A Grisly Anniversary. By Peter Berger. The American Interest, May 22, 2013.
Waco in red and blue: 20 years after the siege. By Philip Jenkins. Christian Century, May 15, 2013.
Berger:
Jenkins
astutely describes how the Waco incident has supplied contradictory symbols to
both the progressive and conservative camps in the ongoing American culture
war. On the Left, Waco has come to symbolize the lethal potential of religious
fundamentalism. The notion of mass suicide has obviously appealed to this
constituency: Waco can then be interpreted as a companion piece of the
Jonestown incident, when in 1978 another sect leader, Jim Jones, ordered the
mass suicide of 918 people (also including children, and also in response to a
perceived threat from the US government) at his so-called Peoples Temple in
Guyana in South America. Then as now, this type of fundamentalism is associated
by progressives with the Christian Right, the “gun culture” of the National
Rifle Association, and conservatism in general. I suppose a proof text of this
perspective could be the notorious statement by Barrack Obama, made at a
fundraiser in 2008, saying that jobless people in small towns “get bitter [and]
cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them”.
(One may wonder what sort of religion Obama was “clinging to” during the twenty
years he was a member of Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago.)
And on
the Right, Waco symbolizes government overreach, tyranny and the attack on the
Second Amendment of the constitution. On this side of the aisle, of course,
there is the propensity to blame the FBI for the tragedy—a massacre by
government forces rather than a mass suicide by the Davidians. It is then put
in the company, not of Jonestown, but of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where in 1992
federal agents (also from the FBI and the ATF) besieged the compound of the
“survivalist” Randy Weaver and in the resulting firefight killed his wife and
son.
I think
that Jenkins is right when he suggests that the contradictory symbolizations of
the Waco incident not only demarcate the boundaries of the two camps of the
American culture war twenty years ago, but continue to do so today. He
expresses the view that the tensions have lessened somewhat. I rather doubt it.
Perhaps the ideological rhetoric is a bit less strident, but the polarization
in politics has deepened, as the two major parties are more clearly aligned
with one or the other camp in the culture war. Both moderate Democrats and
moderate Republicans, the kind of politicians who make compromises possible in
a democracy, have been marginalized if not eliminated in their respective
parties. And survey data show that the religious profile of an individual is a
major predictor of which side he or she belongs to. The polarization continues,
as does the mutual demonization of the two camps manifested so clearly in the
conflicting interpretations of Waco. Of course both stereotypes are
distortive—most conservatives are not religious fanatics with guns, most
progressives are not bent on federal thugs running roughshod over the Bill of
Rights. Stereotypes can be empirically false, yet be very useful politically.
