What Waco Changed, in Federal Practice and in the Study of Religion

The fire that ended the fifty one day siege near Waco on 19 April 1993 killed seventy six people inside the building, including more than twenty children, after four federal agents and six Branch Davidians had died in the initial raid on 28 February. The argument over responsibility has continued ever since, and it has had two separate afterlives.

The official one ran through inquiry. Congressional hearings in 1995 were followed by the investigation led by the former senator John Danforth, whose report in 2000 concluded that federal agents did not start the fire and did not fire shots on the final day, while criticising the government's failure to disclose its use of pyrotechnic tear gas rounds earlier that morning. The tactical lessons were absorbed into federal doctrine on barricade situations, where the standing assumption is no longer that pressure applied over time produces surrender.

The scholarly afterlife is the reason the case matters to an atlas of belief. James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher argued in Why Waco? that the decisive failure was interpretive rather than tactical: negotiators treated David Koresh's biblical language as a delaying device rather than as the thing he was actually saying, and did not take seriously his eventual offer to come out once he had finished a written commentary on the seven seals. Their case, that reading a group's theology accurately is an operational requirement and not a courtesy, is now the standard reference point in the field.

The date acquired a second meaning when Timothy McVeigh chose the second anniversary for the Oklahoma City bombing.