Salon Books | Rethinking Jonestown


	Hearing the Voices of Jonestown A L S O +T O D A Y After the Fall Reviewed by Peter Kurth A deeply narcissistic memoir, from the former "Three's Company" star and ThighMaster queen, about her struggle with low self-esteem T A B L E+T A L K Readers who are in-between books swap recommendations in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Beach reading 1998 By Dwight Garner (06/15/98) Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick (05/27/98) Cormac McCarthy: Shakespeare of the American West By Vince Passaro (05/20/98) Communism on your coffee table! By Barbara Ehrenreich (04/30/98) Hollywood swingers By Ray Sawhill (04/22/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers		RETHINKING JONESTOWN \| PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - At least these established organizations won't take you too far from mainstream life. By contrast, a group likely to be dubbed a cult makes substantial demands on the member. Its existential gratifications may be so profound that the person withdraws completely from the established institutions. (You may even forget to be a good consumer, and give your money to the group instead.) For society at large, this is anxiety-inducing. And so, to defend itself, the mainstream conjures up images of the "cult member" and "cult leader" -- treating them as pathological Others who are either 1.) somewhat "touched in the head" to begin with or 2.) very quickly rendered so by the charisma and brainwashing techniques of the leader. According to this consoling stereotype, the group's ideas and decisions flow from the top down. Cultists are passive. They absorb (and obey) the leader's word. They surrender responsibility -- in effect, their souls -- to someone else. In the case of Jonestown, Maaga is quick to label this notion as racist. The leader, Jim Jones, was white. The majority of his followers were black, and to depict them as brainless slaves doing their master's bidding has unsavory overtones. Maaga also dismisses what she calls the "deprivation theory" of Peoples Temple recruitment -- the idea that poor and/or elderly African-Americans were attracted to the group because they were impoverished and otherwise socially disenfranchised. People joined, and remained, not because Jones had some power to cloud their minds, but because he preached a message of social equality and revolutionary justice. He gave them something capitalist society could not. Maaga insists that the group was appealing in ways that should not be trivialized. Members drew meaning and self-respect from Jones' teaching. (That is far more important than the fact that Rev. Jim -- also known as "Dad" -- eventually discovered he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and V.I. Lenin.) The "anti-cultist" stereotype treats followers as puppets on a string, jerking when the leader twitches. Maaga, by contrast, emphasizes the "agency" of Temple members. They possessed intellect and free will. Jonestown held periodic "assemblies" at which anyone could speak, where issues facing the community could be discussed. Maaga does admit that, unfortunately, this institution of participatory democracy became less and less open as time went on. "Assembly" gatherings became a kind of theater or ritual, directed by Jones' inner circle of apostles -- mostly white and mostly female -- who administered the group's day-to-day operations. It is this core group, more than the black rank-and-file, that Maaga is especially concerned with defending -- even celebrating. The standard image of the male cult leader (David Koresh, for instance) treats him as a sexual predator. His revelations entitle him to full gratification of the libido; building a harem is not simply a fringe benefit of his power but its clearest expression. Maaga flips this interpretation of Jonestown on its head. There was no "glass ceiling" preventing women's advancement at Jonestown! "Within Peoples Temple," she writes, "there was an opportunity for some women to exercise power and authority beyond what either their gender or educational training would have allowed in mainstream society." Sex with "Dad" was empowerment itself: "It was the power to influence Jim Jones and the authority to make decisions about the day-to-day functioning of Peoples Temple." Yet, despite all this wonderfulness, members defected from the group. There was, for one thing, what the laity came to refer to as Rev. Jim's "blood sugar problem," which required him to gobble down a wide array of pharmaceuticals. The press began to have a closer look at Jones, who in the early 1970s had developed some impressive connections with the San Francisco political establishment. The utopian project of Jonestown seemed threatened; a siege mentality set in. And so Jones instituted the sacrament of the "White Night" -- a call to group suicide designed to test and solidify his congregation's devotion. Members drank the ritual Kool-Aid a number of times, but without real poison. Evidently this did not fully convince the core group of its following's loyalty. Maaga reproduces a lengthy and very disturbing letter to Jones from one of the (dynamic, autonomous) women closest to him: "I never thought people would line up to be killed but actually think a select group would have to kill the majority of the people secretly without the people knowing it ... I am basically cynical about how far you can trust our people ... I'll do whatever is expected of me no matter what you have me to do." Hear the "voices of Jonestown"! What a joyous spirit of communal democracy! Despite banishing the word cult from her vocabulary, Maaga nonetheless ends up drawing conclusions that no one would dispute: "People's Temple developed the level of loyalty that led them to suicide in part because its view of the world was based on a highly developed 'insider-outsider' ideology and also because the views of only one group of people -- the inner circle surrounding Jim Jones -- were privileged over those of the others." At some points, the argument seems almost to parody itself. Jim Jones was no cult leader, dominating the life of the group. After all, Maaga says, decisions about livestock and agricultural work were made without his direct supervision. Not every group with unusual beliefs (and "a highly developed 'insider-outsider' ideology") is bound to end up like Jones' flock. The panicky and stereotypical discourse on cults needs to be scrutinized. But "Hearing the Voices of Jonestown" -- in treating Peoples Temple as simply another variety of religious experience -- reduces the arguments of new religious movements scholarship to absurdity. Jim Jones employed the rhetoric of social radicalism -- democracy, equality, justice. And what was the end product of the "agency" of Temple members? Corpses, the stench of death, a cloud of flies. Thinking about what happened during the final White Night in Guyana, 20 years ago, means confronting a question that sociology is ill-equipped to address -- and that theology has seldom answered to anyone's satisfaction: namely, the problem of evil. SALON \| June 17, 1998 Scott McLemee, a contributing editor at Lingua Franca, writes regularly for Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S Marshall Applewhite's cry for help An expert in schizophrenia says society should intervene to treat cult leaders before they push themselves and their followers over the edge. By Jonathan Broder March 31, 1997 How strange were they? The Heaven's Gate cultists have more in common with other religious enthusiasts than you might think. By David Futrelle March 28, 1998 Scientology's "Holocaust" Is Hollywood on the wrong side in Germany's "Church" vs. state furor? By David Hudson Feb. 25, 1997