Jim Jones Beliefs

James Warren Jones commonly known as Jim Jones was an American cult leader. He was the founder of Peoples Temple which is infamous for mass murder suicide in 1978 November where 918 members of his cult lost their live. It is estimated that nearly 300 innocent children were murdered at Jonestown, almost all of them by cyanide poisoning. He was seen as a very charismatic man by his followers and he attracted people who were feeling isolated for whatever reason. Majority of his followers were African American but there were also some white people, Jew and Mexicans. The people who wanted religion, Jim Jones used to fool them into thinking that he was the only one who can give them that, if they wanted a father figure, he’d be that. If they wanted socialism, he would give them that or make it seem to them that he can. The basic technique here being finding the
Peoples Temple organized medical programs and social programs such as legal aid service, free dining hall, drug rehabilitation for the needy people. This helped him attract a lot of followers and initially he used to give sermons on community, social responsibility, tolerance, equality. But as the church grew he started demanding personal loyalty and obedience from his followers. Made them sign blank sheets of paper which he called “compromise”- something he can use to blackmail the people if they decide to leave him someday, which shows his paranoid state of mind.
At Jonestown in Guyana, Jones convinced his followers that Soviet Union soldiers would come and torture their families. He summoned everyone in the main pavilion and ordered/forced them to commit “revolutionary act” or “revolutionary suicide” by drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid. Children was made to drink it first and families were told to lie together as they