revolutionary suicide as religion
dying to change the world?
What does co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey Newton have to do with Peoples Temple? Given what you already know about his tendency to appropriate Black culture, it probably won’t surprise you to learn Jones adopted and twisted Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide” for his own apocalyptic ends.
What we’re reading/listening to
- Newton, “The Way of Liberation,” from Revolutionary Suicide (1973)
- Q042 Transcript, FBI Transcription
- Harris & Waterman, “To Die for the Peoples Temple,” from Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America (2004)
Newton, “The Way of Liberation”
Huey P. Newton was a key figure in the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Here’s Newton in his own words:
And from today’s reading:
“It is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.”
(Newton 1973, 5)
In defining “revolutionary suicide,” Newton says
Revolutionary suicide does not mean that I and my comrades have a death wish; it means just the opposite. We have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death.” (ibid.)
What does he mean by this? Do the transcript of “the Death Tape” and the events at Jonestown suggest Jones correctly understood or applied Newton’s concept? Why or why not? This piece might be helpful for trying to answer these questions:
Q042 Transcript
“We committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” (Jim Jones, November 1978)
I don’t want to linger on this or any of what Smith would call the “pornography of Jonestown.” But I did want you to see for yourselves the way that Jones appropriates and twists Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide.
Harris & Waterman, “To Die for the Peoples Temple”
Yeah, I don’t love this reading either, friends. I appreciate that the authors are putting Jones’ sermons and actions in the context of Newton’s work. But Harris and Waterman are presenting the Jonestown tragedy as voluntary self-harm, when we know most of the victims were held at gunpoint and forced to harm themselves and their children.
This article is most useful, I think, in giving us a sense of the political landscape in which Peoples Temple emerged and in showing us just how much Jones drew on Black liberation rhetoric in his own preaching. I also appreciate the authors’ insistence that Peoples Temple was a political as well as a religious movement (Harris & Waterman 2004, 121). Hopefully by this point in the semester, you’ve learned that there’s no such thing as apolitical religion in what’s now the United States. And it’s undeniable that “Peoples Temple, as a religious and political project, helped to give meaning to the world that was quickly emerging, and to position collective agency as a lever for progressive change,” (ibid., 104). Though again, we could say the same of all the movements we’ve discussed this semester; while the historical moment at which Peoples Temple and Black Power movements emerge is significant, Weisenfeld’s work has shown us religio-racial groups had been at work on creating political change for decades before the 1960s.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t used essays from this volume before, and I’m not sure I’d assign them again. Whereas the Moore chapter we read for last time used a deeply troubling theorization of race to ground its analysis, this chapter offers us an intriguing survey of the US religio-political landscape in which PT emerged but offers very little by way of analysis at all. Nevertheless, there’s merit in engaging material we disagree with or find dissatisfying, and I’d like to hear what you think about this one.
You read the primary sources Harris and Waterman are discussing: Jones’ so-called “death tape,” and Newton’s treatise. How do Harris and Waterman help us better understand Jones’ appropriation and misrepresentation of Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide?
