Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

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Monitor journalist observed, “In many ways, Warren Jeffs reminds me of David Koresh.”
Koresh died with many of his Branch Davidian followers in their Texas compound in
1993 during an assault by federal law enforcement officers.
Branch Davidians, Mormons (including a nod to Jeffs), and Ghost Dancers are the
main cases in Kerstetter’s study. The histories of these three groups receive extended
attention—a chapter each—because Kerstetter believes they can help us see that “God’s
country” is also “Uncle Sam’s land.” That is, on the one hand, the United States of
America is known—and rightly so—for religious freedom (God’s country). And within
the U.S., the West is especially associated with freedom, religious and otherwise (God’s
country, only more so). On the other hand, even in the West religious freedom has been
constrained by prevailing Protestant-tinged values enforced at times through federal
power (Uncle Sam’s land).
In the Mormon case, Kerstetter has little new to add to what is an extensive
historiography. Tensions and conflict between the restorationist and millenarian Mormon
community and “Gentile” neighbors helped propel the CJCLDS to the West’s Great
Basin in 1846-47. Once the Mormon Zion was relocated to Utah, public opinion fueled
extensive federal intervention. In 1857-58, President James Buchanan sent elements of
the U.S. Army to Utah to install and support territorial officials. Further, it was only after
plural marriage was banned by the CJCLDS in 1890—a ban in direct response to
escalating federal enforcement in the 1880s of anti-bigamy and polygamy laws—that
Utah was admitted as a state (1896). By the end of the nineteenth century, observes
Kerstetter, “the [federal] government had reformed the face of Mormonism and made the
religion’s adherents American enough to join the Union” (79).
Also by 1890, the Native American Ghost Dance worried the American public and
many federal officials. The Paiute Wovoka’s 1889 prophecy of a coming regenerated
earth without whites attracted the attention and the devotion of many American Indians.
In late 1890, the Lakota holy man Sitting Bull was killed by reservation police, and soon
thereafter Big Foot and from 150 to 300 of his Lakota band of Ghost Dancers were killed
by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. The federal response to the Ghost Dance,
in Kerstetter’s view, was part of “a program of cultural obliteration” that included Native
religions (122). While not new, this conclusion is enhanced by the author’s use of anti-
Ghost Dance materials by Christian Dakotas in his analysis.
With his third case—the Branch Davidians—Kerstetter makes an even greater
addition to historiography. The group originated in the 1930s as a Seventh-day Adventist
break-off commune (Mount Carmel) near Waco, Texas. By the 1970s, the group was
known as the Branch Davidians. Vernon Howell eventually gained leadership, and in
1990 he changed his name to David Koresh. He understood his divinely appointed role to
be that of “the Lamb” who would open the seven seals of Revelation. His reorganization
of the Mount Carmel community to build a heavenly community on earth—including
designating various women in the group as his wives—brought regional notoriety and the
attention of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF). Concluding that
the Branch Davidians were illegally manufacturing firearms, in late February 1993 the
BATF initiated what, with the help of the FBI, became a siege of Mount Carmel. During