Messianic revolution

On April 19, 1993, at least seventy-four people lost their lives near Waco, Texas, in the confrontation between the followers of David Koresh and the federal agents outside his compound. These groups, clearly, inhabited two different conceptual worlds. Yet both then and now, it seemed that neither journalists nor law-enforcement experts nor the public was aware of the rich tradition of messianic, revolutionary politics behind groups like Koresh's, a history that stretches back, unbroken, to the early Middle Ages. In this study, two historians explore that tradition, showing how the beliefs of…