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annihilated in Europe, but in the 1720s they began taking refuge in William Penn’s
colony, the “holy experiment” of Pennsylvania. Amish life has remained essentially
unchanged since then, a kind of museum of eighteenth-century farm life. The adherents
live sequestered lives, out of the drift of popular culture, on a kind of religious atoll. I
was moved by the beauty and simplicity of their lives. The Amish see the Earth as God’s
garden, and their duty is to tend it. The environment they surround themselves with is
lled with a sense of peace and a purposeful orderliness. Individuality is sanded down
to the point that one’s opinions are as similar to another’s as the approved shape of a
bonnet or the regulation beard. Because fashion and novelty are outlawed, one feels
comfortably encased in a timeless, unchanging vacuum. The enforced conformity dims
the noise of diversity and the anxiety of uncertainty; one feels closer to eternity. One is
also aware of the electried fence of orthodoxy that surrounds and protects this Edenic
paradise, and the expulsion that awaits those who doubt or question. Still, there is a
kind of quiet majesty in the Amish culture—not because of their rejection of modernity,
but because of their principled non-violence and their adherence to a way of living that
tempers their fanaticism. The Amish suer none of the social opprobrium that
Scientologists must endure; indeed, they are generally treated like beloved endangered
animals, coddled by their neighbors and smiled upon by society. And yet they are highly
schismatic, willing to break o all relations with their dearest relatives on what would
seem to an outsider to be an inane point of doctrine or even the question of whether one
can allow eaves on a house or pictures on a wall.
As adorable as the Amish appear to strangers, such isolated and intellectually
deprived religious communities can become self-destructive, especially when they
revolve around the whims of a single tyrannical leader. David Koresh created such a
community in the Branch Davidian compound that he established near Waco and aptly
called Ranch Apocalypse. In 1993, I was asked to write about the siege that was then
under way. I decided not to, because there were more reporters on the scene than
Branch Davidians; however, I had been unsettled by the sight of the twenty-one children
that Koresh sent out of the compound shortly before the fatal inferno. Those children left
behind their parents and the only life they had known. They were ripped out of the
community of faith, placed in government vans, and ushered through a curtain of
federal agents and reporters onto the stage of an alien world and who knows what
future. I thought there must be other children who had experienced similar traumas;
what had become of them?
There is a strangely contorted mound in a cemetery in Oakland, California, close by
the naval hospital where Hubbard spent his last months in uniform. Under an
undistinguished headstone rest four hundred bodies out of the more than nine hundred
followers of Jim Jones who perished in Jonestown in 1978. The caskets had been
stacked on top of each other on the side of a bulldozed hillside, then the earth was lled
in, grass was planted, and the tragedy of Jonestown was buried in the national memory
as one more inexplicable religious calamity. The members of the Peoples Temple, as
Jones called his movement, had been drawn to his Pentecostal healing services, his
social activism, and his racial egalitarianism. Charisma and madness were inextricably