Long before the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) set out on their ill-fated raid against the Branch Davidians' Mount Carmel compound on February 28, 1993, long before the April 19, 1993, conflagration that engulfed the compound, causing the death of some seventy-four Branch Davidians and ending their standoff with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), David Koresh's apocalyptic sect was becoming “another Jonestown.” So said former Branch Davidians more than a year before the sect's shootout with BATF sharpshooters (Breault and King 1993: 11–12). I believe that the apostates were prophetic: Waco became a new Jonestown in the minds of the public. But was the former members' prophecy in part self-fulfilling? To probe this question, I examine here how cultural opponents of David Koresh reinvoked and reworked the central public meaning of Jonestown – mass suicide – in ways that shaped the conflict at Mount Carmel.

There is deep irony in the early prophetic warnings by former members against Mount Carmel as another Jonestown – a “cult.” The people who put the most effort into labeling countercultural religious groups as “cults” typically are not passive bystanders or critics after the fact. They are active opponents. In the case of Jonestown, the movement against the Peoples Temple contributed to the dynamic of accelerating conflict that ended in the murders and mass suicide (Hall 1987). If, as I believe, Mount Carmel must be understood as another Jonestown, then we must ask whether anticult labeling played into the conflict.