Peoples Temple (Jonestown)
The largest mass suicide in modern history
1955 - 1978
Embedded Files
When Jim Jones was a young man, he studied Stalin, Marx, and Mao, noting their strengths and weaknesses. Jones later recalled asking himself, "how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church". By 1954 he had started The Peoples Temple which quickly grew and became widely respected for its social activism and assistance to the less fortunate.
Believing that there would be nuclear disasters in the near future, the Peoples Temple moved to a commune in Guyana to protect themselves. However, after hundreds of members moved to the area, the cult found that they could not grow enough food to feed everyone. Even worse, in Jones's eyes, U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan visited Jonestown to investigate the commune and prepared to bring members back to America who had secretly asked to leave with him.
As they were leaving, the congressman and the defectors were attacked by armed guards, who killed five people. Immediately afterward, Jones commanded his followers to commit suicide to avoid the persecutions that they expected to face from the U.S. government. Surrounded by armed guards, members drank the poison, and the ones who refused were killed. In the end, this became the largest mass suicide in modern history, with 918 total deaths.
Religion: Christianity
Denomination: Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Founder: Jim Jones
Founded: 1955 in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Ended: 4 December 1978
Size: 3,000-5,000
Offshoot of: Disciples of Christ
Also called: Jonestown; Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church; Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel
Borrowed mind control and behavior modification techniques from post-revolutionary China and North Korea (source p. 163-164)
In 1974, founder Jim Jones beat a child seventy times (source)
Jones forced a child to eat his own vomit (source)
Investigated by U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan for abuse allegations (source)
Members who tried to leave Jonestown or broke the rules were beaten, humiliated, forced to do hard labor, or placed in sensory depravation chambers (source ch. 12)
Some members in Jonestown were kept sedated with drugs (source p. 34)
Jones was a drug addict and was found with drugs in his system after the murder/suicide (source ch. 12)
Jones regularly took painkillers and tranquilizers (source)
One member claims to have caught Jones possessing amphetamines (source)
After Jones felt disrespected by a child, he secretly drugged him. After the boy fell unconscious, members "made goblin and spook noises into his unconscious ear" (source)
Members murdered U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan, three journalists, and one defector in 1978 (source ch. 12)
During the murder/suicide, members were surrounded by armed guards, putting pressure on them to commit suicide (source)
Some members were forcibly poisoned during the murder/suicide (source)
Babies were killed during the murder/suicide (source ch. 12)
Tim Carter, a surviving member, claimed that the majority (roughly 550) of Jonestown residents died involuntarily (source ch. 12)
After he left the organization, a member was told that Jones hired an assassin to kill him (source)
Required members to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with the church rather than with families (source)
Former member David Wise reported that if Jones felt threatened by someone, "he developed a need to compromise them sexually or humiliate them in public or both" and that Jones would use his followers to "humiliate or torture" people that rejected his sexual advances (source)
David Wise claimed that Jones asked him deeply personal questions about his masturbation habits, including what he fantasized about and how many times he had been able to orgasm in one day (source)
Jones was arrested for exposing his erect penis to an undercover officer (source)
Jones forced members to falsely confess to having homosexual relations with him (source)
Member Deborah Layton claimed that she, along with other men and women, were raped by Jim Jones (source, source)
Largest mass suicide in modern history: after Jim Jones ordered his members to commit suicide, 918 people died by suicide or murder on November 18, 1978 (source)
Members agreed that they would commit suicide if they could not escape the United States before it collapsed (source p.85)
A letter sent by a member to all members of the U.S. Congress in 1978 said, "we are devoted to a decision that it is better even to die than to be constantly harassed from one continent to the next" (source p. 79)
In January 1978, members lined up to take poison after Jones declared a "white night," referring to a time of "severe crisis of mass death during, or as the result of, an invasion" (source ch. 12, source p. 75)
In 1976, Jones made his inner circle drink wine, then told them that it was poisoned and that they would die in 45 minutes. After no one protested, he told them it was just a test (source ch. 12)
A similar test suicide happened in February 1978 (source p.79)
The cult threatened to kill defectors (source)
Jones sent search parties out, including an airplane to scan highways, when members defected (source p. 225)
A number of Jonestown residents expressed a desire to leave with congressman Leo Ryan when he visited but were intercepted by security guards (source)
Jones insisted his followers remain celibate (source)
Jones decided who the members could marry and who would be encouraged to procreate (source ch. 12)
Jones had sex with several church members (source ch. 12)
According to surviving member David Wise, Jones used his church members to indulge in his homosexual fantasies: "He used the preposterous notion that he had to 'relate' to other men's homosexuality, to reach them on their level, or he would propose to introduce men to their inner sexuality. Although Jim was the one who was actually guilty... [he] spread a new ideology: that all men were latently homosexual except for him" (source)
One member claims that Jones would use his followers to "humiliate or torture" people that rejected his sexual advances (source)
Jones claimed that all men and women were homosexual and that he was the only true heterosexual (source)
Other info:
Other info:
Jones faked faith healings (source)
Jones, an ordained Christian minister, openly rejected the Bible and claimed the "Sky God" of Christianity was "ultimately useless for human salvation, liberation, or deliverance from real suffering” (source)
By spring 1976, Jones openly admitted that he was an atheist and claimed that his congregation was "ninety percent atheist" (source)
Immediately before they committed suicide, members were starving due to being unable to grow any food (source)
Jones's social programs earned him great recognition, including the Los Angeles Herald's Humanitarian of the Year award in 1976 and the Martin Luther King Jr., Humanitarian of the Year Award in 1977 (source ch. 12)
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Survivor Testimony:
Survivor Testimony:
From Tim Carter, a surviving member of the murder-suicide, who claims that most Jonestown residents were murdered:
In terms of why people stayed in the Temple and what attracted them to the Temple, I do believe that there was a huge dichotomy between the younger and the older members. The younger members, both black and white, were much more politically oriented. I think that for the older black folks and white folks it was more religious, even though in the Temple religious faith meant helping other people, putting into action the Sermon on the Mount. That was an incredibly powerful thing for me. I could actually see with my own eyes that we were making a difference in the community. The Temple was helping people. For a lot of my liberal friends, it was a lot of talk and not a lot of do. And I felt good about the “do” part.
Jim Jones was brilliant, he was charismatic, he was a genius—and that’s not an exaggeration. He was the best speaker that I ever heard in my life to this day. He was better than Jesse Jackson when Jesse was at his best. He was also manipulative, he was cunning, he was controlling. If I had seen all those things when I was first there, I probably wouldn’t have ended up in Guyana. My reason for staying in the Temple for the last two years was my loyalty to the people. That was genuine and is genuine. It didn’t have to do with following Jim Jones, because I hated the son of a bitch for about the last year and a half. I really did not like him, but I believed in what we were doing. And if you take away Jim Jones, I believe in my heart that Jonestown would still exist in some form or fashion....
People want to focus on Jim Jones. But the story of Peoples Temple is the people. It’s not Jim Jones. He’s a part of it. He added them all together. But what made the Temple dynamic and successful and mainstream was the people—because we were as mainstream as it could get in terms of the progressive movement in the Bay Area. We were not freaks. We were not cultists. We were mainstream. When the focus is on Jones, then all we are is “cultists.” We are “them.” For anybody to actually begin to learn anything about Peoples Temple, it has to become a “we”....
People want to focus on Jim Jones. But the story of Peoples Temple is the people. It’s not Jim Jones. He’s a part of it. He added them all together. But what made the Temple dynamic and successful and mainstream was the people—because we were as mainstream as it could get in terms of the progressive movement in the Bay Area. We were not freaks. We were not cultists. We were mainstream. When the focus is on Jones, then all we are is “cultists.” We are “them.” For anybody to actually begin to learn anything about Peoples Temple, it has to become a “we”....
If the only story that somebody focuses on is that, well, there was this underground sensory deprivation chamber, and people had to work twelve hours a day, and the diet was horrible, and people couldn’t leave— well, that’s an accurate image. Is it the whole image? No. For everything in the Temple there are contradictions. At the same time that that’s going on, we were building a city in the middle of the jungle. I saw kids that were sociopathic in the States. One of them was a black albino kid. He was out of place everywhere. He had been teased and given a hard time to the point where he was torturing animals. There was another kid who had watched his mother’s brains blown out by his father. He was an angry kid. When I got to Jonestown I could see that these were completely different human beings—and I’m not talking about robot automatons. One of them was in charge of the animals; the same kid that had been torturing animals had a great relationship with them.
There were things that make me want to swell my chest with pride. Then I think, what difference did it make? Everybody died. If you look at the ending as suicide, then it really was a waste. But if you look at the ending as murder, then some of the things that we did do still have meaning. (source ch. 12)
Jonestown Documentary
Short news segment looking back on the cult
Archive footage of Jonestown
In this riveting narrative, Jeff Guinn examines Jones’s life, from his extramarital affairs, drug use, and fraudulent faith healing to the fraught decision to move almost a thousand of his followers to a settlement in the jungles of Guyana in South America. Guinn provides stunning new details of the events leading to the fatal day in November, 1978 when more than nine hundred people died—including almost three hundred infants and children—after being ordered to swallow a cyanide-laced drink.
Guinn examined thousands of pages of FBI files on the case, including material released during the course of his research. He traveled to Jones’s Indiana hometown, where he spoke to people never previously interviewed, and uncovered fresh information from Jonestown survivors. He even visited the Jonestown site with the same pilot who flew there the day that Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered on Jones’s orders. The Road to Jonestown is the definitive book about Jim Jones and the events that led to the tragedy at Jonestown.
Jackie Speier was twenty-eight when she joined Congressman Leo Ryan’s delegation to rescue defectors from cult leader Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Ryan was killed on the airstrip tarmac. Jackie was shot five times at point-blank range. While recovering from what would become one of the most harrowing tragedies in recent history, Jackie had to choose: Would she become a victim or a fighter? The choice to survive against unfathomable odds empowered her with a resolve to become a vocal proponent for human rights.
From the formative nightmare that radically molded her perspective and instincts to the devastating personal and professional challenges that would follow, Undaunted reveals the perseverance of a determined force in American politics. Deeply rooted in Jackie’s experiences as a widow, a mother, a congresswoman, and a fighter, hers is a story of true resilience, one that will inspire other women to draw strength from adversity in order to do what is right―no matter the challenges ahead.
Collectively this is a record of ordinary people, stigmatized as cultists, who after the Jonestown massacre were left to deal with their grief, reassemble their lives, and try to make sense of how a movement born in a gospel of racial and social justice could have gone so horrifically wrong—taking with it the lives of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters. As these survivors look back, we learn what led them to join the Peoples Temple movement, what life in the church was like, and how the trauma of Jonestown’s end still affects their lives decades later.
What emerges are portrayals both haunting and hopeful—of unimaginable sadness, guilt, and shame but also resilience and redemption. Weaving her own artistic journey of discovery throughout the book in a compelling historical context, Fondakowski delivers, with both empathy and clarity, one of the most gripping, moving, and humanizing accounts of Jonestown ever written.
Deborah Layton saw that something was seriously wrong the minute she arrived in Jonestown, and six months before the massacre, she escaped the guarded compound she had imagined would be paradise. Her warnings to the press and to the U.S. State Department of an impending disaster fell on disbelieving ears: Exactly four days after her testimony in Washington, D.C., Congressman Leo Ryan, three reporters, and over nine hundred Peoples Temple members, including Layton's mother and countless friends, were dead. Layton's return to the world outside of the Peoples Temple was slow and painful. Her brother remains in prison, the only person alive today held accountable for the tragedy. After years of shame and silence, she is finally telling her story.
From Waco to Heaven's Gate, the past decade has seen its share of cult tragedies, but none quite so dramatic or compelling as Jonestown. In this very personal account, Layton opens up the shadowy world of cults that pervade our existence and shows how any race, culture, or class of individuals can fall victim to a cult's strange allure. Vividly written and powerfully told, Seductive Poison is both an unflinching historical document and an enthralling story of intrigue, power, and murder.
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