The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Where Father Divine was mistakenly presumptuous, Jones was simply acknowledging fact. Jim Jones was God or Christ on Earth, meaning that whatever he wanted was right and must be done. Jones still believed in the virtues of socialism and was dedicated to lifting up the oppressed. But he would no longer have the capacity to learn from mistakes, because he didn’t believe that, as a superior incarnation, he could make any. In the future, anything that didn’t work exactly according to Jones’s desires would be the fault of flawed followers or implacable enemies—and, with each passing day, Jones became more convinced that he had enemies everywhere.