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03/07/93
Texas may have many extremist groups, cult experts say
By Terry Box / The Dallas Morning News
Wide-open Texas, where arms and isolation are abundant, could be home to dozens of groups as extremist as the Branch Davidians in Waco, some cult experts say.
With its acres of empty, inexpensive land, Texas would seem ideal for groups that want to cloister themselves from society and veer far from the mainstream-without attracting much attention, the experts said.
And although some experts believe that there are indeed many well-armed cultist groups in Texas, most speculate that no more than 10 or 12 have any real potential for violence.
"I would say treat this (incident in Waco) as an aberration, don't set up surveillance of minority or new religious groups, and don't assume that they all contain within them the seeds of violence,' said Dr. Lonnie D. Kliever, professor of religious studies at SMU.
Said Russ Wise of Probe Ministries of Dallas, a Christian research organization: "(Group leader) David Koresh is a small fish who made a big splash.'
Part of the problem in dealing with cults or extremist groups is that no central agency in the state tracks them. The Texas Department of Public Safety "tracks crime, not groups like cults,' said agency spokeswoman Laureen Chernow.
"We would certainly look at something on a selective basis if we think a law is being broken, but not otherwise,' Ms. Chernow said.
In addition, many of the private organizations that do try to keep up with the groups can't agree on what exactly constitutes a cult.
"One man's cult is another man's church,' noted Dr. Kliever, who has studied cults for a decade.
Despite the lack of any official data on cults, there have been attempts to assess their strength.
The Encyclopedia of American Religions, for example, lists 34 groups in Texas that some might view as cults or as having cultist tendencies. They range from the Branch Davidians in Waco to Madalyn Murray O'Hair's American Atheists organization in Austin, and include at least three groups in the Dallas area.
Klanwatch, which monitors white supremacist groups, lists nine such groups in Texas-among them one each in Dallas and Fort Worth.
The North Texas chapter of the Cult Awareness Network, which has collected information on the Branch Davidians in Waco for at least five years, has no official estimate of the number of cultist groups in Texas.
But Nelda Neale, president of the Dallas-based chapter, said she thinks that the number is "in the hundreds and maybe thousands.'
Groups emerging
Though most are not as self-contained and well-armed as the Branch Davidians, "new names of groups are emerging all the time,' Ms. Neale said.
"In my opinion, the aberrant Christian groups are just exploding,' she said. "My own personal opinion is I'm surprised it's taken so long for this to occur because there are so many armed camps out there.'
Because of the lack of central information on cults in Texas, it is difficult to estimate the number of cults or compare activity here with that in other states. But Ms. Neale said she would be surprised if there were an unusually high number of cults in the state, if only because they are a relatively recent phenomenon.
"The big cults all sprang up on the West and East coasts, and Texas was one of the last states to get them,' she said. "There's nothing about the culture of the state that lends itself to cults. It's the vastness of the state and the availability of cheap land that attracts them.'
When the Children of God left California for Texas in the 1970s, one reason they did so was the cost of land in California, Ms. Neale noted.
That sort of mobility-in which groups move into and out of the state for a variety of reasons-complicates attempts to track cults, the experts said. Further aggravating the problem is that cults can undergo dramatic transformations over time.
For more than 50 years, the Davidians were considered "different,' but never posed a threat to anyone, said Dr. Bill Pitts, a professor of religion at Baylor University in Waco.
"Actually, the founder (of the group) was opposed to the bearing of arms,' Dr. Pitts said. "The members of the group were viewed as being a little different, but they were considered good workers, good laborers. During World War II, they were conscientious objectors so they worked in the hospitals.'
Many oddities
All that began changing in 1987 when the group's current leader, Mr.
Koresh, stepped to the forefront after a gunbattle with George Roden, who was trying to take control of the group.
The Davidians' recent history is only one oddity about the group, the experts said. It also is structured in a way that makes it distinct from most other cults and sects.
"They are not that psychologically different, but they are sociologically different,' said Dr. Kliever of SMU. "The members of this group have sociologically separated themselves by creating a self-enclosed, self-sustaining community. For a lot of practical reasons, there aren't many groups in the United States-much less Texas-that do that anymore.'
Mr. Wise of Probe Ministries said he doubts that cult membership in general is growing much in Texas.
"They lose as many members as they gain,' he said. "The average
stay is three to five years. It takes about that long for people to
wake up and say, "What am I doing?' '
Like most of the other experts, Mr. Wise discounts the possibility that a large number of groups similar to the Branch Davidians could be thriving in remote corners of the state-mainly because the Davidians are so different.
But he said that the situation could change-and change quickly.
"Everything's up for grabs in the '90s,' Mr. Wise said.
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