He chose Guyana, a former British colony in South America whose socialist regime was politically sympathetic. A magazine article alleging abuse in the Peoples Temple spurred Jones’s desire to relocate. Jones, who had long believed the US was in danger of imminent nuclear holocaust, had been searching for a place where his church would be “safe” during an apocalyptic event. The result, Naipaul wrote, “was neither racial justice nor socialism but a messianic parody of both”. In his 1980 study of Jonestown, the writer Shiva Naipaul, younger brother of VS Naipaul, argued that the Peoples Temple was at heart a fundamentalist religious project – “obsessed with sin and images of apocalyptic destruction, authoritarian in its innermost impulses, instinctively thinking in terms of the saved and the damned”. Jones’s fierce advocacy for the downtrodden earned him the admiration of leftwing icons like Angela Davis and Harvey Milk and the support of groups like the Black Panthers – a tragically misguided political affinity, given that more than two-thirds of Jonestown’s eventual victims were African American. He also claimed that his goal all along was communism, and, in a twist on the famous dictum that religion is the “opiate of the masses”, that religion was merely his way of making Marxism more palatable.īy the 1970s, the Peoples Temple, now based in San Francisco, had gained significant political influence. He drifted away from traditional Christian teachings, describing himself in messianic terms and claiming he was the reincarnation of figures like Christ and Buddha. In 1965, when Jones was in his mid-30s, he ordered the Peoples Temple moved to California. The Peoples Temple advocated socialism and communitarian living and was racially integrated to an exceptional standard rarely matched since. He called his burgeoning church the Peoples Temple.Īlthough Jones’s followers would later be stereotyped as sinister, brainwashed idiots, the journalist Tim Reiterman argues in his seminal book on the subject that many were “decent, hardworking, socially conscious people, some highly educated”, who “wanted to help their fellow man and serve God, not embrace a self-proclaimed deity on earth”. Jones’s idiosyncratic blend of evangelical Christianity, New Age spirituality and radical social justice attracted an enthusiastic following. Photograph: Don Hogan Charles/Getty Images Jim Jones and his wife Marceline Jones, seated in front of their adopted children and next to his sister-in-law, right, with her three children, California, 1976.
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