Sacred and Profane

Malcolm Gladwell

The New Yorker

2014-03-27

“In order to give his followers a sense of identity and resilience, Jospeh Smith “required them to maintain certain fictions of cultural apartness.” Moore describes the Davidians. They were “value-rational”—that is to say, their rationality was organized around values, not goals. A value-rational person would accept his fourteen-year-old daughter’s polygamous marriage, if he was convinced that it was in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Because the F.B.I. could not take the faith of the Branch Davidians seriously, it had no meaningful way to communicate with them”


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