of the Branch Davidians in Mount Carmel viewed their siege as a test or a trial to be faced: Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, p. 13. 37 The Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel had a similar apprehensive expectation of their end: see Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, pp. 4-5 38 For a typical example, admittedly in after-the-fact testimony, see the statement of Dan Hartnett, the former Deputy Director of the BATF (Congress 1996: 223): “But if we did a siege, one thing, as you’ve heard some of the testimony today, [was] mass suicide … There was a big fear of everybody [sic] that there would be mass suicide.” 39 Department of Justice, 1993, 2: Chronology, p. 4 (1 March): ‘During the conversations of 1 March, Koresh stated on at least two occasions that suicide was not being contemplated by those inside the compound, and that he and the sect members needed to stay alive to deliver his (Koresh’s) message to the

47

world.’ Similar disclaimers were made on March 2 (p. 5) and March 8 (p. 15), and by Steve Schneider on March 27 (p. 26) and by Koresh again on March 28 (p. 27). 40 Crummey (2004), p. 75, on the dilemma in which the authorities in seventeenth-century Muscovy found themselves. 41 Procopius, Anecdota, 11.23: who reports that different religious groups reacted differently to the same imperial threat. ‘But the Montanists who were established in Phrygia, shut themselves up in their own churches and at once set these buildings on fire, perishing with them for no reason at all.’ (transl. G. A. Williamson); cf. Gaddis, 2005, p. 138—but note that this report, too, derives from a hostile and biased source. 42 To get some idea of the scale, see Vernadsky, 1969, p. 724 f. (the expenditure on armed forces, for example, almost trebled between the 1620s and the 1680s); see Anderson, 1974, pp. 334-40. 43 For example, well before the formal emergence of the Raskol, distant monastic establishments, like those at Paleostrovsk and Solovetsk, were used as places to dump or to exile dangerous dissidents: Bushkovitch, 1992, p. 60; Michels 1992a, pp. 9-11; cf. 1992b, pp. 204-05 on the hard frontier location of the Paleostrov Monastery in Karelia. 44 Put succinctly by Riasanovsky & Steinberg, 2005, p. 185: ‘It is remarkable that, although no dogmatic or doctrinal differences were involved, priests and laymen in considerable numbers refused to obey ecclesiastical authorities, even though the latter received the full support of the state.’ 45 The final outcome, which was, no doubt, the rhetorical point of the accounting by the hagiographer, should be admitted: the insistent lobbying of the emperor by the holy man finally did succeed. 46 The substance of the argument advanced by Tabor & Gallagher, 1995, esp. ch. 7, “The Cult Controversy,” pp. 146-72. 47 A. A. Stone, “Evaluating the Risks of Mass Suicide,” § 2 [in] Deputy Attorney General, 1993. p. 7, in an understatement typical of official bureaucratese: ‘… I am now convinced that the FBI’s noose-tightening tactics may well have precipitated Koresh’s decision to commit himself and his followers to this course of mass suicide.’

48

48 Department of Justice, 1993, 1: Introduction, p. 4. 49 The larger problems appear to have been matters of disinterest between the various enforcement arms of the state, including, potentially in this case, at least the FBI, the BATF, and the DEA, all of whom viewed each other suspiciously as having competing interests in ways that considerably reduced communication amongst them. 50 Lupinin, “The Great Councils of 1666-1667,” ch. 9 [in] 1984, pp. 157-76, at pp. 157 & 174-75, who sees these councils as having played a decisive role in the seventeenth-century politics of church and state. Later, Lupinin (pp. 177-79) specifies the role of the councils as decisive insofar as they formalized the break and brought the government in a way that could not be changed. Previously the quarrels had been within the church—Old Believers remained within it—now they were outside and had to be dealt with by the civil authorities. 51 Bushkovitch, 1995a, 8-11: it was one of the first general councils involved in the support of Nikon’s reforms and in issuing the first formal excommunications of those who dissent from them. The distance between the church officials at the conference (about 39 for all of Russia) and the mass of believers, however, was commensurately great, lacking the sort of intense local representation that bishops in the African church provided. 52 On the conference of Carthage in 411, see Shaw, 1992, pp. 17-20; the Tsar was prodding to have such a council held as early as 1660: Bushkovitch, 1995b, p. 12. 53 A point made forcefully by Wright (1995), pp. 75-76. and by many others. 54 These became formative in the minds of senior government officials by the time of the assent to the final assault. See the formal written response of Attorney General Janet Reno in Congress, 1995, p. 176, where the compelling nature of these other fear factors is manifest.