David Williams met the modern world in a little town square shaded by pecan and oak trees in remote West Texas, and it was hard to know which found the other more bewildering. The 32-year-old welder wore his hair slicked in a bygone style and sometimes stammered as he spoke in a flat monotone about prophets and the trials sent by God to test him. His cryptic words were directed to a group of people holding television cameras and microphones and tape recorders, people whose impressions of Williams then flashed by satellite and digital relays to households around the world.
Williams...