Book Review: The Road to Jonestown
Someone once told me, “Jonestown is what happens when you worship a man more than God.”
I have always been fascinated by Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and the Jonestown massacre. I have read many books, including Raven, and articles by survivors and seen almost all the documentaries about it. I also regularly visit the website Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple. I was fascinated but, I could figure out why I was fascinated. It had all the hot topics that make for a great true-crime thriller – sex, drugs, race, religion, murder, and mental instability.
Then I read Jeff Guinn’s book, The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, which I think is the most comprehensive book about this topic. It does a good job of taking a wide-angle view 40 years on. After reading it, Jim Jones and the state of Peoples Temple made a lot more sense to me. To really understand Jones, you have to look at his beginnings as a young child growing up in segregated Indiana, worshipping Hitler and having animal funerals.
Page 34 – “When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, thwarting enemies who sought to capture and humiliate him, Jimmy was impressed.”
He didn’t worship Hitler because of his racist view, but rather studied Hitler’s demagoguery. Over the years, he would be mentored by Father Divine, another spiritual leader who controlled his followers.
Page 60 – “Jones seemed to believe that once he did anything for someone, from that moment forward the person belonged to him, with no right to disagree about anything or ever leave.”
Page 186 – “Keep them poor and keep them tired, and they’ll never leave. How well he understood his people.”
Page 197 – “He’d learned well from Father Divine that having enemies, real and imagined, was invaluable in recruiting and retaining followers.”
Page 311 – “Individual suicide was wasteful, but mass suicide that sent a message of defiance, and that encouraged future generations to fight oppression to the death, was admirable.”
Jones was a racial justice advocate and used his position in his church to help integrate Indianapolis. While no one can know what he truly believed, it seemed like he genuinely did care about racial and class equity. However, it always seemed off that Jones only had one black person with a leadership position in his church. Also, it is also true that he hijacked social justice issues and Christianity and took advantage of society’s most vulnerable and marginalized groups to push his own agenda. His ultimate betrayal was seen in Jonestown on November 18, 1978.
This quote fixes all the missing links I mentally had about this situation.
Page 467 – “Demagogues recruits by uniting a disenchanted element against an enemy, them promising to use religion or politics or a combination of the two to bring about rightful change.”
Roll Call recently did a podcast series about government oversight (or lack thereof) in Jonestown.
Here is a talk with the author.
This is original news footage from San Francisco two days after the massacre in 1978, hosted by trailblazing reporter Belva Davis.