The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Jimmy’s two earliest and most enduring lessons from his mother were these: there was always some Them out to get you, and reality was whatever you believed.

When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, thwarting enemies who sought to capture and humiliate him, Jimmy was impressed.

During every Sunday worship service, the preacher always asked sinners to come up and be saved. The first week, Jimmy went up and got forgiven for his sins. Then the next Sunday, he did it again, and then every Sunday for the rest of the summer. According to Lester, “You usually didn’t do that. You got saved once, and it stayed that way. Maybe you went up again sometime if you’d done something especially bad, but Jimmy, he just went every time the preacher asked. He would go up there and kneel. I thought that was a little different, but he never talked about why. He just did it.”

he didn’t believe in her God at all, since a just and loving Lord would never permit so much human misery. He would later say in Jonestown that “I started devastating [God], I tore that motherfucker to shreds and laid him out to rest. . . . [Marceline and I would] fight, and she’d cry. We were washing dishes one time and [Marceline] said, ‘I love you, but [don’t you] say anything about the Lord anymore’. I said, ‘Fuck the Lord’ . . . we ended up in some goddamn scrap and she threw a glass at me.”

His performances were carefully structured; they continued to combine Bible-quoting rhetoric with healings. Jones had a fine sense of just how many miracles were necessary to keep individual crowds enthralled. Most of these still involved eavesdropping in advance, “whatever I could take down.” He commanded headaches to vanish, coughs to desist, and, on very rare occasions, the lame to walk. These miracles didn’t always come off as Jones would have liked, or as his audiences hoped. He was dealing with strangers and couldn’t count on their cooperation, so he was careful not to ask too much. A woman in a wheelchair might be gently instructed to stand and take just a single, shaky step rather than run or dance down the aisle. Then Jones could declare even the slightest hint of progress as the initial moment in a gradual healing process that God had granted through him.

Community Unity celebrated its new home with a name change. Briefly, the church was known as Wings of Deliverance. But the word “Temple” was carved in stone outside the building, and so Jones decided that the name of his church would reflect both its philosophy and the carving: Peoples Temple, not People’s, because the apostrophe symbolized ownership. After all, one of the key Temple goals was to discourage obsession with material possessions.

“Every knock is a boost, every criticism is a praise.”

He’d learned well from Father Divine that having enemies, real or imagined, was invaluable in recruiting and retaining followers.