Jonestown and the Peoples Temple

Jim Jones was born in 1931 in rural Indiana and was drawn to religion as a boy, visiting the town’s churches and preaching to other children. In the early 1950s he became a student pastor in Indianapolis, and in 1955 he founded his own congregation, which soon took the name Peoples Temple. Its services borrowed the energy of Pentecostal worship, with music, testimony and healing, but its message was unusual for Indiana in the 1950s. Jones preached that racial segregation was a sin, and he built one of the city’s few fully integrated churches.

The Temple ran soup kitchens, care homes and a job service, and Jones and his wife Marceline adopted children of several races, calling them their “rainbow family”. In 1960 the Temple joined the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a mainstream Protestant denomination, and Jones was ordained in 1964. At the same time his preaching drifted. He spoke more and more about nuclear war, and he increasingly presented himself not as a servant of the gospel but as a prophet, and at times as a divine figure in his own right.

A word on terms is needed here. Groups like the Peoples Temple are often called cults, but scholars of religion usually prefer “new religious movement”, because “cult” is a contested label that can describe any unpopular group. Jonestown is studied precisely because it shows how an admired church could change over two decades into something its early members would not have recognised.

In 1965, convinced that a nuclear attack was coming and that northern California would be safer, Jones moved about 140 members to Redwood Valley, near Ukiah. In the early 1970s the Temple opened large churches in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Buses carried members up and down the state, and the Temple could fill a hall or a political rally at short notice. Politicians valued that support, and in 1976 Jones was appointed to chair the San Francisco Housing Authority.

Jones called his creed apostolic socialism. Members, especially the most committed, gave the Temple their property and income and lived in communal houses, and older members often signed over pension cheques. For many, especially poor African Americans and young idealists, the Temple offered what society did not: community, purpose, and a place where Black and white people lived as equals. Jones also used the Bible against itself, mocking passages he called racist and teaching that socialism was the true religion.

Inside the movement, discipline was strict and growing harsher. Members were criticised and punished at public catharsis meetings, and loyalty was tested by sleep deprivation and long meetings. Jones demanded constant attention, and his inner circle handled finances, legal affairs and the defection of members. In August 1977 a magazine article based on interviews with former members described beatings and financial pressure, and Jones left for Guyana before it appeared.

The Temple had begun clearing land in the north-west of Guyana in 1974, leased formally from the government in 1976, near the Venezuelan border, and by the end of 1977 nearly a thousand people lived there. Jonestown was presented as a socialist promised land. Residents built cottages, a school and a pavilion, and grew crops in poor soil. Daily life combined hard labour with constant broadcasts of Jones’s voice, rationed food and strict control of contact with the outside world. Passports were held by the leadership, and leaving was very difficult.

Jones’s health and mood worsened in 1978. He told residents that the settlement faced attack by American agents or Guyanese soldiers, and he held White Nights, sudden alarms in which the community gathered to face a supposed enemy. Some of these included rehearsals of collective death, which he presented as “revolutionary suicide”, a protest against a hostile world.

In the United States, former members and relatives formed the Concerned Relatives, which lobbied for an investigation. In November 1978 Leo Ryan, a Democratic congressman from the San Francisco area, flew to Guyana with journalists, his aide Jackie Speier and several relatives. On 17 November the party was received in Jonestown with a musical evening. The next day a number of residents asked to leave with Ryan, and a Temple member attacked him with a knife, though he was not seriously hurt.

As the party prepared to fly out from the airstrip at Port Kaituma, a group of Temple gunmen opened fire. Ryan, three journalists, Don Harris, Bob Brown and Greg Robinson, and a defecting member, Patricia Parks, were killed, and others, including Speier, were wounded. At Jonestown, Jones gathered the residents in the pavilion. Over the next hours residents were given a poisoned drink, while armed guards stood around the gathering. A tape recording of the final meeting survives, in which at least one resident argued against dying.

In all, 909 people died at Jonestown, among them Jones himself and more than 300 children. In Georgetown, a Temple member and her three children died at the Temple’s house. The Guyanese and American authorities who reached the site found a scene that shocked the world. A report by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1979 examined the events, and one Temple member was later convicted in the United States in connection with the attack on Ryan’s party.

Jonestown changed how Americans thought about new religious movements. For years after, the word “cult” evoked Jonestown, and the fear it caused shaped public reactions to later groups, including the Branch Davidians in 1993. The phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid”, meaning unthinking loyalty, entered everyday English, although many survivors and relatives find it hurtful.

Historians such as John R. Hall, David Chidester and Rebecca Moore, whose two sisters died at Jonestown, have tried to explain the event without reducing its members to dupes. They point to the Temple’s real achievements, the racism and poverty that drew many members to it, and the way isolation, pressure from outside, and Jones’s own paranoia combined in the last years. They also stress that the dead were individuals: most were African American, many were elderly, and a third were children.

The dead were returned to the United States, and many unclaimed and unidentified bodies were buried in a mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where a memorial bearing the names of all who died was dedicated in 2011. The site in Guyana itself was abandoned and returned to jungle.