Peoples Temple: beliefs, history and sources

History & overview

An integrated church in Indiana that ended as a settlement in Guyana.

Peoples Temple began in Indianapolis in 1954 as one of the very few congregations in the city where Black and white members worshipped in the same room, and it stayed that way on purpose. It ran a free restaurant, soup kitchens, nursing homes and a job placement service; its pastor, Jim Jones, was appointed director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in January 1961. The congregation affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1960, moved to Redwood Valley, California in 1965, and to San Francisco in the early 1970s, where it turned out voters and fed the poor and was praised by the mayor. By then Jones was preaching what he called apostolic socialism, and had begun to teach that the God of the churches did not exist. In 1974 the Temple started clearing farmland in northwest Guyana; roughly a thousand members had moved there by 1978. On 18 November 1978, 918 people died.

On the record

On 18 November 1978, 918 people died in Guyana: 909 at the Jonestown settlement, of whom 304 were children; five at the Port Kaituma airstrip — US Representative Leo J. Ryan, NBC correspondent Don Harris, NBC cameraman Bob Brown, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson and Temple member Patricia Parks; and four at the Temple house in Georgetown. Most of the Jonestown deaths were caused by cyanide taken in flavoured drink. Nine others were wounded at the airstrip, including Ryan's legislative counsel Jackie Speier. The FBI investigation was code-named RYMUR, for Ryan Murder, and runs to 2,750 serials and more than 10,000 pages, released under FOIA and indexed at San Diego State University.

Why it is filed this way

On paper the Temple was an ordinary Protestant congregation: affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from 1960 and never expelled. Scholars of new religious movements classify it as a movement rather than a denomination because its authority ran entirely through one man and its doctrine changed with him. The word cult was applied to it constantly after 1978 and almost never before; Rebecca Moore, who edits the San Diego State archive and lost two sisters and a nephew at Jonestown, has written at length about what that relabelling does to the people who were in it.

The corporation was wound up after 1978 and its assets went to a court-appointed receiver to settle claims. Several hundred people survived — members who were in Georgetown or San Francisco, members who walked out through the bush on 18 November, and children who had been taken out earlier. There is no successor body and no one claims the name.

DeitiesThe Temple did not hold one doctrine across its life. It began as a healing ministry in a Pentecostal register, with laying on of hands and calling out illness. By the San Francisco years Jones was preaching that the God of the Bible — he called it the Sky God — is a fiction used to keep the poor quiet, and that what he named Divine Socialism should be worshipped instead. He also presented himself to members as the embodiment of that principle. A member who joined in Indianapolis in 1956 and a member who died in Guyana in 1978 did not believe the same things.

Founded1954 CE · Indianapolis, Indiana, United States

FounderJim Jones

AfterlifeContested and inconsistent. Jones denied the heaven the churches preached and at times spoke of reincarnation; on the recording made while the deaths were happening he told members they were stepping over to another plane.

TextsThe King James Bible, preached and later publicly repudiated · Peoples Forum, the Temple newspaper · The transcribed sermons and the Jonestown tapes

The map

Peoples Temple’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →

c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 1517 CE Protestantism 1954 CE Peoples Temple

Core Tenets

2 — a sample of the center, never the sum Enter →

Heaven is built here, by people, or it is not built. The Temple's working doctrine in California was that religion is worth what it feeds and houses. It ran a free restaurant, a legal aid office, care homes and a fleet of buses that carried members to demonstrations and to the polls, and pointed at all of it as the argument. Go deeper — context →

Jones told members he was God in a body. The claim arrived late and by degrees. In Indianapolis he was a preacher who healed; by the mid-1970s he was throwing a Bible on the floor in front of the congregation and asking why they needed it when he was standing there. Some members accepted it, some tolerated it as the price of the work, and some had already left. ⚖ contested within Go deeper — context →

Figures

who it looks to — gods, spirits, ancestors; some rooms are empty on principle Enter →

J Jim Jones — Father. A gifted preacher with a genuine and early record on integration, and a man who staged fake healings from at least the Indianapolis years. Both are documented, and any account that keeps only one of them is not describing the person the members knew. Domain Healing, provision, protection, and by the end the whole content of the faithStanding Called Father by members from the Indianapolis years; by 1976 presented as God in a body Meet them — context & 1 source →

Rites & Ritual

what its people do — and when Enter →

The service, and the meeting that came after it. Music first — the Temple choir cut records — then testimony, then Jones, for as long as he wanted. In Guyana the meeting often ran into the night over a loudspeaker system that reached every dormitory, and there was no way to be out of earshot of it. When weekly, and most nights at JonestownWho the whole congregation, children included Go deeper — context →

Where next

the museum exit — every door leads deeper in

Christianity — 8 shared ideas, a different faith Sikhism — 7 shared ideas, a different faith The Bahá'í Faith — 7 shared ideas, a different faith Hinduism — 6 shared ideas, a different faith Branch Peoples Temple — inherit everything, change what you must The library of ideas — what Peoples Temple shares with every other faith A faith at random — somewhere you have never been

Sources

2 cited texts

Jonestown and Peoples Temple: A Digital Archive, San Diego State University University Library where it is cited →
World Religions and Spirituality Project, Virginia Commonwealth University, entry on Peoples Temple (rendered) where it is cited →

These citations identify texts used in the linked passages. Follow each passage to read its quotation and context. A tradition’s own texts explain its teachings; historical claims may also require independent scholarship. Translations marked (rendered) are our own plain-English wording, not a standard edition; where a passage matters, read it in a full translation.