The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Not all Jones’s road expeditions worked out as planned, either. He received an invitation from an African American Baptist church in Houston to preach to its members. The reputation of Peoples Temple had spread almost two thousand miles to the South, and the Houston congregation wanted to hear what Jones had to say. When the Temple buses arrived, they were warmly welcomed, so much so that Jones failed to take his usual accurate reading of what would move a specific audience most. Assuming that he was addressing a crowd ready to buy into his most extreme pronouncements, Jones skipped his usual biblical references and launched into a diatribe against the U.S. government and a Sky God who was worshipped by deluded fools. When he declared that only socialism could prevent secular and spiritual disaster, church leaders stepped up to the pulpit and asked him to leave, taking his people with him. Jones went quietly, professing only deep respect for all involved. The Temple bus fleet headed back west, but at the first rest stop Jones gathered his followers together and told them that the black Houston Baptists had fallen under the control of the Ku Klux Klan. Since Father said so, they accepted it as fact.