religion as revolution
who were Peoples Temple?
Hopefully you’ve all had time to watch and reflect on the Life and Death of Peoples Temple documentary, which helps us recognize just how far Jones and Peoples Temple leadership drove the movement’s members from their intentions and goals. It’s a hard watch, but it’s important.
What we’re reading
- Peoples Temple Songbook
- Milk, “In Defense of Jim Jones,” (February 1978)
- Moore, “Demographics and Black Religious Culture,” from Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America (2004)
- Lincoln & Mamiya, “Daddy Jones and Father Divine,” from Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America (2004)
And as we begin our inquiries into Peoples Temple in earnest, a gentle but firm reminder:
brainwashing isn’t a thing.
If you need a refresher on this reading/concept, revisit our “what’s a cult?” conversation from the beginning of the semester.
Peoples Temple Songbook
The fortieth anniversary of the massacre was two years ago, and Rebecca Moore — the preeminent American scholar of Peoples Temple and the sister of two women who helped plan the mass deaths in Jonestown, whose work you read for today — asked that we remember the movement by playing a song they wrote at the national meeting of the American Academy of Religion. So much of the group’s hopes and dreams are evident in the songs they sung.
It’s noteworthy that the very first song in the book is “Lift Every Voice,” commonly referred to as the Black National Anthem.
The racial dynamics of PT were fraught: hopefully you can see how much their rhetoric and theology originally built on Father Divine’s Peace Movement — a connection evident in this songbook as well. A significant portion of members were Black, and certainly Jim Jones mimicked Black Church ways of sermonizing and building community.
That so many Black people, especially Black women, died at Jonestown, is an eviscerating betrayal of the movement’s guiding principles. We’ll be reading and watching more of Dr. Hutchinson’s work next week, but this piece gives an insightful overview of the misogynoir at work in the Jonestown massacre.
Milk, “In Defense of Jim Jones”
“Rev. Jones is widely known in the minority communities here and elsewhere as a man of the highest character, who has undertaken constructive remedies for social problems which have been amazing in their scope and effectiveness. He is also highly regarded amongst church, labor, and civic leaders of a wide range of political persuasions.”
Harvey Milk (Feb 1978)
Milk was the first openly-gay person to be elected to office in California. Here’s some background, if you’re not familiar with his work.
I included this letter because often the only things folks know about Peoples Temple is the Jonestown massacre. Not only is that incorrect, it erases so much of the progressive political labor PT did in California during the 1970s.
It might seem odd to hear Jones described so positively, and as the documentary illustrates, there’s a lot of space between the public perception of Jones and his behavior within the movement he founded. But if we read this letter as less about Jones and more about Peoples Temple, it offers us insight into how PT was perceived by community members outside the movement.
One of the most compelling arguments Weisenfeld makes in New World is that focusing on “cult” leaders rather than on movements as communities is misleading and incomplete. Members might have joined in part because Jones offered a compelling — even charismatic — worldview, but they stayed in the movement because they connected with the community and the world they hoped collectively to build.
Moore, “Demographics and Black Religious Culture”
If we do not understand Peoples Temple as Black religion, we have not understood the movement. Moore’s work in this piece gives us a richer, more substantive survey of who Peoples Temple were as a community.
As the same time, I’m not convinced the distinction Moore draws between “racially Black” and “culturally Black” is productive here. Honestly it feels a little to very this:
As it seems to imply both that one could be “racially Black” while not being “culturally Black” (?!?!?) and also that there is a singular “Black culture” rather than a multitude of ways to be Black in what is now the United States (though American Blackness is, of course, always shaped by white supremacy). By now, you all know that race is about much, much more than “skin color,” and honestly “certain prison populations” as an example of Black culture is unforgivable.
But Moore’s emphasis on the cultural components of Black religion in what’s now the United States does help us remember that demographics aren’t just about numbers: they’re about complex human beings living in community with one another. Note, in particular, the attempt to identify as many massacre victims by name as possible.
And there is a profound and tragic irony in a progressive movement dedicated to racial equality ending in the murder of so many Black members. As Moore points out, roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of Jonestown victims were Black, and almost half were Black women. (The “mixed” racial category included in this analysis erases the Blackness of many community members, so it’s hard to arrive at a precise number here.) Again, Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson will help us think more closely about those statistics and their human significance next week.
Note, too, that “the percentage of white male survivors surpasses their presence in the community,” (Moore 2004, 64) — that is, a higher percentage of white men (19% of survivors) survived the massacre than lived in Jonestown (10% of total population). At the same time, we learn that the movement and the Guyana settlement were largely financed by Black members, especially elderly Black members (ibid., 65).
Pay attention to the ways Moore is responding to the other piece we read for today, especially with regard to what these statistics tell us about the members of Peoples Temple and with Peoples Temple’s similarities to Father Divine’s Peace Mission. Pay attention as well to the discrepancy between membership demographics and leadership demographics within the movement. Remember that group leaders saying their leadership isn’t racist doesn’t mean white supremacy isn’t at work in the group’s structures. Oppression and inequality are far often the result of unconscious bias than explicit racism. OR: just because someone says something isn’t racist or they didn’t mean it to be racist doesn’t mean a person or group isn’t perpetuating white supremacy.
Finally, how is Moore responding to Fauset in this chapter? And how do we think Dr. Weisenfeld would respond to the ways Moore has theorized religion and race in this analysis?
Lincoln & Mamiya, “Daddy Jones and Father Divine”
We know from the introduction that this piece was originally published in 1980, only two years after the massacre. How are Lincoln and Mamiya using “cult” in this piece? How do you think Fauset, Hardy, and Weisenfeld would respond to this analysis of Peoples Temple and the Peace Mission?
Note that Lincoln and Mamiya refer to the massacre as a “protracted orgy of coercive suicide,” (2004, 29). It’s important to remember that the victims of the massacre were held at gunpoint and forced to harm themselves and often their children. Please keep in mind that those victims were massacred and robbed of their agency — it’s inaccurate to refer to Jonestown as the site of a “mass suicide,” and using the language of suicide erases the violence done to those victims.
Contrary to the authors’ assertion, America does not do a great job of “tolerating” non-white non-mainstream Christian religions — as I think we’ve observed at length in this course. But the point they’re making about most Americans knowing very little about minoritized religions still stands.
