A Secular Cult: A Case Study on How Religion Gets Blamed for Non-Religious Violence
Jonestown is the largest mass suicide in American history. But can we call Jim Jones's motivations and those of the Peoples Temple "religious"?
My edition: Guinn, Jeff. The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple. Simon & Schuster, 2018.1
In February 1978, Jones called his following, known as the Peoples Temple, together. He announced that armed forces were on the way and would attack in a matter of hours. Everyone was to line up, fill a cup of Flavor Aid (the sugary powder mix was not Kool-Aid, contrary to popular belief), and drink. Jones promised their deaths would be peaceful. The prevaricating were pushed forward by guards and made to drink first. After everyone partook, Jones declared, “You didn’t take anything” (p. 389). This had been a test. A rehearsal.
Nine months later, Jonestown became the largest mass suicide in recorded history. Most mass suicides range from ten to fifty people. Jonestown killed an estimated 918; 278 infants and children were among them. (These were killed first via syringe injection, usually at the hands of their parents.) While the line between suicide and murder is hazy in such cases (at least for the adults), for a thousand people to die in such a manner challenges the notion that most went involuntarily. To explain why an otherwise rational person, let alone a few hundred of them, would knowingly imbibe cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, we immediately invoke the mysterious machinations called up by the word “cult.” With this word, we think we’ve explained something. But our use of it indicates an unspoken plea to ignorance, amounting to: We don’t know why they did what they did, so we call it “cult.” It is like “explaining” a serial killer’s behavior as “insane”: we think this word explains everything, which ought to be our first clue that it explains nothing. In the end, “cult” is the term we apply to groups who do or believe inexplicable things we could not imagine doing or believing ourselves. It is a word for something we have no words for.
Whatever we might mean when we call something a “cult,” the term closely associates that thing with religion, however non-religious the members of that cult might be. Thus calling Jonestown a “cult” is not benign. This term places a special burden, and a perceived accountability, on religion. Wikipedia continues to index Jonestown as a “religiously motivated mass suicide,” but is this fair to religious people? What is the basis for such use? Can we speak of the motivations of the Peoples Temple as “religious”?
Were it not for the Jonestown massacre, Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple, might have been remembered as a civil rights leader. In 1970s America, his was among the few interracial churches. He and his wife raised a “rainbow family.” He battled aggressively against racism and poverty. He preached the gospel of socialism, and he practiced what he preached. While the church amassed a fortune, this funded the political agenda of the Peoples Temple and not Jim’s standard of living: He owned only one suit and one pair of shoes.
The Peoples Temple fed, clothed, helped the destitute find jobs, funded college students from low-income neighborhoods, and launched extraordinarily successful rescue programs for drug addicts. Jones’s loyalist followers were beneficiaries of these programs. Others, like Juanell Smart, had a more cautious loyalty. Smart took an immediate disliking to Jones, but weighed her personal dissatisfaction against the welfare of her kids. The Peoples Temple kept them off the streets (pp. 246–47). The Temple was an ally, in action as well as message, for minorities, particularly Blacks. All this to say, those entering Peoples Temple believed they were acting in their own best interests. Their choices were rational. But the reasons given are manifestly non-religious.
Jones’s dedication to creating a new, freer world was the basis of his entire ministry. He identified with abolitionist radicals like John Brown. In a sermon, Jones quoted a spectator who watched Brown’s bold demeanor at his own hanging: “One’s faith in anything is terribly shaken by anybody who is ready to go to the gallows condemning and denouncing it.” Jones then turned to the congregation: “And we can do that. We can shake people’s faith in the love of money and racism. We can shake their faith in it, dramatically and tremendously, if we will be willing to go to the gallows for what we believe. I don’t think we're going to the gallows, but I’m ready. Aren’t you?” (pp. 278–79). Jones’s intended lesson here is not commendation of John Brown’s religious motivations for his short-lived liberation movement, but how boldness in death can be leveraged as a social device to shake others’ faith in a system. These words take on a harrowing, prescient color in light of later events, but Jones’s message was utilitarian, not religious: Human life is an accessory to the cause of socialism.
As far as religious beliefs go, Jones had a smattering of popular New Age notions which he seldom preached. Jones believed in reincarnation. He seemed to believe that he was the reincarnation of Jesus and Buddha, but it appears few of his followers felt inclined to agree. None were required to. The Peoples Temple had no creed but socialism. Jones retrofitted elements of Christian Pentecostalism into his services in order to appeal to a wider audience and bolster his image as a spiritual leader, but he spoke of religion as an opiate and the Bible as propaganda and God as “a fucker-upper” (p. 329). Jones, on the other hand, was “a liberator” (p. 329) who would on occasion trample a copy of the Bible during his hours-long sermons (p. 215). If a Temple member brought up God or religion, he would be promptly rebuked by other members: “Cut out that Jesus shit. We’re socialists” (p. 269).
Jones spoke of socialism in elevated terms. If you commit yourself to it, it will endow your life with purpose and agency. “If you give yourself to socialism,” Jones taught repeatedly, “you will not die by accident or in a sick bed, but you will determine your destiny and die where and when it can best serve socialism” (p. 333). Jeff Guinn’s history suggests the Jonestown massacre was intended to be a symbolic gesture for the advancement of socialism, a grand revolutionary and disruptive act against the oppressive capitalist order. Jones spoke admiringly of the Siege of Masada (1st cent.), when a thousand Jewish revolutionaries—men, women, and children—committed suicide rather than surrender to the Roman army. “I love socialism,” Jones preached, in connection with Masada, “and I’d die to bring it about. But if I did, I’d take a thousand with me” (p. 311). Jonestown was no outburst of religious enthusiasm. Jones carefully engineered the massacre. His followers were catechized on how to interpret a command to die. They had a dress rehearsal. They knew what they were doing and why: as a daring performance to “best serve socialism.” None of them were taught to think they did it for any religious reason. The overtly secularizing force of socialism, not God or religion, would save the world.
Perhaps “cult” continues to stick because we have a psychological (and exclusively modern) need to categorically limit the radical, the unintelligible, the insane, and the mysterious to “religion.” Jonestown would be more accurately described as a radically progressive activist community staging the ultimate political protest, but calling it “cult” obscures this identity and files it away in a different department entirely. Religion is blamed in absentia. That we cannot recognize the non-religious as “cult” reveals much. If the attempt is made to do so, it is often presumed a basically pure and well-intentioned movement must have been polluted by a religious element somehow, at some point. They reason (conveniently) that this violence must have been a result of incorrect implementation: Secular ideology can only be accidentally violent, whereas religious ideology is inherently violent. Why the hesitation to hold secular, atheistic, and socialist dynamics to account for cult massacres, as though this would be to make a categorical error, as though these things could not also command extreme blind allegiance en masse? Instead, at the deployment of a single word, the piled bodies are implicitly re-labeled as “victims of religion.”
Meanwhile, secularism walks free, hands dripping blood but not a victim to its name.
I came across my copy in 2019 in a corner of Batavia Public Library where they sold books. Up to that point, I hadn’t read anything about Jonestown except internet fare; I bought it to indulge my morbidity with intent to read during my upcoming vacation. I think I paid two dollars for it, cash. It sat unread on my shelf for almost three years.