PERSPECTIVES ON THE WACO TRAGEDY : The ‘Crazy’ Label Was Lethal : There’s a righteous streak in American thought that refuses to see repellent kinds of thought as religion.

Forget about the guns for a moment. Forget everything you have heard about brainwashing and mind control. Forget even the children, if you can, for a moment.

What happened at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco is the sort of thing that could only have happened in this land of the free and the home of the righteous. American civil religious dogma holds that religious wars are fought by other peoples, on foreign soil. We practice freedom of religion here. Elsewhere, if the state intervenes against a religious group, it’s called oppression. Here, when federal forces attack a religious group, it is for their own good and the public benefit.

Even if David Koresh might have been a maniac, even a potentially dangerous one, there is no good excuse for what happened in Waco.

I am in no way defending Koresh or his views; indeed, what he practiced and preached is repellent to me. But it is religion--in fact, religion of a not-uncommon type in our society. Prattling on about thought control and deprogramming, profiling its leader as a nut case and his followers as social misfits does not alter that fact.

Religion can make people do awful things, to themselves and to others. When Buddhists or Hindus engage in self-immolation, we Americans cringe and call it “part of their culture.” When Hare Krishnas or “Moonies” pledge unswerving allegiance to their leaders, we call it brainwashing. When Operation Rescue members or pious Roman Catholics do the same thing, we deem it “deeply held religious conviction.”

In an open society like ours, freedom of religion may necessarily entail toleration of a certain amount of craziness. But this is a matter of perspective. When, as happened a few weeks ago, federal agents are lauded for “restraint” in holding fire against an apparently unarmed Davidian leaving the compound, or when the FBI attributes the deaths of women and children to the mothers’ failure of “maternal instinct,” we have to wonder who is crazier.

The justification for the initial attack also bears scrutiny. The government apparently only suspected that the Davidians had violated, or might be intending to violate, firearms laws. The fact that a bunch of “crazy” religious fanatics were involved in no way justified the severity of the actions that were taken against Koresh and his followers seven weeks ago, or Monday.

What we don’t like or understand, we call crazy. We make it a subject of jokes. Sometimes, we kill it.