A new Netflix documentary premiered this week, recounting one of the strangest and most tragic incidents in American religious history just before its 30th anniversary next month: the bloody ending of the siege between FBI agents and members of the Branch Davidian religious group in Waco, Texas.

For many people, Waco is a lurid story about a cult — a story that has lent itself to decades of sensationalist media coverage (and, recently, a television miniseries). It’s the story of a maniacal and apocalypse-minded cult leader, David Koresh, whose delusional stubbornness led to the deaths of 76 people. The 1993 media coverage of the Waco massacre — which depicted Koresh as a single-minded genius exerting power over his fellow Branch Davidians via mind control — has by now become the defining story of the siege. A 1993 Texas Monthly story captures this mentality well:

For 51 days federal agents camped outside the compound, paralyzed by their own ineptitude, while this notorious liar and con man was permitted to broadcast his incoherent message to the world. The authorities must have known that it was all a sham … but Koresh had given them no choice. The feds were the hostages, the ones who were surrounded without hope. They kept assuring [the public] that they weren’t about to be drawn into a firefight, then permitted exactly that to happen. … What happened at Mount Carmel was not suicide; it was Holy War. Just as Koresh had prophesied.

Media coverage almost uniformly referred to the Branch Davidians as a “cult” and was unsympathetic not just to Koresh but to his followers as well. A Newsweek article published during the ongoing siege, for example, uses as its closing kicker a quote from the estranged son of one Branch Davidian suggesting that the inhabitants of the Mount Carmel compound wanted to die: “They are waiting to get zapped up to heaven where they’ll be transformed and fight a war where they get to kill all their enemies. … The only people that may be sorry are the parents who had to let their children be released.”

The prevailing narrative, in other words, presumed that all inhabitants of the Branch Davidian community were crazy, and that therefore, any violent means used against them would be justified.

Like the story of another so-called cult of the late 20th century — Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple, in which almost 1,000 people died by mass suicide — Waco persists in the popular imagination as a story about a group of people who brought their fate upon themselves. It shouldn’t.

The story of Waco is, without question, a tragedy. But it’s also much more complicated than a story about a cult. Indeed, some of the few survivors of the siege have expressed anger with the way they feel that official accounts of the siege removed Branch Davidians’ agency, portraying them as victims rather than believers. In his book Waco: a Survivor’s Story, David Thibodeau writes: “So many of the Davidians have been demonized by the media … I felt it my duty to tell the true story of a group of people who were trying to live according to their religious beliefs and the teachings of a man they all considered divinely inspired.”

The story of Waco is also the story of disagreements over religious freedom, the rights and boundaries of the federal government, and what it means to be a legitimate religion. 

The Branch Davidians didn’t start with David Koresh

While David Koresh is the figure most commonly associated with the Branch Davidians, the story of the group begins several decades before his ascent to leadership.

The group began as the “Davidians” (also known as “Shepherd’s Rod”), an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, a Christian religious movement that flourished in the late 19th century in America and that boasts 21 million members worldwide.

The Davidian movement was spearheaded in 1930 by a Bulgarian immigrant, Victor Houteff, who dissented from aspects of standard Seventh-Day Adventist theology. Houteff believed that the Messiah prophesied in the biblical book of Isaiah was not Jesus, but was yet to come. Houteff argued that he and his supporters would help bring about the future “Davidic kingdom” — mirroring the empire of the biblical King David — during the apocalypse. That apocalypse, he taught, was imminent.

It was Houteff who first purchased the compound in Waco, Texas, that he called Mount Carmel, after the biblical mountain of the same name. There, Houteff led a small Christian religious community that believed Mount Carmel would be the center of a new divine kingdom following the apocalypse.

After Houteff’s death in 1955, one of his followers, Benjamin Roden, claimed to be hearing messages from God telling him to continue Houteff’s work. Roden’s claims split the group, as did the claims of Houteff’s widow, Florence, who had prophesied that the world would end in 1959. After the world failed to end, Florence Houteff abandoned the Davidian group, leaving Roden’s followers — by now known as the Branch Davidians — to take over part of the Mount Carmel Center.

Only in 1981 did Vernon Howell — the man who would soon change his name to David Koresh — join the Branch Davidian community. A troubled child from an unstable family background, Howell had become a born-again Christian in the 1980s. He joined the Southern Baptist Church, then switched to a Seventh-Day Adventist Church, from which he was expelled after aggressively pursuing a pastor’s daughter. Only then did he encounter the Davidians. According to rumors repeated in Thibodeau’s memoir, Howell may have had an affair with Benjamin Roden’s widow, Lois, by then the de facto leader of the group.

Claiming the gift of prophecy, Howell gained increasing power within the Branch Davidian community, something that brought him into conflict with Lois and Benjamin’s son, George. When George Roden went to prison for murdering another rival, Howell — who changed his name in 1990 to commemorate biblical Kings David and Cyrus (Koresh) — assumed complete control of the group.

This is important because it contradicts a major element of what has by now become the Waco narrative: the idea that the faith of the Branch Davidians of Waco was inextricable from their relationship with Koresh. The Texas Monthly piece quoted above, for example, acknowledges the group’s history, but nevertheless places the blame for the outcome of the Waco siege squarely on Koresh’s cult of personality. As Gary Cartwright wrote:

For nine years Koresh had relentlessly drilled his followers to prepare for Armageddon, had preached its inevitability, had forecast its imminence. This was the ending that Koresh had prayed for and staked his reputation on — the final battle, the trial by fire. It didn’t matter if the fire came from automatic rifles or a match and a can of kerosene; this was what Koresh had promised. Anything less would have been a monumental betrayal of his claim to be David Koresh, Angel Warrior of the Armageddon. Did anyone really expect the prophet of Ranch Apocalypse to meekly surrender his sheep to the enemy and come out with his hands up?

While Koresh did, ultimately, possess an extraordinary amount of power within the Branch Davidian community, he was not its only representative. A number of Branch Davidians exist today, many of whom see Koresh as a splinter leader from their own legitimate tradition. And many of the Branch Davidians who ultimately died at Waco had been longstanding members of the community, practicing their faith long before Koresh was even born.

For example, Koresh’s first (and only legal) wife, Rachel, was a second-generation Branch Davidian, and both she and her parents remained with Koresh until the end of the siege.

David Koresh may have engaged in acts of sexual abuse — but that wasn’t the source of the FBI’s main interest in the community

David Koresh taught that he was a messiah and that, furthermore, any children born of the messiah would be sacred. Because of this, he engaged in multiple “marriages” with women in the Branch Davidian community, some of whom were underage, fathering at least 13 children. In the years following the massacre, a number of additional children who had grown up among the Branch Davidian community reported that Koresh had molested them.

That said, at the time of the Waco siege, the evidence to support any sexual allegations against Koresh was far more inconclusive. Multiple probes into alleged sexual abuse at the Mount Carmel site went nowhere.

The government’s primary interest in the Branch Davidians, according to later documents, was the alleged possession of a potential illegal arms cache on the site.

On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) attempted to raid the Branch Davidian site in order to execute a search warrant. What happened next remains unclear — both surviving Branch Davidians and surviving agents claimed the other side fired first — but the raid resulted in a bitter gun battle that killed five ATF agents and five Branch Davidians, and injured an additional 16 agents.

What followed was all but unprecedented in American history: a 51-day standoff between the Branch Davidians and the FBI (which had taken over from the ATF). The FBI used a variety of tactics to breach the compound — including the playing of agonizingly loud music on speakers 24/7 in order to induce sleep deprivation in members — and participated in a full 60 hours of negotiation with Koresh in an attempt to negotiate access to the site. Malcolm Gladwell, writing on the siege for the New Yorker, captures the sheer scale of the operation:

Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the F.B.I. assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history: ten Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, six hundred and sixty-eight agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, fifteen U.S. Army personnel, thirteen members of the Texas National Guard, thirty-one Texas Rangers, a hundred and thirty-one officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, seventeen from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and eighteen Waco police, for a total of eight hundred and ninety-nine people.

Finally, on April 19, the FBI raided the compound, using military-grade weaponry such as armored tanks, as well as tear gas. A fire broke out — the source of which remains disputed — and 76 of the 85 Branch Davidians, including Koresh and a number of children, were killed.

For some, the story of Waco is the story of government overreach

By and large, the public treated the ending of the siege of Waco as the story of a crazy cult that had gotten the end it deserved, similar to the mass suicide at Jonestown. Just a day after the raid, then-President Bill Clinton argued that the FBI bore no responsibility for the deaths at Waco, saying: “I do not think the United States government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of religious fanatics decided to kill themselves.”

But for some, the Waco tragedy was the foundation of a different narrative: a story of unlawful government overreach, and of the consequences of federal aggression. On the political far right in particular, Waco became something of a rallying cry for those who saw the federal government as a threat. Right-wing anti-government bomber Timothy McVeigh, for example, carried out his 1995 Oklahoma City bombings in part as a direct response to Waco, where he had been an eyewitness at the siege.

As a 2015 New York Times story looking at Waco’s influence on today’s far right put it:

For right-wing militias and so-called Patriot groups, Waco amounts to evidence of a tyrannical, illegitimate government unblinkingly prepared to kill its own people … the specter of Waco has not faded. Right-wing extremists regularly invoke it as a defining moment, proof of Washington’s perfidy. “Waco can happen at any given time,” Mike Vanderboegh, a prominent figure in the Patriot movement, told Retro Report. He added ominously: “But the outcome will be different this time. Of that I can assure you.”

The Waco massacre challenges us to think of what it means to be a cult

The media tended to legitimized the FBI’s raid on Mount Carmel — despite its disastrous outcome for many innocent members of the Branch Davidians, including children — because Waco was a “cult.”

But all too often, notes Dr. Megan Goodwin, a scholar specializing in American minority religions, the term “cult” is used to delegitimize and diminish religious practices that don’t fit neatly into the American (Christian, often Protestant) mainstream, and justify violence that would not be used against more established religious groups. She notes that the term “cult” is itself controversial in scholarly circles (many prefer the more neutral term “new religious movements”).

“My standard joke is that ‘cult [equals] religion/community [you] don’t like,’” says Goodwin. But, she notes, “the political ramifications of identifying something as a cult are real and often violent.”  

After all, there is no standard way to define a cult. As I’ve written elsewhere, the designation of “cult” is more often an aesthetic value judgment — a religious group that “seems weird” — rather than an academic one.

And when it comes to the experiences of the Branch Davidians, who belonged to an established religious community that predated Koresh, that designation gets even trickier.

After all, many surviving members of the Waco siege, such as David Thibodeau, report that their faith — and Koresh’s legacy — remains important to them. Does dismissing their experience as that of brainwashed cult members diminish their own agency to make free choices about faith?

“By resisting the term ‘cult,’ I’m not suggesting that David Koresh didn’t sexually exploit his community,” Goodwin told Vox, “I’m suggesting that using the term ‘cult’ to describe the Branch Davidians at Waco helped the ATF decide that the community, and Koresh specifically, were irrational or being held against their will and that they needed saving.”

It’s a point also raised by religion scholar Catherine Wessinger in an essay for the Conversation.

“When journalists and law enforcement agents use the term ‘cult’ to describe a religious group,” Wessinger writes, “it’s problematic. In fact, studies have shown that once the ‘cult’ label is applied, the group is more likely to be deemed illegitimate and dangerous. It’s then easier for law enforcement agents to target the group with excessive, militarized actions, and it’s easier for the public to place all blame on the supposed cult leader for any deaths.”

The fact that it was so easy to diminish Koresh and his followers as “unworthy victims,” she adds, made it that much easier for the public to accept their deaths. “Religion is a constitutionally protected category. … And the identification of Waco’s Branch Davidians as a cult places them outside the protections of the state.”

Twenty-five years later, the complicated legacy of Waco challenges us to think about how the language we use to talk about religion — “victims,” “cult leader,” “fanatics” — affects the way we react to them. Would the FBI have used armored tanks and tear gas in an attempt to protect victims of, say, similarly institutionalize sex abuse in evangelical Christian or Catholic communities?

After all, Goodwin points out, “Americans frequently damage people we think need saving.”

Update, March 23, 2023, 1 pm: This story was originally published in April 2018 and has been updated to reflect the release of the new documentary.

Everything is a witch hunt to President Donald Trump.

First it was Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian collusion and obstruction of justice. Now it’s impeachment.

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday, objecting to the impeachment proceedings that will culminate in a House floor vote Wednesday, Trump wrote: “More due process was afforded to those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.”

It might sound outlandish — people, mostly young women, were literally executed in Salem in the late 17th century — but this is one of Trump’s favorite tropes. In his telling, he is the subject of the greatest political witch hunt in history. He’s often takes the same line to his preferred platform, Twitter.

Trump tweeted about the Mueller “witch hunt” more than 110 times in 2018. He’s since linked the two, impeachment and the Mueller probe, into one big “WITCH HUNT!”

The president became something of a trendsetter. When Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens was facing allegations of horrendous sexual misconduct, he unsubtly said it was “exactly like what’s happening with the witch hunts in Washington, D.C.” The critics of #MeToo — often but not always men — have also compared the campaign to eradicate sexual abuse to a witch hunt.

If you want people to believe you’re wrongfully accused, the subject of malicious scrutiny on the part of your enemies, you cry that you’re the target of a witch hunt.

Trump didn’t pick this phrase out of thin air. Politically, this goes back at least to McCarthyism and Watergate. The Nixon White House also claimed he was the subject of a witch hunt. Critics of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s insidious anti-communist probes called them witch hunts. Back in those days, playwright Arthur Miller made the subtext text with his play The Crucible, an anti-McCarthy allegory set during the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.

Which is where our story really begins. In the modern setting, “witch hunt” is a useful defense because people living in the 21st century know that the “witches” of 17th-century Salem were almost certainly innocent and, therefore, that the persecutions that led to 20 deaths were unjust. It’s a hyperbolic if undeniably powerful rhetorical device to claim one’s innocence.

There is also, once you stop to think about it, something distasteful about men in power — particularly two men credibly accused of sexual assault — using a term that harks back to an era in history in which a patriarchal society wrongfully persecuted (mostly) women.

“We’ve turned the expression on its head. Traditionally a witchcraft charge amounted to powerful men charging powerless women with a phony crime. Now it is powerful men screeching that they are being charged with phony crimes,” Stacey Schiff, who wrote a 2015 book about Salem called The Witches, told Vox over email. “Unfair targeting is the only thing the two have in common, and even that is debatable.”

The Salem witch trials, explained by politics

What exactly caused the mass hysteria in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 and 1693 is still a subject that divides historians and others who study the witch trials. What we know for sure is that between 1692 and 1693, 19 people were hanged, and one crushed to death, ostensibly for the civil crime of practicing malevolent witchcraft, after an outbreak of mass hysteria. They had all maintained their innocence — with the exception of Tituba, a local enslaved woman, whose confession may have been tortured out of her.

The majority of the Salem witch trials didn’t actually happen in Salem Town — what is known as Salem today — but in Salem Village, an inland hamlet that was renamed Danvers in 1752.

Mary Beth Norton, a Cornell University professor who wrote 2007’s In the Devil’s Snare with an eye toward explaining the crisis in its historical and political context, connected the hysteria over the witch trials and the actions taken by village elders to Native American attacks on the New England settlers.

She summarized her understanding of the witch trials to Vox like this:

I argue in my book that the judges at the trials, who were also the military leaders of the colony, used the search for “witches” as a means of deflecting their own responsibility for the disasters then afflicting the colony. But as they genuinely believed in the existence of witches (that was the accepted opinion at the time), we can’t say that they manufactured a belief in witches for political reasons. Still, the search for witchcraft was very beneficial to them politically, until it all came crashing down on their heads after about nine months when skepticism about how the trials were being conducted prevailed in the colony. People didn’t stop believing in the existence of witches, but they stopped believing that the Massachusetts judicial system was successfully uncovering and convicting them.

As Norton emphasized, it’s simplistic to think of the Salem trials as purely political: Christians living in New England in the 1690s absolutely believed that witches were real and that they could serve as consorts of the devil to wreak havoc in their town.

But the relevance to our modern understanding of a “witch hunt” is eerie. Sinister authorities using the specter of “witches” to protect their own interests. The deteriorating faith in political institutions. Right from the start, “witch hunts” were imbued with much of the meaning that would make them such a powerful rhetorical tool in 2018.

How “witch hunt” became so politically potent

As a result, Salem has held a prominent place in America’s political imagination ever since.

As Texas Tech’s Gretchen Adams chronicled in her book The Specter of Salem, the witch trials served several political purposes in the intervening centuries. In the 1790s, textbooks would use Salem as the quintessential example of America’s less enlightened past, a history the new nation was abandoning as it embraced Enlightenment ideals in its early years.

During the 1830s, during a religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, which rejected the Enlightenment, critics would compare those new religious orders to the Salem elders, seeking to remind people of the dangers of unchecked fanaticism. During the Civil War, Southerners would cite the witch trials to attack the Union for its supposed irrationality in persecuting the war.

But for modern politics, the turning point seems to have been Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible. A retelling of the trials, the play was a coded indictment of the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and ’50s. Miller heavily implied that the accusers and magistrates of Salem were motivated by a combination of fear and greed, including a desire to seize the lands of the accused. The story of Salem, for Miller, was the story of any mass panic — how self-interested humans use fear and panic to stoke “witch hunts” for personal gain.

“It’s a 20th-century term that comes into use during the Cold War. There was no single, directed, witch-identifying force in America’s 17th-century prosecutions,” Schiff said. “In that sense, Salem does not actually constitute a ‘hunt.’ It’s more a panic, or an epidemic, or a societal delusion.”

As Vox’s Dara Lind noted previously, Richard Nixon (or his staff) invoked Salem as the Watergate investigation was gaining steam:

President Nixon and his top aides believe that the Senate Watergate hearings are unfair and constitute a “political witch-hunt,” according to White House sources. The sources, said, that the President in recent weeks had expressed bitterness and deep hostility toward the two-month-old proceedings. “The President sees the hearings as an attempt to get Richard Nixon and do it just damn unfairly,” one source said.

According to four separate sources, the hostility toward the hearings is pervasive among the White House staff, especially among former assistants to H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, the resigned top presidential aides. One White House source said he saw the struggle with the Senate Watergate committee as not just politics but a battle for survival. “The Ervin committee is out to destroy the President,” he said.

The current “witch hunt” claims are both gross and dangerous

Vox’s Lind wasn’t the only one to connect Nixon and Watergate to Trump’s use of the phrase. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward cited Trump’s laments of a “witch hunt” as they described the “eerily similar confrontation” that Trump had with Mueller and that Nixon had with special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

On the one hand, Trump comparing the investigation into his campaign to a crisis that left 20 people dead in the 17th century is clearly ridiculous — there is much more evidence in the criminal indictments, the court-sanctioned wiretaps, and the consensus of Republican and Democratic investigators for Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election than there is for witchcraft — and rather unsavory. Not to mention the evidence, often provided by the White House itself, of the Trump administration pursuing quid pro quo with Ukraine to investigate former vice president Joe Biden.

As for Greitens, who so transparently drafted off Trump’s tactics, his use of the term might be even more galling: This is a man accused of coercing a woman into sexual acts and then threatening to blackmail her if she talked.

“There is something twisted, misdirected, and vaguely demented in the cries of ‘witch hunt,’” Schiff said. “Many American women (and a handful of men) did protest their innocence. They were not witches, though the courts decided they were; they hanged all the same. None ever cried ‘witch hunt.’”

But Trump’s never-ending laments of “witch hunt!” can’t just be dismissed. They serve an important function for the president: discrediting his opponents.

It isn’t an accident that Trump’s most influential allies in the media, like Fox’s Sean Hannity deploy the exact same rhetoric.

For now, most Americans still support the impeachment proceedings. Screaming “witch hunt” didn’t save Nixon either — not that we should necessarily believe the Ukraine affair will end the same way Watergate did.

But at the same time, Trump has shored up support among Republican voters and politicians. His “witch hunt” claims have found a particular audience, it seems.

Investigating potential crimes against the country shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But it’s become that way. Trump — and the screams of “witch hunt!” — have helped make it so.

How should Christians respond to Trump’s rhetoric on immigration?

Within the white evangelical world, at least, that answer is complicated. On the one hand, several major evangelical leaders and institutions have been vocal advocates for the dignity of refugees, and for a more compassionate public policy toward immigration overall.

In June, delegates at the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual conferences passed a near-unanimous resolution affirming the dignity of migrants and refugees. More recently, six major evangelical leaders, including Russell Moore, director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm, and Galen Caley, a vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, released joint statements urging President Donald Trump to allow members of the Honduran migrant caravan currently making its way to the US-Mexico border to seek asylum in the United States.

“People fleeing for their lives are not to be used as political props,” Moore has said. “Those escaping violence and persecution in Honduras and elsewhere bear the image of God and should be treated with dignity and compassion. As Christians, we should share the heart of Jesus for refugees and others imperiled.”

On the other hand, white evangelicals report being more hostile to refugees, and to migrants more generally, than any other religious group in America. A full 68 percent of them say they believe America has no responsibility to house refugees, according to a poll by Pew conducted this spring. Another poll, conducted by Washington Post/ABC in January, found that 75 percent of white evangelicals said they thought that the Trump-era federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants was a good thing, compared to just 46 percent of Americans overall.

Prominent white evangelicals close to the president, such as Paula White, have frequently defended Trump’s stance on immigration policy, including family separation. They argue that Jesus should not be considered a forerunner of modern-day refugees because, as a sinless man, he never broke immigration law.

From his dismissal of “shithole countries” to his attempts to institute a “Muslim travel ban,” from his incendiary rhetoric about Mexican immigrants being rapists and criminals, to his latest attempts to prevent the Honduran migrants to seeking asylum, Trump’s approach to borders has been one of nativism and insularity by protecting (his idea of white) America at the expense of everyone else. And, by and large, white evangelicals on the ground have followed suit — even when some in evangelical leadership is advocating for more nuanced policy positions.

The reasons for this discrepancy are complicated. They include a white evangelical population that gets its moral sense as much from conservative media as it does from scripture. There’s also a more general conflation of white evangelicalism with the GOP party agenda, which has been intensifying since the days of the Moral Majority in the 1980s.

As Jenny Yang, vice president for advocacy and policy for World Relief, the humanitarian wing of the National Association for Evangelicals, told Vox, white evangelicals’ views on immigration are more likely to be shaped “not from their local church or their pastor, but actually from the news media. … This has become an issue of the church being discipled by the media more than the Bible or the local pastor in terms of their views on immigration.”

Ed Stetzer, a Christian author and commentator who leads the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, agreed. “White evangelicals are more shaped on this issue by Republican views,” he told Vox. “They’re being discipled by their cable news network of choice and by their social media feeds.” He pointed out that, while white evangelicals are more likely than other religious voting blocs to express conservative views on immigration, they don’t necessarily do so at greater rates than nonwhite evangelical Republicans.

In other words, the political views of white evangelicals may say far more about their party affiliation than it does about their theological identity. In the Trump era, in particular, white evangelical Christianity and nativist political isolation have become particularly intertwined. Trump, his administration, and its allies have used the language of Christian nationalism to shore up their political base.

Stetzer acknowledged that “what you have is a distance between the grassroots and what’s often called the evangelical leadership” on immigration, with evangelicals in the pews generally far more negative on immigrants than those in the pulpit. “The leaders of evangelical institutions have increasing distance from one another at this issue.” Only, he said, once evangelical leaders and pastors were successful in promoting a Biblical theology of immigration, rather than one gleaned from cable news, could everyday evangelicals adopt a less reactionary stance towards migration.

Evangelical political theology often has a strongly authoritarian strain

The uneasiness within the evangelical community over immigration policy can be tied to a tension within evangelical theology itself. Some passages in the Bible — such as Matthew 25 — urge care for those on the margins. Meanwhile other passages such as Romans 13 are interpreted by evangelicals like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to justify Trump’s family separation policy and an authoritarian political theology.

Travis Wussow, vice president of public policy for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, captured some of these tensions. On the one hand, he said, “Americans might agree or disagree about the details of asylum policy…[but] we [evangelicals] can’t disagree about whether every single migrant is made in the image of God” — and therefore worthy of being treated with dignity.

At the same time, Wussow noted, “One of the propositions that Romans 13 stands for that government is … an institution that’s been created by God, for the good of humanity.” Ultimately, he said, the idea of national borders — and that a government’s response is primarily to care for its own people — is also scriptural.

“I think if you just sort of step back and look at scripture, God seems to see the world in terms of nations,” he said, adding: “We think that every government has an obligation and responsibility to care first for those who are within its sovereignty and then answer the question, What can we do to extend compassion to those who are fleeing persecution.”

But, Yang pointed out, the idea of civil disobedience — even when it comes specifically to immigration — is also deeply rooted in scripture. He cited the biblical story in the book of Genesis of Abraham smuggling his wife Sarah into Egypt, having her pose as his sister, to protect her. “People need to also understand that the laws are broken in scripture,” she said.

In fact, she argued: “The whole scripture is based on migration. Every single major biblical character was an immigrant. Jesus himself was a refugee. Abraham, who’s considered the father of our faith … was an immigrant. Joseph was a victim of human trafficking.”

Yang rejected the idea that a Christian political theology had to make a choice: “There’s a Christian narrative around the issue: there’s always an either/or, which is between the role of law enforcement, security and showing compassion to strangers. And it’s always talked about as a choice between one or the other. I think that’s a false dichotomy. I think we can hold the rule of law and submit to the governing authority while also welcoming the stranger and showing compassion to those who are enormous and they’re not mutually exclusive.”

The Christian duty to obey the law should galvanize a call to make laws fairer, she said. “Not only do we have a responsibility to submit to the government authorities and ensure that our government has proper resources to do that, but it’s also our role to ensure that the law itself is good, adjust and is working for the common good.”

Stetzer, likewise, pointed out that within scripture, there’s also what he interprets as a clear calling for the collapse of borders within the Kingdom of God. Citing the prophetic book of Revelation about the end of days, Stetzers noted “there will be men and women from every tongue, tribe, and nation. So if you’re not used to being around people that are different than you, you’re really going to hate heaven.”

The evangelical church is more than just the white evangelical church

National and ethnic distinctions, however, are blurring the present evangelical church, not just the prophesied future one, Yang said. Evangelicals in America are getting more diverse, and white evangelicals are becoming a smaller and smaller portion of the population.

Just in the past two years, the percentage of white evangelicals in America dropped from 17 percent to 15.3 percent according to the latest PRRI polls. And more and more black and Latino evangelicals are joining historically white denominations and traditions. While polling data tends to focus exclusively on white evangelicals, evangelicals of color, Yang said, “are actually a lot more welcoming and are more supportive of comprehensive immigration reform.”

In fact, she said, in many communities, evangelical churches are sustained by the influx of immigrants, particularly from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. “Immigration is not just changing the face of our nation,” Yang said, “it’s actually changing the face of Christianity.” About one in three evangelicals in America today is Latino, black, or Asian.

“There are people who are very firm in their faith and, in fact, for them to be able to come into the United States of America is a part of the story of God’s faithfulness and love. And they come. They plant churches.”

White evangelicals, in other words, are only part of the story of evangelicalism in America. And as their numbers shrink, an “evangelical” approach to politics may come to look very different.

Activists are castigating Facebook for hiring a public relations firm accused of promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and blamed Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros for galvanizing some of Facebook’s critics.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on some of Facebook’s tactics to deflect criticism over its role in enabling political propaganda, particularly from Russia, to be disseminated on its platform in the runup to the 2016 presidential election. According to the article, Facebook retained the services of the public relations firm Definers Public Affairs, which had been founded by several Republican political operatives. Definers, in turn, helped push the narrative that critics of Facebook were being bankrolled by Soros and his Open Society Foundations.

In particular, Definers targeted Color of Change, a racial justice organization that counts Soros among its many funders. That organization was part of a coalition of activists known as Freedom From Facebook, according to internal Definers strategy documents leaked to the Times. Definers representatives frequently contacted journalists, encouraging them to look into Color of Change’s funding as a means of casting doubts on its legitimacy, specifically as a recipient of funds by Soros.

In a statement, Rashad Robinson, president of Color Of Change, said: “Facebook’s response to our campaign … was to fan the flames of anti-Semitism … they have given oxygen to the worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the white nationalist Trump base. Those theories aim to not only dehumanize Jews, but also seek to deny legitimacy to progressive social movements led by people of color, by suggesting we have no agenda of our own.”

Facebook has since cut ties with Definers, and its founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied any knowledge of the strategy, telling reporters that he “learned about this reading the New York Times yesterday.”

In a statement, Facebook condemned the story for its many “inaccuracies,” adding: “Definers did encourage members of the press to look into the funding of ‘Freedom from Facebook,’ an anti-Facebook organization. The intention was to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company. To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue.”

But if the “Soros bankrolling” narrative sounds a little bit familiar, that’s because it is. The idea that activists, and leftist activists in particular, are being bankrolled by Soros, or by Jewish interest groups more widely, is a ubiquitous form of political propaganda.

When President Trump wanted to delegitimize the women protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, he floated the idea that they were actually paid protesters funded by Soros. Likewise, just a few weeks ago, opponents of the Central American migrant caravan currently heading to the US-Mexico border, where its members intend to seek asylum, cast doubt on the legitimacy of participants’ intentions implied that they, too, were being funded by Soros. In that case, the conspiracy theory led to political violence: The alleged shooter at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg, who killed 11 Jews in October, seems to have directly cited Soros’s alleged involvement in the migrant caravan as inspiration for his decision to carry out the attacks.

This trope has a particularly loaded anti-Semitic history. The idea of the Jew as a “puppet master” secretly pulling the strings of world affairs for the express purpose of destabilizing governments or diluting the white population goes back at least to the days of the European Enlightenment.

And as Media Matters researcher Talia Lavin has noted, it has become particularly popular with white supremacists who wish to imply that Jews are somehow responsible for motivating and controlling people of color as part of a nefarious plan to commit “white genocide.”

“People don’t understand the degree to which anti-Semitism is both vital to and inextricable from white supremacy in the US,” Lavin told Vox.

That Facebook was willing to hire a public relations firm to peddle anti-Semitic conspiracy theories doesn’t mean that Facebook is an actively anti-Semitic company. After all, both its founder, Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, are Jewish.

Facebook’s top figures have had to deal with what they characterized as public anti-Semitism themselves. The Times article notes that in July, when Freedom From Facebook protesters crashed a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee, holding signs comparing Zuckerberg and Sandberg to tentacles of an octopus, an official at Facebook immediately called the Anti-Defamation League, which condemned the image as playing into other anti-Semitic tropes. (The image’s creators said they were referencing a historic cartoon condemning Standard Oil.)

But Facebook’s willingness to pick and choose the conspiracy theories it peddles, and its seeming indifference — or, at least, failure to do due diligence — to how those theories might fan into wider conspiracy narratives points to a bigger problem.

From Facebook to Twitter, tech companies show a fanatically apolitical devotion to free-for-all capitalism, in which all information, from conspiracy theories to hate speech, is treated as equally valid. This has led to an ideas marketplace in which toxicity is allowed to flourish.

Earlier this year, for example, Zuckerberg made headlines when he announced that the site would not clamp down on Holocaust deniers, telling Recode’s Kara Swisher that Facebook was committed to treating all content equally.

“I find [Holocaust denial] deeply offensive,” Zuckerberg said. “But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” He went on to add, “[Unless you’re] trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.” He later apologized for his remarks.

Like many tech entrepreneurs, Zuckerberg seems to subscribe to a libertarian ethos of truth, one that trusts an open platform, a free exchange of ideas, and a fundamental view of human nature as sufficiently objective to assess ideas fairly. It’s the same ethos that, for example, has made Twitter so slow to remove white supremacists and neo-Nazis from its platform.

But Facebook’s willingness to partner with those who weaponize information — peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories when it’s beneficial, then turning around and accusing its opponents of doing the same — reveals the fundamental moral rot at the core of such an ethos. Ideas aren’t interchangeable, even in an information marketplace. As the Tree of Life shooting taught us last month, narratives do have consequences. According to both the ADL and the latest FBI hate crime statistics, anti-Semitic incidents in America have reached an all-time high.

And Facebook’s apparent blithe indifference to those consequences casts doubt on the entire moral architecture of the website. Information on Facebook isn’t “free.” Rather, its costs go straight into Facebook’s coffers.