The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

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. Jones picked his spots, avoiding outright declarations of actual divinity in non-Temple settings. But he expected his closest associates to acknowledge him as godlike and this troubled some of them, Ross Case and Archie Ijames especially. It took Ijames some time to come around. Case never did. But other Jones followers either believed immediately—they were certain they’d seen him demonstrate otherwise inexplicable powers—or, like Jack Beam, didn’t care what outrageous claims Jones made about being God. The socialist principles that he shared with them were what mattered. Whatever Marceline Jones thought, she kept to herself. If she didn’t believe in her husband’s divinity, she still saw him as a man of special, God-driven purpose, and never wavered in her public support.