March 3, 1993: Experts Differ on Handling of Davidian Standoff

Two experts on religious “millennial” “cults” have drastically different views on how to handle the Branch Davidians, currently besieged by federal authorities near Waco, Texas, after a shootout with federal agents (see 5:00 A.M. - 9:30 A.M. February 28, 1993 and March 1, 1993). Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University who has studied white supremacist and anti-Semitic Christian groups, warns that becoming too aggressive with the Davidians may backfire and cause a violent, perhaps fatal confrontation. “The show of force employed in the belief that it will intimidate can have the opposite effect, convincing people that this is indeed the battle of Armageddon and they should respond accordingly,” he says. But Ronald Numbers, a University of Wisconsin historian who has written about Seventh-Day Adventism (the parent church of the “splinter” Branch Davidians), alludes to the 1978 mass suicide of the People’s Temple in Guyana in advocating some sort of proactive response, saying, “Since the Jim Jones episode, nobody wants to fail to take these groups seriously.” [New York Times, 3/3/1993]