History & overview · every faith gets one
Adventists who read the seals of Revelation as opening now.
The Branch Davidians are the second of two schisms from Seventh-day Adventism that settled outside Waco, Texas. Victor Houteff, a Bulgarian-born Adventist, began publishing tracts called The Shepherd's Rod in 1929, was disfellowshipped in 1930, and in 1935 moved with thirty-seven followers to land they named Mount Carmel. They kept the Adventist Sabbath and the vegetarian diet, farmed semi-communally, tithed twice, and waited for a purified church of 144,000 to be gathered before Christ returned. Ben Roden organised the Branch in 1955 after Houteff's death; his wife Lois led from 1978 and taught that the Holy Spirit is female. Vernon Howell, later David Koresh, took control of the property in 1987. The community that lived at Mount Carmel ended on 19 April 1993.
On 28 February 1993 agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to serve a search warrant at Mount Carmel. John C. Danforth, appointed Special Counsel to investigate, concluded that Branch Davidians shot and killed four ATF agents that day and wounded twenty; six Branch Davidians also died. A siege of 51 days followed. On 19 April 1993 the buildings burned. Danforth found that government agents did not start or spread the fire, did not direct gunfire at the complex and did not unlawfully use the armed forces; and that Davidians spread fuel through the main structure and ignited it in at least three places, and shot some of their own people, including at least five children. His report counted at least 80 recovered bodies in all, including the six killed on 28 February, and stated that the exact number could not be given because of the condition of the remains. The figure usually cited for 19 April is 76, among them 25 children.
Why it is filed this way
A movement by category — a schism from a schism, with no denominational structure and authority resting in whoever held the prophetic claim. Scholars of religion, notably James Tabor and Catherine Wessinger, argued during and after 1993 that the group's biblical framework was legible and could have been negotiated with, and that treating it as a hostage situation rather than a theological one made the outcome worse. That argument is not settled.
The community at Mount Carmel ended in 1993. Small Branch Davidian and Davidian congregations continue in Texas, California, Jamaica and elsewhere, some of them at the Mount Carmel site, and they disagree with each other about Koresh. The name has no single body behind it.
The founding
Houteff's movement was, in its own account, a reform of Adventism rather than a break from it: he argued the church had gone slack on diet, dress and Sabbath and had stopped expecting anything. After his death in 1955 his widow Florence set a date — 22 April 1959 — for the gathering; over 900 people sold their homes and came to Waco, and nothing happened. Ben Roden arrived at that gathering announcing he was the sign they had come for, and the small group that followed him became the Branch. Nearly every leader in the line claimed to have been given a further piece of the prophetic sequence, and each schism turned on whether the last one had.
Its founding is bound to Benjamin L. Roden — 1955 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Scriptural and imminent. History is a sequence written in Daniel and Revelation, currently running, and the point of study is to work out where in it you are standing..
The divine. Trinitarian in the Adventist manner, with two departures. Lois Roden taught from 1977 that the Holy Spirit is feminine — she published a journal, SHEkinah, arguing it. Koresh taught that he was the Lamb of Revelation 5, the only one able to open the seven seals; he did not claim to be Jesus, and members distinguished the two carefully..
Death and after. Conditional immortality in the Adventist pattern: the dead sleep until resurrection, the saved receive eternal life, and there is no eternal torment..