The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Over the next few years, he joined them all, being baptized by the ones that required it, swearing other forms of allegiance to those that didn’t. Jimmy studied everything. There were Sundays when he spent part of the morning in one church service, then scampered out to catch the tail end of a different one.

In September 1977, Jim Jones would claim in an interview intended as part of a memoir that he’d never actually believed in God. He’d seen religion as an opportunity to “infiltrate” the church and turn Christians toward socialism.

I said, ‘Fuck the Lord’ . . .

This white preacher named Jim Jones didn’t just talk about doing things, he did them.

Not all Jones’s healings at Community Unity involved chicken guts passed off as cancer.

After all, one of the key Temple goals was to discourage obsession with material possessions.

In terrible pain—he would be diagnosed with bleeding ulcers—Jones refused to be treated until he saw for himself that integration was being carried out.

By the end of 1961, Indianapolis was a significantly more integrated city than it had been twelve months earlier, and Jim Jones was almost entirely responsible.

Jones held regular “corrective fellowship” sessions, where individual members stood before their peers and were criticized for any wrongdoing. There was always something each person needed to do better.

To challenge Jim Jones was to challenge the Lord, and God would respond accordingly.

For thirteen days, the world trembled on the brink of catastrophe. Then the Russians agreed to abandon the Cuban site in return for the removal of American missiles in Turkey.

The lesson for Jones’s followers was that an honorable end justified whatever morally questionable means were necessary to achieve it.

It was one thing to give blacks the right to live where they pleased, and another for housing to be made available to them at affordable prices. Even the finest stores and restaurants now had to serve customers of all races—but few nonwhites in the city had much, if any, disposable income.

He unnerved some by denigrating the Bible. He declared that it was “the root of all our problems today. Racism is taught in it. Oppression is taught in it.”

When communion was required, Temple congregants were offered coffee and donuts rather than wine and wafers.

Originally, these acts of kindness had been presented as simple obedience to Christian principles. But Jones kept careful track of every favor done.

In fact, Jones said, it was the Bible’s endorsement of the hateful practice that made slavery possible, which in turn led to modern-day racial injustice. Jones still recognized Jesus as more than human. It was just that imperfect men had written an equally flawed book about him.

They can’t be allowed to think that I’m ever wrong.” Lambrev felt honored that Jones had taken him into his confidence and resolved not to challenge him in public again. Nothing was more important than the cause, facts included.

“Keep them poor and keep them tired, and they’ll never leave.” How well he understood his people.

It’s impossible to be certain whether Jim Jones truly believed that he was God, or that he was the spirit of Jesus that reappeared once in every generation. What’s inarguable is that he felt himself to be something beyond an ordinary man, that there was a special divinity in him.

More often, as Peoples Temple expanded, the admirable motive was sublimated in favor of Jones’s baser objective. Ultimately, personal ambition completely won out. But in 1971, he still struggled to satisfy both. In doing so, Jones drove his followers relentlessly and drove himself harder.

he included Cartmell by putting her in charge of his “fuck schedule,” a notebook listing who Jones was scheduled to sleep with, and when.

“Well, if you ever want to, I can.” Jones had occasional sex with male followers. Never as often as he did with women, but on a regular enough basis that younger men leaders were warned by some of Jones’s previous male partners, “If you ask Father to fuck you in the ass, take a douche.”

Jones was clearly bisexual, though he chose not to openly admit it.

Besides dogs, there was a chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs, who occupied a cage just outside their house in Redwood Valley.

Jones preached, and his followers believed, that the U.S. criminal justice system was corrupt, as well as rife with racism. Local police were untrustworthy, too,

Jones instituted a rule: “Don’t ever go to the authorities. . . . Don’t call police on a member, [especially] if they’re black.

White Angelenos expected black rioters to come streaming into their genteel residential areas, but in reality, by and large young black males took out their frustration and rage on each other.

Jane Fonda came to a Peoples Temple service, along with her husband Tom Hayden, the political activist who’d helped found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Afterward, she sent Jones a letter enthusiastically praising the Temple. It gave instant cachet to Jones among Los Angeles’s liberal glitterati.

And the Temple offered more than entertaining meetings. At the back of the main room, nurses provided tests for hypertension and diabetes. Trained social workers helped with welfare and other government-agency-related issues.

Further, though Peoples Temple did considerable good for the poorest ghetto residents, Watts and South Central were so isolated from the rest of the massive city that their programs could never extend to every area.

Jones once urged followers not to use Crest toothpaste:

Something new for the longtime loyalists, something unforgettably dramatic, was necessary.

Afterward, more of the Temple security guards were armed; some carried rifles in addition to handguns.

A Marceline Jones musical solo was described: the “trim blonde” sang “My Black Baby” while Jimmy Jones (“a handsome boy of 14”) stood nearby. Marceline’s performance of that song was a Temple standby.

Jones established a new Temple department called Diversions, and told Terri Buford that she would run it. “ ‘Diversions’ meant that we would divert the press’s attention from Jim,”

Carter was stunned. “I thought, ‘This guy has psychic ability.’ What I didn’t realize was that they had a guy planted in the row right behind Terry and me. He wrote what I’d said on a card and passed it to somebody who passed it to Jones.

“Cut out that Jesus shit. We’re socialists.”

Jones ordered the auditorium windows opened, and then commanded everyone to shout “Fuck!” in unison.

Marceline Jones, a trained nurse,

the sight that night of well-armed black men circling in front of a menacing mob alarmed the cops, and their superiors felt the same concern when they read reports about the incident. That the black troublemakers were led—incited?—by a white preacher made it worse.

Yet despite this incessantly professed love and admiration for blacks, few held positions of actual authority in the Temple.

After Jones verbally abused her some more, Efrein was required to remain naked for the remainder of the meeting, which lasted another few hours.

Jones ordered a woman who’d allegedly broken some rule to have her hands tied and then tossed into the swimming pool. She was left to gasp and struggle for a few moments, then pulled out.

I thought of writing my deep sentimental feelings I have for you but decided that was selfish since you might feel it required some response from you. So, I decided that the things I most wanted you to know was:

Several times Jones specifically mentioned Masada, the mountaintop fortress in Israel where almost one thousand Jewish revolutionaries, women, and children committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman army about to breach the walls.

We were always going to be the only ones who died. [Jones] was always ready to kill us. That whole group suicide [idea] didn’t start in Guyana.”

[Dad] talked [gender] equality but for him, it was always his sons.”

That was why Jones wanted every possible follower crammed into the settlement immediately; he must lead a multitude, just as he had back in California. That they lacked proper housing, that feeding so many put an impossible strain on the still limited possibilities of Jonestown’s fields, didn’t concern him.

As a tactic to delay any fatal orders by Jones, Marceline arranged for Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver to send radio messages of support for the Temple cause.