It is not enough that the murderous ravings of David Koresh and his apocalyptic religious cult have turned into a terrible human tragedy. There seems to be a great desire to turn it into a cultural statement. The siege at Waco has occasioned a worldwide festival of commentary -- and condescension -- on the subject of American primitivism. An Israeli TV interviewer asked me to explain to his audience why it is that America seems to throw up these weird religious cults at such regular intervals. I pointed out that Israel sports the Ateret Hacohanim, a group of believers so convinced of the imminence of the Messiah who will rebuild the Temple of Solomon that they spend their days studying the ancient laws of animal sacrifice. That way they'll be -- to borrow a phrase from George Bush's -- ready on Day 1.
Tut-tutting about American primitivism mixes easily with that other sport, eye rolling about religious primitivism. You know: There go those religious nuts again. In keeping with a popular culture that gives serious religion no attention but devotes endless prime time to crooked, hypocritical and otherwise deformed religiosity, the Waco wackos are getting more coverage in a week than religion does in a year.
A front-page story in the Washington Post looked for deeper trends. "The United States has become a land echoing with the rumble of apocalyptic prophecy," it reported on Day 5 of the siege. And the phenomenon is ecumenical: "The anticipation extends across religious lines."
True enough. But it also extends beyond religious lines. What the endless media chatter about the Koresh phenomenon misses completely is that millennial thinking is hardly the property of the religious. Indeed, the most widespread and historically significant outbreaks of millenarianism in our time have been secular.
For the past half-century more than a quarter of the earth's people were controlled by political movements whose pursuit of the millennium was as fanatical as that of their religious counterparts -- and far more destructive. Soviet, Cambodian, Korean, Chinese communists relentlessly drove their people to extremes of privation and repression in order to hasten the arrival of full-fledged "communism," the millennium as foretold by that 19th century prophet Karl Marx.
In 1958, for example, Mao decided to skip the intermediate stages of "socialist construction" and go right to full communism. He called it the Great Leap Forward. It would take a million David Koreshes to kill the number of Chinese who perished (through famine, forced labor and civil unrest) to satisfy that lunge for the millennium. Two decades later, the Khmer Rouge murdered more than a million of their countrymen in an attempt, explained Khieu Samphan, to "reach total communism with one leap forward." Has any religious vision occasioned more human sacrifice than "total communism"?