“Arrival at Jonestown”

Making the American Religious Monster

Fairfield University American Studies Conference (2022)

“And why does one make a monster?

In order to watch it die, of course.”

(Ingebretsen 153)

Good evening, and thanks so much for being here. Thank you to Dr. Lydia Willsky Ciollo, Dr. Peter Bayers, Dr. Gwendoline Alphonso, Linda Miller, the American Studies Program, and everyone else who made it possible for me to join y’all today. This is the first public talk I’ve given in person since, well, March 2020; I’ve really missed this. Hopefully I haven’t completely lost the knack. So:

CULTS!!!

Good, I have your attention. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there has been an explosion of cults media in the past few years. Don’t get me wrong; “cults” have been American clickbait (or its analog antecedent) for well over a century. But if you’re paying attention to this sort of thing–and I do, despite my best intentions, continue to pay attention to this sort of thing–you know that we’ve moved way past the fairly consistent “oops I joined a cult” sitcom one-off

Alexis endangers us all

or even the occasional semi-prestige standalone series.

I would say we’re approaching market saturation, but all evidence to the contrary. America just cannot get enough of cults.

I want to talk to you tonight about America’s cult consumption obsession and why I think it should give us pause. This is part of my (very) new book project, which I have tentatively entitled Cults Incorporated: The Business of Bad Religion. I’m excited about the project and, as I’ve said, delighted to be talking with all of you about my work. But before we go any further, I have to confess something.

I hate the word “cult.”

Cults?

I hate it. And to be honest, I have been trying not to write some version of this book for the past decade. Cults make me so cranky. Not the groups themselves–not just the groups themselves; I am looking at you, Scientology–but the way both scholars and, uh, normal people talk about cults. As your resident experts Drs. Hardy and Willsky Ciollo can attest, religious studies as a field has very little time for the study of new religious movements, and the study of new religious movements has, for the most part and present company very much excepted, failed to account for critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, class, or frankly power writ large.

Also I was told in no uncertain terms by my dissertation advisor that there were no jobs for people who work on transgender Norse neoshamans. The joke is on HIM, though, because there are no jobs in the academy, period. But I digress.

The meat of the matter is that most scholars of religion don’t bother to learn very much about “cults” because there literally is no academic market for that kind of scholarship.

Trust me, I looked.

But whereas scholars can at least be counted upon to respond with a semi-interested “huh” when I involuntarily and strenuously object to their offhanded references to “drinking the Kool-aid,” civilians are often downright offended when I attempt to unsettle their certainties about cults. Trying to explain that brainwashing is not a thing, that Jonestown is a story about white supremacist leadership murdering hundreds of Black people and not, you know, a goddamn punchline, makes some folks, to use internet parlance, Big Mad. Lots of folks who don’t think about them professionally are QUITE certain they know what cults are and how they work, and they do not take kindly to being corrected or asked to reconsider what they think they know.

Which is why I had firmly resolved NOT to write a book about cults. I specifically avoided the term in my first book, Abusing Religion,

Abusing Religion - MEGAN GOODWIN

focusing instead on what I call “minority religions” and the axes upon which they are minoritized: namely, race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism, which work together to characterize religious outsiders as threats both to white American women and children AND the American body politic. Sure, I might have done so much online yelling on the topic that I accidentally wound up quoted on the Wikipedia page for cults. And yes, I agreed to do a Keeping It 101 episode on cults,

but only because a senior scholar specifically asked for one.

We’re going to talk more about Judith Weisenfeld’s work in a minute. For now, suffice it to say that if she asks you to do an episode about cults so she can use it in her class, you freaking do it.

And okay, I did agree to teach a cults class

Cults & Sects

— I did not name it, but I did over-enroll it two semesters in a row. If you want to check out the syllabus, it’s available on my website.

There’s also a Medium page I used to discuss readings with students during quarantine.

But I was definitely absolutely not going to write a book about cults.

Until Jim Jones trended on twitter twice this summer, which was surprising, given he’s been dead almost as long as I’ve been alive. And then Leonardo diCaprio apparently signed on to play Jones in a biopic.

Leonardo DiCaprio In Final Talks To Star & Produce 'Jim Jones' At MGM; Scott Rosenberg Writing

And then literary journalist Jeff Sharlet and I had a public dust-up when he called 45-supporting antivaxxers “Jonestown America” and I politely but firmly asked him to stop doing that, please.

We have since made up; I know y’all were concerned.

And something inside of me just broke.

So I officially gave up, admitted I was powerless, and sketched out what is very slowly becoming Cults Inc, and by very slowly I truly mean one angry twitter thread at a time.

This is a book less about so-called “cults” themselves and more about who benefits from treating groups AS cults. The short version: businesses! universities! law enforcement! political parties, plural! Protestants! Catholics! white people!

The project considers this central question–who benefits from certain groups, certain practices, certain kinds of people, being received and disciplined as “cults” and “cult members” — in the context of 20th and 21st century American Islam, the 1985 MOVE bombing and its aftermath, QAnon and the 1/6 Capitol Siege, and our national misremembering of Peoples Temple and its doomed Agricultural Project. This last piece is the one I’m highlighting tonight.

I want us to talk about why this word, “cult,” DOES more than it SAYS, and why that matters, especially if you care about religious freedom, racial justice, and the concept of America. I’ll explain why what you think you know about Peoples Temple and Jonestown is probably wrong, and why Americans being wrong about Jim Jones, Peoples Temple, and cults in general–and they are so very, very wrong so very very often–is not just incorrect but dangerous. I’ll conclude by offering a theory as to why America would prefer to monstrify murderous white men than to grapple with its own centuries-long history of antiBlack racism and white christian nationalism.

WORDS DO THINGS: CULTS EDITION

But before we get into the tragic history of a truly beautiful movement, I want to give you a quick 101 on “cults.” As I mentioned I teach a “Cults” class, and that class starts with me trying to get my students to stop using that word. And it follows, as the night the day, that some earnest soul implores “but wait, what do I call Jonestown then?”

Honestly I’m always surprised that Zoomer students know anything about Jonestown, including that it existed, but that they do tells us something significant about the afterlife of these movements, I think. More on the afterlife of Jonestown in a bit.

I tell these students that first of all, Jonestown wasn’t a cult. Jonestown wasn’t even a group. It was a place — the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project — where a group of people, many of them Black women, worked themselves to exhaustion trying to create a better, more just world.

Here’s what Jonestown was:

when you hear Jonestown, you probably think

If you were alive and old enough to read magazines in 1978, you might remember this striking image

and a number of others I’m not going to show you.

We’ll get more into what Jonestown was and wasn’t in a moment. But I’m belaboring the language here because words do things, and cult does the wrong thing when we think about religion. It MATTERS that when you hear “cult” you think:

• pile of bodies
• brainwashing
• charismatic leader
• (some? all?) religion is dangerous

It matters that “cult” makes you go like “ooh, if I click this headline I’m going to read some weird shit about freaky sex, manipulative assholes, and people too dumb to know they’re being taken advantage of.”

Or as NRMs scholar Cathy Wessinger puts it,

‘cult’ can also be seen to imply that it is only in small, unconventional religious groups that believers commit hurtful and illegal actions; socially dominant religious groups are somehow let off the hook, as if their members never transgress in this way.

The short version is that “cult” is a misdirect, one that’s smuggling in all sorts of assumptions about religion and American belonging. “Cult” is basically three sexist, classist, white supremacist toddlers in an American flag trench coat.

Let me pause to let that terrifying and absurd image sink in and to clarify that when I talk about white supremacy, I do not just mean Proud Boys or the Klan. In the context of what’s now the United states, considerations of white supremacy signals systems and institutions that were built to privilege white people and qualities we associate with whiteness at every conceivable level. Looking at minoritized religions and calling them cults has a long, white supremacist history (cf. Weisenfeld, Greene-Hayes).

Whether you mean it to or not, “cult” — especially in what’s now the US— makes people think

• dangerous
• pervy
• controlling + greedy + manipulative leaders [who are often but not always men]
• stupid or trapped members [who are often but not always women
• RELIGION BUT BAD

“Cult” smuggles in the idea that “real” religions are inherently good. It just so happens that Americans’ ideas of “real” religions look an awful lot like white mainstream Christianity. “Real/ good” American religion is:

• private
• individual
• belief-based
• civil
• reserved
• text-based
• limited to certain times/locations
• pro-United States

All of those things sound a lot like white supremacy, and that is because they ARE components of white supremacy, which in what’s now the United States takes the form of white small-c christian nationalism. By small-c christian, I mean the germination of markedly Christian worldviews, explanatory frameworks, and value systems through nominally secular institutions (courts, schools, hospitals, etc), thus encouraging and rewarding acceptance of these Christian worldviews, explanatory frameworks, and value systems as NOT religious but rather just “good old American values.”

Religions in America that are

• community-focused
• ecstatic / “too” enthusiastic
• practice-oriented
• uncivil / impolite
• based primarily on experience, orality, and revelation
• not bounded by time/location
• and/or critical of American imperialism?

Those are the ones that get called cults. And it just so happens that a lot of folks who join these groups are

• not white
• not cis men
• not wealthy
• not straight (OR just not doing sex in “normal” ways)
• not traditionally Christian

So when I say “cult” is racist, sexist, and classist — this is what I mean.

At which point the students who haven’t dropped the class while I was mid-rant usually ask what they should say if they can’t say “cults.” I tell them there’s an easy (but less good) answer and a harder-but-better answer, which is also, I apologize but not really, academics in a nutshell. The easy answer here is “new religious movements,” or NRMs for short — that’s what the textbooks tend to use. But new religious movements doesn’t accurately characterize these groups.

For example: scholars still talk about the Shakers (founded 1770) as an NRM. We do NOT talk about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (founded 1830) as an NRM. These groups aren’t significant because they’re novel, I’ve argued — they’re important because they tell us something about how America defines religion:

• who counts & who doesn’t
• who the first amendment protects
• who can put their monument on the grounds of a state capitol, say

Satanic Temple Baphomet statue (AR 2018)

• and whose non-normative sexual practice gets used as an excuse to invade a community with armored personnel carriers and take all the community’s children away from their families

Yearning for Zion raid (2008)

Focusing on novelty renders these groups a curiosity — Lawrence Moore says Americans treat NRMs “as sideshow events.” I argue that studying minoritized religious communities matters because Americans’ reception of these groups tells us something important about power, about who is protected and who is made a legitimate target of state violence, and how our understanding of who should be protected is informed by our assumptions about religion, whether we recognize those assumptions as religious or not.

But if I’m telling you “cult” is a problem (and it is) and I’m saying that NRM doesn’t really get the job done (because it doesn’t), then what the heck do I want you to call these groups? This is where the harder but better answer comes in. I want us to think about what questions you’re trying to answer when you’re asking about these groups. As I mentioned, I look at “American minority religions” in Abusing Religion because I’m interested in the overlaps b/w how we treat a marginalized but not new group, like Islam, and how we treat a marginalized new group, like FLDS.

The central question in my first book is about abuse, how abuse happens in minoritized religious communities, and how we respond differently to abuse in those communities than to abuse that happens elsewhere. The conclusion I came to is: religion doesn’t cause abuse. Abuse HAPPENS in minoritized religious communities. Of course it does. Because abuse happens EVERYWHERE, because we as a nation let it happen.

Abuse Happens Because We Let It

Religion doesn’t cause abuse: people cause abuse. Religion is not dangerous: people are dangerous. And some people use religion to do dangerous, violent, unforgivable things.

But “American minority religions” isn’t the only way to think about these groups. In New World A-Coming, her breathtaking analysis of Black religious innovation and racial identity formation during the Great Migration, Judith Weisenfeld ALSO resists the c-word, saying “cult” tells us more about the person using the word than about the group/s in question (12–13). Instead she offers the concept of “religio-racial movements” to think more carefully about how Black Americans in the early-to-mid 20th century urban US northeast, midwest, and west resignified religion and race beyond histories of enslavement and suffering.

Rather than position the[se] groups…in relation to a presumed normative center by labeling them ‘cults’ or ‘sects’ or isolate them from broader cultural and religious influences as new religions, I examine them as windows into religious challenges to conventional racial categories and explore what participation in the movements meant for members. (Weisenfeld 2016, 12–13)

Though she allows that “all religious groups in the United States could be characterized as religio-racial ones, given the deeply powerful, if sometimes veiled, ways the American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame,” Weisenfeld is very resistant to making “religio-racial movements” or “religio-racial identity” theoretically portable (14). Her focus is on specific communities in specific times and specific places. She’s expressed concerns that her terminology might be used to obscure rather than highlight the co-constitutive nature of race and religion–the making of race through religion; the making of religion through racialization in what’s now the United States–and draw focus from the radical and life-giving creativity of the movements she engages in New World.

I read both her hesitation and her meticulousness as a call to use language about these movements with care, both to honor the full humanity of members of these communities and to reckon with what Toni Morrison calls our vulnerability to language. There is not one good descriptor for these groups. There are as many labels for them as there are ways of doing religion, which is to say their labels are legion. As JZ Smith famously wrote, it’s “not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined, with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways,” (281).

I want us to resist the urge to think religion is simple, that there are easy ways of describing it. I want us to recognize that HOW we talk and think about religion MATTERS, and that getting it wrong can have dire consequences.

Speaking of religion, JZ Smith, and how we talk about religion gone wrong…

PEOPLES TEMPLE AGRICULTURAL PROJECT

(deep breaths; this section gets a little rough)

The mass murder that most would come to know as simply “Jonestown” occurred the weekend before Thanksgiving 1978. The weekend before Thanksgiving is when the American Academy of Religion usually holds its annual meeting; 1978 was no exception. Which means thousands of religious studies scholars were gathered in one place as news broke that hundreds of Americans had seemingly taken their own lives in Guyana at the command of one white man: Jim Jones.

JZ Smith was at that meeting. In Imagining Religion, he wrote that

one might claim that Jonestown was the most important single event in the history of religions, for if we continue… to leave it ununderstandable, then we will have surrendered our rights to the academy.

Smith’s challenge to scholars was not to dismiss this event as a freak tragedy, an event occurring outside history, lacking precedent or explanation. But scholars of religion have mostly ignored Smith’s imperative — there is, as we have discussed, no market for the study of minoritized religions. And the meaning most Americans have made of Jonestown is just…incorrect. And worse than incorrect. It is dangerous. Let me tell you why.

When you hear “Jonestown,” you probably think “drinking the Kool-aid.” You think mass suicide. You think brainwashing. Most of all, you think Jim Jones.

You might, but probably don’t, think “mass murder.” You most likely do not think “antiracist utopia.” Or “radically inclusive community dedicated to mutual aid.” Or “anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist organizers and activists.” You almost certainly do not think Black religion.

There is so much to unpack in the brief and heartbreaking history of the Peoples Temple; we barely have time to scratch the surface. I honestly want to say as little as possible about Jim Jones — as Judith Weisenfeld compellingly argues, the true founders of any movement are its participants.

father’s kingdom

The people of Peoples Temple lived communally, pooling their resources and providing care for members and neighbors. They provided rental assistance, health exams, legal assistance, scholarships, and elder care.

“There is the largest group of people I have ever seen who are concerned about the world and are fighting for truth and justice for the world,” Annie Moore wrote of Peoples Temple to her sister, religious studies scholar Rebecca Moore, in 1972. “And all the people have come from such different backgrounds, every color, every age, every income group.”

Peoples Temple members were, as Rebecca Moore writes “teachers, postal clerks, civil service employees, domestics, military veterans, laborers.” They came from working class and professional backgrounds. Together they built the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana, an attempt to create a racially integrated, socially conscious haven beyond the reach of American capitalism and imperialism.

Before the tragedy at Jonestown, the people of Peoples Temple had a dream

They were scholars and revolutionaries, activists and optimists. They lived together, worked together, celebrated and worshipped and mourned and protested together. Most of all, they were human beings working as hard as they could to build a kinder, more just world — a world worth living in, worth saving.

They were people.

Over 900 of them–including 300+ children and Annie Moore, who wrote to her sister about their collective fight for truth and justice–died in Guyana in November 1978 at the command of one erratic and ultimately homicidal white man. Jones’ orders were carried out by the overwhelmingly white leadership of Peoples Temple; so many of those leaders were white women. Nearly half of those who died were Black, and so many of them were Black women.

We do not remember Peoples Temple as a Black religious movement, despite its membership being 75% Black. We do not remember the murders at Jonestown–and they were murders, as coercing people to poison themselves and their children at gunpoint IS murder–as white supremacist violence.

We do not remember that Guyana refused to bury the Jonestown dead — “overwhelmingly Black bodies,” “so many Black women,” as Sikivu Hutchinson writes, naming this erasure both historical amnesia and misogynoir (Maya Bailey’s term for gendered and racial oppression of Black women).

Black Women and the Peoples Temple in Jonestown

We do not remember those same bodies shipped in rubberized bags from a Guyanese jungle to an Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, where they would be stored for six months until the city of San Francisco agreed to inter the unclaimed remains of 378 members of Peoples Temple. “​​No one wanted these bodies, the remains of Jonestown,” David Chidester writes (1988, 683).

Peoples Temple memorial

Americans came to terms with the event by dismissing the people of Jonestown as not sane, not Christian, and not American, thereby reinforcing normative psychological, religious, and political boundaries around a legitimate human identity in America

Chidester argues(1988, 700). That is: America ultimately decided that the Jonestown dead were not human and therefore not America’s problem — rendering these teachers and veterans, workers and revolutionaries, as Christina Sharpe might put it, unmournable.

Chidester argues that “American civil religion” [which we can read here as small-c christianity, christian commitments denatured into good old American values] “defines itself by what it excludes,” (1988, 698). America excluded the Jonestown dead, as it continues to exclude Black women and communities of Black radical religious innovation. But America has not been satisfied to exclude the Jonestown dead, to render their lives unmournable. Rather, America has turned their deaths into a cautionary tale, the punchline to innumerable bad jokes about brainwashing and sugar-saturated quick-prep potables — what JZ Smith called “the pornography of Jonestown,” (Devil in Mr Jones, 112). And America has turned Jim Jones, their executioner, into a monster.

Making the American Religious Monster

Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not closing out this paper with any sort of apology for Jim Jones. He is, to me, the least interesting and least important thing about Peoples Temple. And yet Americans know so much more about Jones than about the movement he convened. Once again, I want to insist that this approach to thinking about “cults” is not merely wrong, but dangerous and dehumanizing.

I noted above that Peoples Temple was an overwhelmingly Black new religious movement. Jones stole so much from faithful Black Americans, from American Black-led new religious movements, like Father Divine’s Peace Mission, and from Black revolutionaries, like Huey Newton. The very first song in the Peoples Temple songbook is “Lift Ev’ry Voice,”

from the Peoples Temple songbook

colloquially known as the Black national anthem. But I want to conclude my talk tonight by asking us to focus NOT on what Jones stole from Black Americans. Rather I want us to consider what we steal from the Jonestown dead — overwhelmingly Black, so many of them Black women — by monstrofying Jones.

Let me explain.

It is common — too common — for public interest in so-called cults to focus on a so-called charismatic leader. This is an incorrect approach for a number of reasons: as Weisenfeld teaches us, while many might join a movement for a leader, they stay because of a community. Also many new religious movements had perfectly dull leaders; EG White and Mary Baker Eddy were not exactly barn burners, and Marshall Applewhite was downright off-putting.

Highlighting a single, usually male founder as central to understanding a religious tradition is also a christian imperialist approach to studying religion — one visibly prevalent in the world religions model (and if this sort of thing interests you, check out our most recent season of Keeping It 101 for more yelling about what’s wrong with the World Religions Paradigm).

So yes, focusing on a charismatic leader is incorrect and misleading. But this lens is also dangerously distorting. Explaining unconventional, controversial, troubling commitments away as gullible people falling prey to brainwashing (which is not a thing, see Rebecca Moore on this as well).

The brainwashing myth

Handwaving NRM belonging as inherently irrational becomes exponentially more problematic when we survey the history of American groups called “cults” and see that their members were very often women, very often people of color, very often poor, very often drawn to sexual difference. Focus on a charismatic leader is easily extrapolated into assumptions about, for example, Black women being “naturally religious,”

please hear my scare quotes

more susceptible to exploitation by, say, a particularly charming white man. Focus on a charismatic leader reinforces assumptions that religion itself is dangerous, and so religious freedom must have its limits, even within American democracy.

Small-c christianity sets those limits; see Winnie Sullivan for more on this; and as Sylvester Johnson reminds us, the freedom of some requires the unfreedom of others.

Finally, focus on a charismatic leader distracts from the systemic inequalities and injustices that make belonging to a marginal community desirable and rational in the first place.

But Americans have done more than reduce the complexity of Peoples Temple to Jones’ supposed charisma. Rather than remember the Jonestown dead in their full humanity, we tell ourselves stories about seemingly gullible people brainwashed into ending their own lives at the whim of a madman. We have spectacularly abjected the Jonestown dead and used religion to make a monster out of Jim Jones.

“Making monsters is a process of social persuasion,” Edward Ingebretsen writes in “Death by Narrative” (155). We make monsters to reinforce and renew social boundaries, to simplify complex cultural anxieties, and most of all to absolve ourselves of culpability in their justifiable, indeed inevitable and necessary, deaths (158, 173). “And why does one make a monster?” Ingebretsen asks. “In order to watch it die, of course,” (153). It is not enough that the monster dies — it must be seen to die, to reinforce the severe consequences of insubordination and redraw the boundary between the permissible and the incorporable, between us, that is, and the monster. The spectacle is the point.

When I say that America has made Jim Jones into a monster, I mean we glanced at the tragic deaths of over 900 people who just wanted to live in a world where we all took care of one another like each one of our lives was sacred and decided the lesson was that religion done wrong is dangerous. That the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project emerged solely as a shrine to Jones’ charisma, rather than as a radical rejection of American nationalism, capitalism, and white supremacy — a utopian community that Jonestown survivor Laura Johnston Kohl still recalls as “heaven on earth.”

“I never believed in Heaven in my whole life,” Kohl says in Jonestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Firelight 2006). “You know, that’s not the way I operated — but when I was in Guyana, and when I’d watch the sun rise, I actually thought there was a heaven on Earth. And now, I can’t believe in heaven anymore.”

America looked and looks at Peoples Temple and sees a group that is

• community-focused
• ecstatic
• practice-oriented
• uncivil
• based primarily on experience, orality, and revelation
• not bounded by time/location [part of daily life]
• critical of American imperialism

America looks at Peoples Temple and sees a cult. A cult led by a deceptive, abusive, exploitative figure with seemingly inhuman influence over their lives and minds, who terrorized and ultimately murdered his followers. America uses small-c christian values, assumptions, and worldviews to make Jim Jones out to be a monster [a process I’m thinking of as religio-monstrofication, both in conversation with and with all apologies to Weisenfeld].

I will remind you that we make monsters to watch them die. Making Jones into a monster makes his destruction inevitable, necessary, virtuous, and most of all not our fault. The religio-monstrofication of Jones exculpates Americans for the nationalist, capitalist, white supremacist conditions that rendered America unlivable for the people of Peoples Temple. If Jones is a monster, the Jonestown dead are merely collateral damage in his fearsome wake.

We should understand Americans’ smug consumption of the horrorshow that was the Jonestown massacre as an act of what I’m calling spectacular abjection, drawing close enough to monstrosity to be overwhelmed by it and to ultimately repulse it, reaffirming existing hierarchies and social orders. In considering Americans’ reception of Jonestown as an act of spectacular abjection, I’m drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, in which she laments “the spectacular nature of Black suffering and…the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle,” (1997, 22). That is, making a spectacle of Black suffering both reinforces the power of those causing the suffering and obscures the humanity of Black people by making a horrorshow of their pain.

Remember, the community of Peoples Temple was 75% Black. Nearly half of those who died in Guyana were Black. But Americans do not remember Peoples Temple as a Black movement, nor do we remember the Jonestown massacre as white supremacist violence and betrayal. We remember brainwashing. We remember Kool-aid. We remember the monster: Jim Jones.

How can we learn to look past the monsters of American religion? Islamic historian Ali A Olomi offers us a different approach. Olomi says he thinks of historians as necromancers:

We either raise the dead so that we can see that we’re just like them, or we lay the ghosts of our past down… This is the work of decolonizing, this is the work of dismantling white supremacy, the ghosts that continue to haunt, the ghosts built into the machines… But the other component of [historians] is to…reawaken the ghosts or the dead that have been silenced…to remind us, to say, look, there is a real person here.

The dead of Jonestown are still speaking, if we’re willing to listen. We should listen. We should allow them, invite them to haunt us. Indeed we must, as James H Hill writes, “lean fully into the haunting, irrational, atheological dislocation of a nightmare otherwise known as the United States of America.” The Jonestown dead still have much to teach us, if we can pull our focus from the monster we have made Jim Jones into, if we can learn to think of groups like Peoples Temple as more than just a “cult.”

“Nobody joins a cult,” as Peoples Temple member Deborah Layton says in the opening sequence of Jonestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Firelight 2006). Cultifying Peoples Temple–making Jim Jones the religious monster at the center of the movement’s story, its moral and its ultimatum–dehumanizes and does further violence to the victims of Jones’ homicidal agenda. Their stories matter. Their lives matter. We have to learn and teach their history, to think past what JZ Smith called the pornography of Jonestown and what I’ve called the religio-monstrofication of Jones.

I can confidently say that America does not need another monster. What we need are more necromancers — like Ali Olomi, like Sikivu Hutchinson, like Judith Weisenfeld — reaching back through tangled histories to let our unquiet dead speak for themselves.

Thank you.