History & overview · every faith gets one
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 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.
The founding
Jones was a student pastor at Somerset Southside Methodist in Indianapolis and left after being told he could not bring Black worshippers into the congregation. He opened his own church at Hoyt Avenue and Randolph Street in 1954, first called Wings of Deliverance, and funded it in the early years partly by selling imported monkeys door to door. Members who joined then joined an integrationist church in a city that had been a Klan stronghold thirty years before, and that is what they thought they were joining. Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones to run the city Human Rights Commission on 6 January 1961; he was the only applicant for the post.
Its founding is bound to Jim Jones — 1954 CE.
What it holds
Reality. Material and historical. In its later years the Temple taught that no power intervenes from outside the world, and that whatever justice exists has to be built by people for each other..
The divine. The 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..
Death and after. Contested 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..