Hello everybody. My name is Viran and this is Kerene, Andy, Dave and Shona and we have decided to do our presentation on the suicide cult Jonestown. The People’s Temple, otherwise known as Jonestown, was a religious group aiming to, ‘set up a Utopian-based society that promoted racial tolerance and reject the excesses of capitalism.’ Over 900 members of the People’s Temple are thought to have died in a mass suicide pact in 1978 which saw this so called Utopia meet its downfall.
It was lead by Jim Jones, a self-proclaimed messiah. Jim Jones was mixed race, a blend of Native American and White cultures and throughout his life he maintained a strong almost obsessive preoccupation with racial issues. He started his career in religion when he was just 12, preaching to his friends at school. He married young and during his years doing undergraduate work at Butler University and graduate work at Indiana University, Jones took on the position of student pastor at Somerset Methodist Church, however, his “radical” beliefs on interracial worship and outreach caused many quarrels between him and church leadership, leaving him with no options but to resign from his position. He set up his first Church with his wife in Indianapolis when he was 18 called ‘Community Unity’. He studied other religious leaders and tried to adopt their style. It is said that he used to go door to door and sell monkeys of all things, I don’t know who brought them – maybe some lonely Organ Grinder, to people to raise funds to maintain the church. In 1995 Jones founded the ‘People’s Temple’. Jones modelled his new church after his inspiration, Father Divine, who founded the Peace Mission. The People’s temple quickly gained disrepute because of Jones hoax healings where he claimed he could extract cancerous growths from people who came to him for help, but amazingly still managed to recruit new members. Despite his phoney healing though he and his wife became quite influential figures in the community and they adopted 7 children from different racial background, which he called his ‘Rainbow Family’.
He was also involved with projects fighting poverty and racism, working in soup kitchens and clothing stores for the poor. In 1959 he set up a fund for an orphanage and fought for proper education and medical facilities for people in ghettos, and in 1961 the Mayor nominated him Director of the Human Rights Commission. However Jones had a drug addiction which caused him to get paranoid and preach that he had a ‘vision’ that the world was going to end by nuclear holocaust. Having read an article in Esquire Magazine about the safest places to go in the event of a nuclear attack he moved his congregation to Ukiah, California. The group continued to grow and grow and many of his followers ended up selling their homes and giving their wages to the Temple. They respected and trusted Jones so much that even when he began claiming to be the reincarnation of his childhood heroes, Jesus, Buddha, Lenin, and Father Divine they believed him and continued giving all they had to the cause. However Jones paranoia continued, especially about the US authorities (he kept thinking the commune was under threat from capitalist enemies) and he decided to move the congregation to Guyana in Latin America.
This was because it had ideas of socialism, racial brotherhood and cooperative agricultural enterprise that coincided neatly with those of The People’s Temple. It was mainly jungle but he made a community there. They build cottages, farming buildings, a pavilion to hear Jones’s charismatic teachings and there was even a hospital. However this was never the utopia that was expected and fell to a tragic demise.
