Peoples Temple

The Peoples Temple was a socialist religious sect that rocketed to international prominence in 1978, when more than 900 members of its intentional community in Guyana, South America, took their own lives by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid or were shot for their refusal to do so. The group was led by the charismatic self-styled prophet Jim Jones, whose lifelong battle for racial integration and social equality won him accolades from civil rights organizations but who, in the years leading up to the mass suicide, demanded increasingly authoritarian control over his followers and ratcheted up his rhetoric against what he saw as a conspiracy by a coalition of the U.S. government, the media, and a group of ex-followers to undermine his vision and destroy his movement.

Jones was born into the fractured landscape of racial and class tensions that would become his central concern. His birthplace was the racially segregated Lynn, Indiana, and while Jones attributed the beginnings of his political and theological radicalism to his outspoken mother, he claimed that his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (although there are no records of his membership). Jones as a child and adolescent was drawn to the emotionalism and progressive social values of the various Pentecostal churches he attended with his mother, but he complained that the churches tended to pay more attention to a style of worship than to furthering the egalitarian sociopolitical values of the faith.

As a young man in the early 1950s, Jones began to discover his sizable talents as an evangelical faith healer. Word of these healings spread, and Jones began appearing in churches in Indiana and beyond, manifesting Pentecostal gifts of the Spirit and laying his hands on the sick to great fanfare among parishioners. Even as his reputation as a faith healer grew, however, Jones saw the practice as simply a means by which to advocate for racial integration and socialism. He required that churches in which he appeared be integrated and even asked that Black parishioners sit up front, which sometimes angered the local community or church elders. As the associate pastor of the Laurel Street Tabernacle in Indianapolis, Jones encountered strong resistance to integrating the congregation. Consequently, he left with a chunk of the membership to start his own church, Wings of Deliverance, which in 1956 he renamed the Peoples Temple.

Jones was significantly influenced by the charismatic Black preacher and self-proclaimed messiah Father M. J. Divine, whose Philadelphia Peace Mission Jones visited several times in the late 1950s. As was the case with Divine, Jones's followers began referring to him as “Father” or “Dad,” and the People's Temple was increasingly organized in a strict patriarchal fashion with Jones as its messiah who would deliver the flock out of the harsh racial and class inequalities of this world and into a utopian Promised Land. In Indianapolis and afterward, Jones began to more openly replace Christian theological tropes with socialist or communist ones, such as rejecting what he called the “Sky God” of Christianity in favor of communist principles. In 1960, the People's Temple was accepted as a Disciples of Christ congregation; however, Jones continued to elevate socialism as the true ideal and to view the Bible as a “paper idol” that had supported discrimination.

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