Jonestown and the People's Temple

Identification Community established in Guyana by an American religious cult founded by Jim Jones

In November, 1978, an estimated nine hundred followers of the People’s Temple cult committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch. The American public reacted with shock, horror, and a multitude of questions about fringe religious groups and the fate of these people.

In 1969, approximately one hundred members of the People’s Temple Full Gospel Church, a congregation affiliated with the Disciples of Christ Church and led by its charismatic founder, Jim Jones, built a church called Happy Acres in Redwood Valley, California. Consisting largely of African Americans who had relocated to California from Indianapolis in 1965, the church also welcomed newer members, who tended to be white and relatively well educated. First organized by Jones in the racially heated mid-1950’s, the People’s Temple was dedicated to the pursuit of social justice along Marxist lines. Jones called his mission “apostolic socialism.”

In 1970 and 1972, Jones opened branch churches in largely black communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The cultlike quality of the congregation’s dedication to Jones and the presence of armed guards at services drew complaints and criticisms from members and the public at large. Partly as a result of this criticism, a few members were sent to Guyana in 1974 to establish a colony for the congregation. By 1975, fifty people occupied a 3,824-acre site.

Migration from the Bay Area and Los Angeles churches soon swelled the Jonestown population to more than one thousand. By most accounts, life in the community was thriving and healthy. About three-quarters of the population were African American, and members represented thirty-nine U.S. states. Reacting to the publication of scandalous reports about his behavior with congregants, Jones himself moved to Guyana in July, 1977.

Investigations and “Revolutionary Suicide”

Meanwhile, Concerned Relatives, a group of congregants’ friends and relatives, began organizing opposition to a church that they labeled a dangerous cult. Despite their move away from the United States, members were not beyond the reach of authorities bent on examining Jones and those supporting his authority. Defectors from the church provided negative information about the group’s activities, and Concerned Relatives convinced Congressman Leo Ryan of California to organize a more formal investigation. On November 1, 1978, Ryan sent a letter to Jones in which he requested permission to visit and inspect Jonestown. On November 9, Jones sent back a petition signed by the congregation that was meant to dissuade the congressman. Ryan, accompanied by journalists, a film crew, staff members, and members of Concerned Relatives, arrived in Georgetown, Guyana, on November 15. Despite Jones’s misgivings, the party was invited to visit and did so late on November 17. Jones’s wife, Marceline, met them and provided a guided tour.

As the inspection and interviews with members drew to a close on November 18, several People’s Temple members asked to leave with the congressman. Ryan was injured in a scuffle, and armed men chased the delegation back to the airport, firing on them as the defectors began to board the airplane. Ryan, one the defectors, and three journalists died of the gunfire. Back in Jonestown, Jones set in motion a grisly ritual that the cult’s leadership had planned for half a decade—“revolutionary suicide.” More than 900 people, including 260 children, drank a poisoned beverage, while Jones and several others died of gunshot wounds. Some may have had the cyanide injected. Because only 7 of the nearly 917 dead cult members were given autopsies, no one is certain of the exact causes of death of each member. All told, 922 people, including the U.S. congressman, lay dead in the Guyana jungle. Many members fled into the jungle, and eighty-five of them survived the massacre; Jones’s two sons and others were away playing basketball in Georgetown.

Impact

Before the mass suicide of November, 1978, the notion that a religious cult could be inherently dangerous to its members or others was not a part of mainstream public consciousness. After the event, however, many Americans began to distrust fringe religious movements and to view those that developed around cults of personality in an especially bad light. Sociologists, psychologists, and experts on American religion researched why seemingly normal people joined such a cult, relocated to a jungle, and apparently killed themselves. In some ways, religious pluralism and tolerance in the United States suffered a palpable setback following this tragedy.

Bibliography

Eden, Karl. The Jonestown Massacre: The Transcript of Reverend Jim Jones’ Last Speech, Guyana, 1978. Philadelphia: Temple Press, 1993. Provides an important primary source to any study of the mass suicide event.

Layton, Deborah. Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor’s Story of Life and Death in the People’s Temple. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Personalized view of the cult and its end.

Maaga, Mary M. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998. A pastor’s examination of the victims of the cult and how the search for social justice led them to their deaths.

Moore, Rebecca, et al. People’s Temple and Black Religion in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Readable academic account of the place of Jonestown in African American Christianity.

Reiterman, Tom, and John Jacobs. Raven: The Untold Story of Reverend Jim Jones and His People. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Heavily detailed account by investigative journalists.

Weightman, Judith Mary. Making Sense of the Jonestown Suicides: A Sociological History of People’s Temple. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983. Academic study of the attraction and membership of the cult.