302 Barry Chevannes 17. The Bobo are the only Rastafari to live a communal life. They distinguish themselves from mainstream Dreadlocks principally by wearing a turban at all times and a flowing robe sometimes, and by peddling brooms made of straw. 18. William J. Petersen, Those Curious New Cults in the 80s (New Canaan, Conn.: Keats, 1982); Diane Choquette, New Religious Movements in the U.S. and Canada (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985); J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (New York: Garland, 1986); Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modem America, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988). 19. See Chevannes, Rastafari Origins, for a more detailed survey of the Rastafari in the United States. 20. The chillum pipe is called a "chalice." To "lick a chalice" is to partake in a communal sharing of ideas, as the chalice passes from hand to hand. This sacred ritual is called a "reasoning." 21. Even the instant dreadlocks that may now be woven by hair stylists are not without their own statement. If nothing else, blacks, as never before, are finding pleasure in their own hair. 22. Indian men smoked ganja using the chillum only; Indian women smoked tobacco using the huka or water pipe. The Rastafari merged the two. Suggestions for Further Reading Barrett, Leonard E., Sr. The Rastafarians. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Caribbean Quarterly Monograph: Rastafari. Kingston: University of the West Indies, 1985. Chevannes, Barry. Rastafari: Roots and Ideology. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994., ed. Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean World Views. London: Macmillan, 1993.
30 PEOPLES TEMPLE lohn R. Holl The two central questions about Peoples Temple have always been these: why did the murders and mass suicide take place? And what is their cultural significance? Peoples Temple began like many American religious groups in the mind of a selfstyled visionary prophet. But it ended in an apocalypse without precedent in U.S. religious history. On November 18, 1978, over nine hundred people from the United States died in the small, poor South American country of Guyana. On that day gunmen from Peoples Temple's communal settlement of Jonestown murdered five people who had just left their jungle community a visiting U.S. congressman, three newsmen, and a young defector. Back at Jonestown, Jim Jones, Peoples Temple's white charismatic leader, was orchestrating a "revolutionary suicide" at which the members of the agricultural community mostly black, some white drank a deadly potion of Fla-Vor Aid laced with poison. How many people willingly gave up their lives at Jonestown? The question will always be open to debate. Certainly young children could not have fully understood the consequences of drinking the potion, and during the suicide council, one woman pleaded against Jones's proposal. But many people supported the plan mothers marching up to have their children killed, elderly people telling Jones they were ready to go, the sharpshooters who had killed the congressman. Wittingly, unknowingly, or reluctantly, virtually everyone present took the poison. At the very end, Jim Jones and a close aide died by gunshots to the head, consistent with suicide. 1 If these tragic events had not occurred, Peoples Temple might never have become the subject of widespread attention. But with the murders and mass suicide, the group became infamous. A film, a television docudrama and more than twenty books enshrined Jim Jones in popular culture as the image incarnate of the Antichrist, Peoples Temple as the paragon of the religious "cult." Like other religious communal movements both historical and contemporary Peoples Temple practiced a way of life alien to mainstream America. Like other collectivist organizations such as religious orders and the military, the Temple demanded individual submission to collective authority and it used social control to forestall internal dissension. Temple staff carefully monitored the commitment of members, and they held public meetings for "catharsis," allowing the assembled populace to determine punishments for wrongdoers and backsliders. Like other religious social movements Peoples Temple practiced a communal socialism that flew in the face of the dominant American ideology that embraces capitalism, individualism, and the nuclear family. In the early years, the Jones family expanded through adoption. Eventually, 303
304 John R. Hall Peoples Temple as a group took on the functions of an extended family. More significantly, Jim Jones was bisexual, and he led the way in exploring unconventional relationships. Sex became something like a currency Jones used, supposedly, "for the cause." With it, he gave some people intimacy, and controlled or humiliated others. The offspring of Jones's sexual unions included Stephan, the one child born (in 1959) to Jones's wife Marcie. In addition, Jones was the father of Carolyn Layton's son Kimo Prokes, and he was widely believed to be the father of John Victor Stoen, born in 1972 to Grace Stoen, wife of Temple attorney Tim Stoen. Quite apart from his controversial sexual practices, Jones called his followers to what Max Weber has termed an "ethic of ultimate ends": he recruited only the most highly committed individuals, and he insisted that followers pursue the cause of Peoples Temple selflessly, tirelessly, without compromise. Members of Peoples Temple in effect took a path that black activist Huey Newton had once described as "revolutionary suicide": they gave up their previous lives, friends, and commitments, and became born again to a collective struggle against economic, social, and racial injustice that had no limits other than victory or death. This radical stance deepened the gulf between Peoples Temple and the wider society and set the stage for a protracted conflict with organized opponents who were equally committed to their own cause. It was specifically this conflict that led to the murders and mass suicide. How, then, did it develop? This question can only be addressed by tracing the biography of Jim Jones and the historical emergence of his movement. James Warren Jones was born in east central Indiana in the time of the Great Depression, May 13, 1931. The only child of working-poor parents, he grew up with a strong sense of resentment toward people of wealth, status, and privilege. He was exposed to a variety of Protestant churches, from the mainstream Methodists to the pacifist Quakers, the Holiness-movement Nazarenes, and the then-marginal Pentecostalists with their revivalist-style worship and speaking in tongues. In his high school years, Jones was seen preaching on the street in a factory neighborhood of Richmond, Indiana, to an audience of both whites and blacks. By the summer of 1949, Jim Jones had married Marceline Baldwin, a young nurse from a Richmond family of Methodists and Republicans. Marcie was shocked, Jones later recounted, when he revealed his sympathies with political communism and his disdain for the "sky god." Jim and Marcie Jones moved to Indianapolis in 1951, and soon Jones was on his way to becoming a preacher. Along this path, Jones forged a volatile mix of theology and practice. Exposed variously to the Methodists' liberal social creed, communist ideology, and the apocalyptic vision of the Pentecostalists, he preached racial integration and a veiled communist philosophy within a Pentecostal framework that emphasized gifts of the spirit discerning of spirits and faith healing. Jones displayed a knack for preaching, and he learned some tricks of the Pentecostal revival circuit how to convince audiences of his abilities in matters of discernment and faith healing by sleights of hand and fakery. More important, he gradually discovered a formula for building a social movement out of a church. Over the years, out of an unlikely amalgamation of disparate ideas and practices, Jones forged the mantle of a prophet who foresaw capitalist apocalypse and worked to establish a promised land for those who heeded his message. Organizationally, Jones started in Indianapolis with a small church called Community Unity. After visitors took in his services following a revival appearance, Jones was invited to preach at the Pentecostalist Laurel Street Tabernacle. A crisis ensued when Jones brought blacks to the service of the racially segregated church, and after witnessing his preaching and healing performance, a substantial segment of the Tabernacle voted with their feet, leaving their congregation to walk with Jones. Together, on April 4,1955, they established Wings of Deliverance, the corporate vehicle of what was to be called
Peoples Temple 305 Peoples Temple. Combining the Pente costalist ethic of a caring community with the social gospel of liberal denominations, Peoples Temple became a racially integrated community of believers in practical service under the umbrella of a church. Jones modelled Peoples Temple partly after the Peace Mission of American black preacher Father M. J. Divine, who, in the 1920s and 1930s, had established a racially integrated religious and economic community with himself at the center. Like Father Divine, Jones took to being called "Father," or, sometimes, "Dad." Like the Peace Mission, Peoples Temple was to become an extended family that offered its communal fellowship as a shelter from the uncertain world beyond. In turn, Jones used the organization of Peoples Temple as a springboard to social action, establishing care homes for the elderly, running q free restaurant to feed the hungry, maintaining a social service center to help people with needs to get their lives back together, and precipitating public confrontations to promote racial integration. The unconventional congregation attracted the attention of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which long had been committed to a social ministry. In 1960, Peoples Temple became affiliated with the Disciples of Christ, and in 1964 Jones was officially ordained a minister. Peoples Temple not only prospered in Indianapolis, it provoked controversy. The city was not a progressive one, and there was stqtt^e res istanee-to racial integration'in some quarters. By publicly challenging segregationist policies. Jones antagonized this opposition and enhanced his own statuses a civil rights leader. To demonstrate what a threat he was to white racists, he also staged incidents in which his family and he were objects of harassment. But some of the harassment was real, and Jones does not seem to have held up well under the pressure. In the face of the public tensions, he was hospitalized for an ulcer in the fall of 1961. After his release, he began to seek a way out of Indianapolis. Leaving his congregation in the care of associate pastors, Jones and his family visited British Guiana (pre-independence Guyana), and spent two years in Brazil. Even as he returned to Indianapolis in 1964, Jones already was laying the groundwork for a collective migration to California by his most committed followers. Tired of racial intolerance and citing fears of nuclear holocaust, they moved to the quiet town of Ukiah, in the Russian River valley of northern California. About seventy families, half white, half black, made the journey in the summer of 1965. Jones's congregation became reestablished slowly, counting only 168 adult members by 1968. But in 1969 the congregation completed its own church building in the hamlet of Redwood Valley, about eight miles north of Ukiah. The church began to attract the interest of a wide range of people hippies, socially concerned progressive professionals, fundamentalist Christians, political activists and militants, street people, delinquents, and the elderly. Propelled by these diverse streams of membership the Temple grew rapidly in the 1970s, establishing churches in San Francisco and Los Angeles, running a fleet of buses to carry followers to church functions, running a "human services" ministry of "care" homes for juveniles and the elderly, and using the care homes as a nucleus for promoting a communal orientation among followers. By its California heyday in the mid- 1970s, Peoples Temple had become a collectivist organization that pooled the economic resources of highly committed members. In return, the Temple offered them an extended, collectivist "family," economic security, and a meaningful life. By the power of their organized efforts, it energized an activist religious social movement committed to racial integration, social and economic justice, peace, and other progressive and radical political causes. In comparison to both conventional churches and retreatist countercultural communal groups of its day, Peoples Temple was an anomaly a relatively disciplined religiously radical collective that successfully pursued an activist politics within the society at large. By 1975 Peoples Temple was a formidable force in the left-liberal political surge that propelled George Moscone
306 John R. Hall into office as mayor of San Francisco. In 1976 the Temple reaped political rewards: Temple attorney Tim Stoen was called from his position as assistant district attorney in Mendocino County to prosecute voter fraud for the San Francisco district attorney; and fim Jones was appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission by Mayor Moscone. Peoples Temple was a dynamic, growing group by the mid-1970s, but its success depended on using public relations techniques to create a facade that hid its more radical aspects. And for all its worldly success, its status in the larger society was precarious. Because of the Temple's complex communal economic practices, its leadership began to be concerned in 1975 that the group would be charged with tax evasion by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Moreover, like many other alternative religious social movements, both historical and contemporary, Peoples Temple garnered considerable opposition both from defectors and from scandalized outsiders. Beginning in Indianapolis, Jones projected the belief that his racially integrated group of followers could not survive in their surroundings. Like Moses and the ancient Jews searching for a land of "milk and honey," like the Puritans who fled to North America from England to found a "city on a hill," Jones sought redemption for his % followers in collective religious migration to a promised land. Indeed, Jones explicitly borrowed the term "promised land" from Father Divine, who had established a series of agricultural communities called the Promised Land in upstate New York during the 1930s. Divine himself was one of a series of "black messiahs" (another was Marcus Garvey) who promised blacks salvation from the racism of a country to which their people had been brought forcibly as slaves. 2 But Jones's promised land was not only to be a refuge for blacks; it came to represent a sanctuary from the United States, portrayed by Jones as Babylon. Peoples Temple operated in the world, yet Jones never expected acceptance from the world. From the Indianapolis years onward, he promised his followers that Peoples Temple would protect them from a hostile outside world. To accomplish that protection, and to separate the truly committed from backsliders, Jones twice drew on the enduring recipe of those (like the Puritans) who claim to be victims of religious persecution collective migration. First, the Temple moved to California. There, Jones used internal defections and small incidents of external "persecution" during 1972 and 1973 as the warrant to establish Peoples Temple's "Promised Land" an "agricultural mission" eventually called Jonestown in a remote corner of Guyana, an ethnically diverse, socialistgoverned South American country oriented toward the Caribbean. At its inception, Jonestown was just a pioneer camp. But even before the site was established in early 1974, a memo by Temple attorney Tim Stoen suggested that the Temple should methodically prepare for collective migration by consolidating its property holdings and other affairs in the United States; the group was to remain in California "until first signs of outright persecution from press or government," then "start moving all members to mission post." In practice, the Temple followed the basic thrust of this plan. The initial settlers devoted most of their efforts toward construction of housing and other facilities to accommodate a large influx of settlers, while Temple operatives in Guyana's capital of Georgetown used their public relations and political skills (and sexual allure) to establish secure political alliances with members of the patrimonial socialist regime of the black prime minister, Forbes Burnham. In the summer of 1977 Jones ordered the collective migration for which the Temple had begun preparing years earlier. At the time, it was widely believed that they left California because of press exposés appearing in California's New West magazine and other media outlets. The exposés were fueled in part through information provided by Temple defectors and outside relatives, and in part by conservative efforts to unseat liberal San Francisco mayor George Moscone, with whom Jones
Peoples Temple 307 and the Temple were allied. It was the defectors who offered the inside view: they accused Peoples Temple of shady financial dealings, faked healings, and atrocities of psychological catharsis and physical punishment. In addition to their other concerns, in the press exposés the opponents raised the issue of custody rights over children in Peoples Temple. Most notable of these was the child born to Grace Stoen, John Stoen, who had been raised communally within the Temple as a son of Jim Jones. In July of 1976 Grace Stoen had defected from the Temple, leaving her husband and her son behind. In the fall of 1976, the legal father, Grace's husband Tim Stoen, signed a power-of-attorney form for John Stoen, appointing Jim Jones and others "to exercise all powers and rights, that I might do in connection with said minor." The four-anda-half-year-old boy was then taken to live at Jonestown. These events set the stage for a custody struggle over John Stoen, and this struggle became the most celebrated among a series of custody battles that eventually raised the question of whether adults at Jonestown were there of their own free will. Although the collective migration took place during the press exposés, it would be a mistake to assume that the exposés caused the migration. There was a different sequence of events, driven by other aspects of the conflict between Peoples Temple and the small but increasingly coherent group of grassroots opponents. The leadership of Peoples Temple actually undertook the migration because of their concerns about a U.S. government investigation of the Temple's tax status. In the years of preparing for migration, the Temple had gone to considerable lengths to keep "black people's money" out of the hands of the Internal Revenue Service. By the standards of poor people, they had created substantial collective wealth (between ten and fifteen million dollars) by collectivizing the financial and housing donations of committed members who "went communal." The Temple was using the resources to finance Jonestown and the migration, and it was shifting millions of dollars into overseas bank accounts beyond the reach of authorities in the United States. In early 1976, the Temple sought to clarify its tax situation with the IRS. Over a year later, in early March, 1977, the IRS finally notified the Temple that it had been denied tax-exempt status. Soon thereafter, the opponents unintentionally substantiated the Temple's longstanding concerns about its tax status: in late March of 1977, they revealed to a Temple ally, American Indian Movement (AIM) leader Dennis Banks, that the Temple was the subject of a U.S. Treasury Department investigation (itself initiated by a reporter, George Klineman, who had close ties to the Temple's opponents). Mistakenly, the Temple leadership took their opponents' "treasury agent" to be connected with the Temple's tax situation (the opponents actually had talked with a Customs Service agent). Faced with what they regarded as a serious governmental threat to their organization, Temple leaders launched final preparations for the migration. In the glare of the media spotlight, the collective migration began in earnest in July of 1977 and was effectively completed by September (a steady trickle of immigrants continued to arrive in Jonestown through October of 1978). There is no way of knowing how Jonestown would have developed as a communal settlement in the absence of its conflict with opponents. The migration to Guyana did not cut the Temple off from its detractors; it simply shifted the dynamics of a struggle that eventually culminated in the murders and mass suicide. In the aftermath of the 1977 migration, the increasingly organized opponents continued to feed information about the Temple to reporters and government investigators; they filed requests that the U.S. embassy in Guyana check on the welfare of their relatives in Jonestown; and they initiated court proceedings both in the United States and Guyana to try to obtain legal custody of Jonestown children. One father even tried to kidnap his adult daughter from the communal settlement. The most famous case was that of the sum- John Victor Stoen. In the, child-god
308 lohn R. Hall mer of 1978, Temple attorney Tim Stoen, the legal father by California law, went over to the camp of Temple opponents. On August 26 a California court granted custody to Grace Stoen. Her lawyer then travelled to Guyana. When people at Jonestown refused to hand over John Stoen, the lawyer obtained a court summons for Jim Jones and the child. In Jonestown, Jones responded with a dramaturgical state of siege. Reaffirming his paternity of John Stoen, he threatened death: "I related to Grace, and out of that came a son. That's part of the deal. The way to get to Jim Jones is through his son. They think that will suck me back or cause me to die before I'll give him up. And that's what we'll do, we'll die." Through political and legal maneuvering, Temple staff managed to vacate the court order (it had been made despite the fact that Grace Stoen had never revoked a standing grant of custody to a Temple member). The crisis abated. In the aftermath, the legal process in Guyana seemed to stall, and in the months that followed, the frustrated Temple opponents, with the increasingly active participation of Tim Stoen, turned to methods that Peoples Temple had used so effectively in the United States political pressure and public relations campaigns. Calling themselves the "Concerned Relatives," they wrote to members of Congress, they met with State Department officials, they organized human rights demonstrations. In the face of these efforts, the Temple's seige mentality hardened. In March, 1978, a Temple letter to members of Congress stated, "I can say without hesitation that we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next. I hope that you can protect the right of over 1,000 people from the U.S. to live in peace." A woman who defected from Jonestown in May of 1978, Debbie Blakey, told an embassy official and the Concerned Relatives that Jonestown was developing plans for a mass suicide and the murder of resisters. In turn, the Concerned Relatives publicized the diehard threats to raise the alarm against Jonestown. For the most part, their efforts accomplished nothing. United States embassy officials in Guyana checked up on the status of relatives in Jonestown, but they did not find evidence for the opponents' charges of mass starvation and people living in bondage. One embassy consul observed, "The Concerned Relatives had a credibility problem, since so many of their claims were untrue." Frustrated in both their legal efforts and their attempts to get the U.S. State Department and its embassy to take their side in the complex dispute, yet propelled by the belief that Jones had to be stopped, the Concerned Relatives increasingly pinned their hopes on political intervention. In Washington they attracted the active support of Leo Ryan, a San Mateo congressman already sympathetic to the U.S. anticult movement. In December, 1977, Congressman Ryan had written U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, asking him "to investigate what action might be taken in connection with Mr. Jones." The State Department had responded by describing the situation as a legal controversy that did not warrant any "political action without justification." Ryan rejected this view. In May of 1978 he wrote to Peoples Temple, "Please be advised that Tim Stoen does have my support in the effort to return his son from Guyana." Then Ryan began to work with members of the Concerned Relatives to organize a visit to Jonestown. The expedition formally was billed a congressional delegation (although it did not meet congressional criteria). Diverse motives shaped it. At least two opponents, Tim Stoen and Steve Katsaris, wanted to retrieve their relatives "by force if necessary," as Stoen put it. A less-clandestine strategy hinged on the opponents' accounts about desperate conditions at Jonestown; in this scenario, the presence of visiting relatives together with outside authorities would break Jones's discipline and result in a mass exodus. The press had agendas too. Don Harris, a soldier-of-fortune journalist, organized an NBC crew to cover a story about people trapped in a jungle commune. With a congressman and the newsmen making the trip, the expedition promised to confront Jones with the choice of either submitting to external scrutiny or
Peoples Temple 309 precipitating a flood of bad press and governmental inquiry. When Peoples Temple staff first learned of the planned expedition, they sought to negotiate conditions about press coverage and the composition of the congressional delegation. But Ryan considered the negotiations a delaying tactic, and he decided to proceed to Guyana with the group of Concerned Relatives and the news reporters. They would try to gain access to Jonestown once they reached the capital, Georgetown. But there, Ryan met further resistance. With time running out before he would have to return to the United States, he flew with the reporters and a subgroup of the Concerned Relatives to Port Kaituma, a small settlement near Jonestown. Faced with a fait accompli, Jones acquiesced to the visit. At Jonestown, Jim Jones already had coached his community for days about how to respond to the visitors. On the evening of November 17, Jonestown offered Ryan and the others an orchestrated welcome, serving up a good dinner and musical entertainment from The Jonestown Express. But during the festivities, a message was passed to NBC reporter Don Harris: "Help us get out of Jonestown." The note was signed "Vern Gosney." On the reverse side was the name "Monica Bagby." The next day, Jonestown staff tried to occupy the visitors with public relations activities. But Ryan and embassy staff began to make arrangements for Gosney and Bagby to leave. Don Harris then tipped off Leo Ryan's assistant, Jackie Speier, about members of the Parks family, who also might want to leave. Jones pleaded with the Parkses not to depart with his enemies; he offered them $5,000 to cover transportation if they would wait several days. But they decided to leave with Ryan. "I have failed," Jones muttered to his lawyer, Charles Garry. "I live for my people because they need me. But whenever they leave, they tell lies about the place." As a dump truck was loaded for departure, Ryan told Jones that he would give a basically positive report: "If two hundred people wanted to leave, I would still say you have a beautiful place here." Ryan spoke about the need for more interchange with the outside world. Suddenly blood spurted across his white shirt as bystanders disarmed a man attacking Ryan. Jones stood impassively by. Ryan was disheveled but unhurt; the attacker was Don Sly, former husband of a Concerned Relative named Neva Sly; he had accidentally cut himself, not Ryan. "Does this change everything?" Jones asked Ryan. "It doesn't change everything, but it changes things," Ryan replied. "You get that man arrested." Then embassy official Richard Dwyer led Ryan to the departing truck, and they piled in with the reporters, the four representatives of the Concerned Relatives, and sixteen people who had decided to leave Jonestown. When the truck reached the Port Kaituma airstrip and the travelers started loading into two planes, a Jonestown man posing as a defector pulled out a pistol in the smaller plane and started shooting. Simultaneously, a tractor came up pulling a flatbed; from it the Jonestown sharpshooters shot toward the other plane. Left dead were Congressman Leo Ryan, NBC reporter Don Harris, two other newsmen, and defector Patricia Parks. At Jonestown, Jim Jones told the assembled community that they would no longer be able to survive as a community. With a tape recorder running, Jones argued, "If we can't live in peace, then let's die in peace." Medical staff set up cauldrons of Fla-Vor Aid laced with cyanide and tranquilizers while Jones called taking the poison "a revolutionary act." One woman named Christine Miller spoke up against the plan, but she was outnumbered by others who argued in favor. Amidst low wails, sobbing, and the shrieks of children, people walked up to take the "potion," then moved out of the pavilion to huddle with their families and die. In the confusion, two black men slipped past the guards. The community's two American lawyers, Charles Garry and Mark Lane, sequestered at a perimeter house, plunged into the jungle. Everyone else died. The proximate cause of murder and mass suicide was the refusal of Jim Jones, his staff, and the loyalists among his followers to brook compromise with oppo-
310 John R. Hall nents whom they believed were out to bring Jonestown as a community to an end. Rather than submit to external powers that they regarded as illegitimate, they chose to stage the airstrip murders as revenge and shut out their opponents by ending their own lives. Their socialist community unraveling in the face of pitched opposition, they sought revolutionary immortality. In the popular mind, they achieved infamy instead. The stigma of the mass deaths carved this infamy in the narrative structure of myth. If Jim Jones were anything other than a megalomaniacal madman or Antichrist, if Peoples Temple were anything but a cult of brainwashed robots, then the stigma of avoidable carnage would not necessarily fall on Jones and his accomplices alone. Either the story of Jonestown would have to be told as an atrocity tale or an unthinkable question would have to be posed: Did the people of Jonestown have the right to live in isolation from the intervention of opponents who sought to dismantle their community? Roland Barthes once observed that myth has an important quality: "The reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal." 3 Put differently, history is much messier than any story that reduces it to myth. Thus, the popular accounts of Peoples Temple have been displaced by the accumulation of careful scholarly research on Peoples Temple by theologians, historians, sociologists, and other students of religion. Compared to our knowledge of many other alternative American religions, we have a quite detailed historical record. To be sure, there is still much potentially important research to be done. Particularly important issues are the factual question of the biological paternity of John Stoen and the broader question of the role of government agencies in the opposition. Much anecdotal evidence suggests that Jim Jones was indeed the biological father of John Stoen: this view was held even by certain people outside the Temple who knew Grace and Tim Stoen at the time of the child's birth. It was affirmed in an affidavit by Tim Stoen in 1972 shortly after the birth, taken as fact within the Temple, and only publicly denied by Tim Stoen much later, when he took the side of Grace Stoen in the custody battle. To date, the evidence is not completely conclusive, but the weight of it leans, in my view, to Jones as the father. If this is so, then one of the Concerned Relatives' central atrocity contentions that Jones amounted to a kidnapper would lose its moral force, and one significant element of their campaign against Peoples Temple would turn out to be based on a public construction of reality that differed from privately held knowledge. The second controversy about government agencies is even murkier. The Concerned Relatives mobilized some governmental interest in Peoples Temple. But some government initiatives preceded the advent of the Concerned Relatives, and the inquiries of various government agencies fed on one another. In particular, early on the U.S. embassy in Guyana had diplomatic and strategic concerns that led to monitoring the Jonestown settlement. Both because the government might have been able to prevent the tragedy and because it may have acted in ways that propelled it, there has been considerable speculation about the government's role. One book weaves together some well-established facts with highly questionable inferences to raise the question of whether Jonestown was a "CIA medical experiment." 4 Whatever the truth of the matter, such accounts cannot be easily assessed because the U.S. government has suppressed information about its dealing with Peoples Temple, partly on the basis of the sensitivity of its diplomatic and geopolitical interests in relation to the socialist government of Guyana. Opening the government files on Peoples Temple might well yield significant reassessments of its history (the same holds for the NBC video "outakes" from the Jonestown coverage). Whatever comes of further research, the popular myth about Peoples Temple already has been substantially revised. Immediately after the mass suicides, popular accounts portrayed the Concerned Relatives, Leo Ryan, and the press that visited Jonestown as tragic heroes. Yet it is now evident that their own actions were conse-
Peoples Temple 311 quential in affecting the course of events. Thus, the murders and mass suicide cannot be adequately explained except as the outcome of an unfolding and interactive conflict between two diametrically opposed groups Peoples Temple and the Concerned Relatives. In this conflict, the Concerned Relatives were able to marshall to their side significant allies within the established social order the press, governmental investigators, a congressman. It is now possible to see more clearly what was obscured by the popular myth. The apocalypse at Jonestown is an extreme case of a more general pattern of religious conflict between a new religious movement and established social interests. In this pattern (found in the history of the Puritans and the Mormons, for example), collective religious migration is a strategy employed by the religious movement when conflict erupts between the movement and opponents who regard it as threatening to an established social and moral order. Peoples Temple ended with the mass suicides. It made its historical mark not like the Puritans and the Mormons, by success, but by dramatic failure. Yet this organization was infused with many of the contradictions of American culture, and in these terms its cultural legacy is defined by the public understanding of Peoples Temples. It is a legacy that keeps changing. After the murders and mass suicide, Jonestown became the quintessence of the "cult." Jonestown undoubtedly shifted the circumstances of other alternative religions in subtle yet profound ways, for it confirmed the most dire warnings of the anticult movement. But Jonestown has also inspired radically different understandings. The cultural significance of the movement is deeply intertwined with certain central issues of American social history, most notably, (1) the status of blacks within a racially divided society, (2) the character and mission of religion in an increasingly secular society, (3) the agendas and strategies of left-liberal political movements, and (4) social and ethical issues about the character of welfare, bureaucratic organization, social control, politics, and public relations in a society where Jones borrowed many of his most questionable practices from the wider culture, but directed them to countercultural purposes. Because of the complex connections between Jones's world and ours, Peoples Temple is a benchmark by which to chart American cultural practices and religious development. Notes 1. Information for the present chapter is drawn largely from my book-length study, John R. Hall, Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987). 2. William Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982). 3. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 128. 4. Michael Meiers, Was Jonestown a CIA Medical Experiment? (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988). Suggestions for Further Reading Chidester, David. Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Hall, John R. Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1987.. Afterword to "The Apocalypse at Jonestown." In Gods We Trust, edited by Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, 290-293. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988. Moore, Rebecca, and Fielding McGeehee III, eds. New Religious Movements, Mass Suicide, and Peoples Temple. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988.