The Jim Jones Religious Movement

The 21st century is the time of possibilities. We are able to change the world with a click of the mouse. Have you ever heard the story of a girl in Chicago that started a revolution in Syria? Sitting on the couch in Chicago and clicking on some links on Facebook she helped to overthrew the local government in one of the Syria cities. It’s hard to believe but we don’t need much to make a difference in the world. But it’s not always been like this. Fifty years ago people had to actually fight to prove something. And if no one believed them, if everyone around them was deaf to their wishes, they may even have had to die to prove something. While some interpret the mass death of the People’s Temple community as insanity, there are good reasons
to interpret it as revolutionary suicide. To understand this movement better, we should start in the very beginning with the central figure of this cult – James Warren “Jim” Jones.
The founder of the People’s Temple, Jim Jones, was born in 1931 in Crete, Indiana. He began to be interested in religion since childhood, being a teenager, preached in the streets. At the age of 24, he founded the religious group "Disciples of Christ”, which in a year was renamed "People’s Temple". The new movement preached the achievement of "apostolic socialism". One of the main distinctive features of his movement was its ethnicity. There were representatives of a wide variety of peoples, unlike most religious groups of Indiana at that time, where white and black belonged to different parishes. This fact was one of the reasons for people's hostile attitude towards the organization. Many citizens in Indiana saw the heresy in the People’s Temple and the activities of the organization. For these reasons, Jim Jones was forced to move and settle in San Francisco. (Jonestown: The life and Death of People’s
Temple) In the early 1970s, the "People’s Temple" opened its branches in other cities of the state, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.
In the mid-1970s, the sect's headquarters moved to San Francisco. After moving, it became more politically active. Supporting the election of the mayor of San Francisco, George Moscone, the founder of the sect received a high post in the city's municipality. Unlike other leaders of the new religious movements, Jim Jones was similar to the highest political and public figures in the country. During the first half of the 1970s, the "People’s Temple" developed even more, so it had a few houses and general educational institutions for children, all of which were given to them by members of the organization; In addition, the organization conducted educational work in the Santa Rosa Junior
College. With the growing number of members of the organization, a lot of problems arose related to relatives of people who decided to dedicate their lives to work in “People’s Temple". Lawsuits were filed against the organization, accusing it in zombifying people. National papers called the organization a "destructive cult", telling about the forcible retention of its members, and that Jones suppresses the will of people, and steals their money. They also claimed that there was cruel punishment for insubordination. Relatives of members of the "People’s Temple" tried to get the federal government to thoroughly investigate the activities of Jones. In this regard, Jim Jones decided to leave the United States. In 1974 in the jungles of Guyana, several members of the Temple of Nations founded a settlement, later named Johnstown, by the name of the head of the movement. In 1977, Jim Jones and his followers (more than 900 people) moved to this settlement. Here, members of "People’s Temple" were engaged in cleaning and ennobling the territory, growing crops. There was a sawmill, a club, a kindergarten, a day nursery. Residents of the village had to work a lot (11 hours a day), and in the evenings they arranged meetings where they talked to each other and listened to Jim Jones. (Jonestown: The life and Death of People’s Temple) There are different opinions concerning the real life of ordinary members of the movement in the village. Most of the people who visited the village during its existence left mostly positive reviews about the life of the inhabitants of Johnstown. On the Jones’s tape recordings of the evening meetings, we can hear jokes and laughter, which confirms these testimonies. However, some of the former members claimed numerous human rights violations, torture, severe corporal punishment for the crime, drug dependence of Jones and his surroundings. (Jonestown: The life and Death of People’s Temple) The settlement became world famous after November 18, 1978, when 918 people died, including the American congressman Leo Ryan. At least 909 sectarians (among whom more than 200 children), according to the official investigation, have committed so-called "revolutionary suicide." Mass poisoning with cyanide occurred after the attack on a group of members who wanted to leave Jonestown. After this, some people were shot and some poisoned themselves. That was a short a tragic story of such a “dreamy” community. Some people view it as an act of insanity. Indeed, how can one person talk 900 people into killing themselves? These people must be insane! However, I don’t think that this's how the members of the community thought. They viewed “People’s Temple” as a religion and Jim Jones as a priest. According to Nye, “Religion is what people do on a day-to-day level. [It] is .. both a set of ideas and beliefs that people can engage with (to some extent or other) and also the framework for their lived experiences and daily practices”(Nye 3). So people viewed their lives there and practices they’ve engaged in as something saint and the right way of living. But then it was taken away from them. This perfect community was crushed into pieces and couldn’t be repaired. No one will listen to them in the government, no one will return them to their normal lives because Jonestown was their normal life. It was the only life they had. So to make their statement clear and loud they committed suicide. Chidester viewed revolutionary suicide as “an act of [resistance] against overwhelming forces of religion, political, and military opposition” (Chidester 135). People had no other tool of resistance and they “gladly welcomed death rather than make bold to transgress the wise provisions of their laws” (Chidester 135). After it’s seen as a victory over the opposition. Those people weren’t crazy. They believed in a better version of our society, where everyone was equal, where people didn’t depend on money, where they could call each other brothers and sisters and share everything they had. But when they saw that this society won’t survive in the modern world, all their hopes were destroyed. They didn’t want to return to our cruel world. So they implemented this act of revolution, hoping that this will be a lesson for everyone else.