Kool-aid Countermemory
Mis/remembering Peoples Temple
Before we begin, I want to say that my presentation includes frank and unsettling discussion of white supremacist violence, culminating in the mass murder of Black women and children. Their lives matter too much for me to soft-pedal what happened to them. But as Toni Morrison taught us, we are vulnerable to language. Please take care of yourselves as best you can through this talk, even if it means removing yourself from the conversation.
In his germinal 1988 essay “Rituals of Exclusion and the Jonestown Dead,” historian of religion and empire David Chidester argues that [SLIDE] “American civil religion” [which we can read here as small-c christianity, white mainstream christian commitments denatured into good old American values] “defines itself by what it excludes,” (1988, 698). America excluded the Jonestown dead [SLIDE], as it continues to exclude Black women and communities of Black radical religious innovation. But America has not been satisfied to exclude the Jonestown dead, to render their lives unmournable. Rather, America has turned their deaths into a cautionary tale, the punchline to innumerable bad jokes about brainwashing and sugar-saturated quick-prep potables — what JZ Smith called “the pornography of Jonestown,” (Devil in Mr Jones, 112). And America has turned Jim Jones, their executioner, into a monster.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not opening this paper with any sort of apology for Jim Jones. He is, to me, the least interesting and least important thing about Peoples Temple. And yet Americans know so much more about Jones than about the movement he convened. Throughout this morning’s conversation, I want to insist that this approach to thinking about “cults” is not merely wrong, but dangerous, dehumanizing, and–if we accept religious liberty as a cornerstone of democracy (and I’m torn on that one, to say the very least, BUT), if we accept religious liberty as a cornerstone of democracy, reducing “cults” to charismatic leadership is demonstrably anti-democratic.
We should, I argue, understand Americans’ smug consumption of the horrorshow that was the Jonestown massacre as an act of what I’m calling spectacular abjection, [SLIDE] drawing close enough to monstrosity to be overwhelmed by it and to ultimately repulse it, reaffirming existing hierarchies and social orders. In considering Americans’ reception of Jonestown as an act of spectacular abjection, I’m drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, in which she laments “the spectacular nature of Black suffering and…the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle,” (1997, 22). [BLANK SLIDE] That is, making a spectacle of Black suffering both reinforces the power of those causing the suffering and obscures the humanity of Black people by making a horrorshow of their pain.
In the nearly half-century since the Jonestown massacre, Americans have made a spectacle of Peoples Temple and Jones’ betrayal of the community. I propose that the popular reception of this tragedy–the punchline-ification of Peoples Temple–reinforces American civil religion as a technology of white christian supremacy and chills radical religious innovation, especially if not exclusively when that innovation challenges American anti-Black racism.
SO: I’m going to provide some background on the radically hopeful Black new religious movement that was Peoples Temple, explain why reducing the vibrant optimism and complex community of Peoples Temple to the charisma of Jim Jones is, quite frankly, dumb and wrong, and conclude by offering spectacular abjection as a more incisive and theoretically useful way to think about this group in particular and American civil religion more broadly. LFG.
ABOUT JONESTOWN
before we get into the tragic history of a truly beautiful movement, I want to give you a quick 101 on “cults.” I teach (though did not name) a “Cults” class, and that class starts with me trying to get my students to stop using that word. And it follows, as the night the day, that some earnest soul implores “but wait, what do I call Jonestown then?”
(Honestly I’m always surprised that Zoomer students know anything about Jonestown, including that it existed, but that they do tells us something significant about the afterlife of these movements, I think. More on the afterlife of Jonestown in a bit.)
I tell these students that first of all, Jonestown wasn’t a cult. Jonestown wasn’t even a group. It was a place–the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project [welcome sign]–where a group of people, many of them Black women, worked themselves to exhaustion trying to create a better, more just world.
Here’s what Jonestown was: [pic of people]
when you hear Jonestown, you probably think [koolaid — which is why we just did another KI101 episode specifically about “drinking the koolaid]
If you were alive and old enough to read magazines in 1978, you might remember this striking image and a number of others I’m not going to show you [time photo]
[SLIDE] We’ll get more into what Jonestown was and wasn’t in a moment. But I’m belaboring the language here because words do things, and cult does the wrong thing when we think about religion. It MATTERS that when you hear “cult” you think:
* pile of bodies
* brainwashing
* charismatic leader
* (some? all?) religion is dangerous
It matters that “cult” makes you go like “ooh, if I click this headline I’m going to read some weird shit about freaky sex, manipulative assholes, and people too dumb to know they’re being taken advantage of” [kimmy schmidt]. Or as NRMs scholar Cathy Wessinger puts it,
“‘cult’ can also be seen to imply that it is only in small, unconventional religious groups that believers commit hurtful and illegal actions; socially dominant religious groups are somehow let off the hook, as if their members never transgress in this way.”
The short version is that “cult” is a misdirect, one that’s smuggling in all sorts of assumptions about religion and American belonging. “Cult” is basically three sexist, classist, white supremacist toddlers in an American flag trench coat. Let me pause to let that terrifying and absurd image sink in and to clarify that when I talk about white supremacy, I do not just mean Proud Boys or the Klan. In the context of what’s now the United states, considerations of white supremacy signals systems and institutions that were built to privilege white people and qualities we associate with whiteness at every conceivable level. Looking at minoritized religions and calling them cults has a long, white supremacist history. [Judith, Ahmad]
Whether you mean it to or not, “cult” (especially in what’s now the US) makes people think
* dangerous
* pervy
* controlling + greedy + manipulative leaders [who are often but not always men]
* stupid or trapped members [who are often but not always women]
* RELIGION BUT BAD
“Cult” smuggles in the idea that “real” religions are inherently good. It just so happens that Americans’ ideas of “real” religions look an awful lot like white mainstream Christianity. “Real/ good” American religion is:
- private
- individual
- belief-based
- civil
- reserved
- text-based
- limited to certain times/locations
- pro-United States
All of those things sound a lot like white supremacy, and that is because they ARE components of white supremacy, which in what’s now the United States takes the form of white small-c christian nationalism. By small-c christian, I mean the germination of markedly Christian worldviews, explanatory frameworks, and value systems through nominally secular institutions (courts, schools, hospitals, etc), thus encouraging and rewarding acceptance of these Christian worldviews, explanatory frameworks, and value systems as NOT religious but rather just “good old American values.”
Religions in America that are
- community-focused
- ecstatic / “too” enthusiastic
- practice-oriented
- uncivil / impolite
- based primarily on experience, orality, and revelation
- not bounded by time/location
- and/or critical of American imperialism?
Those are the ones that get called cults. And it just so happens that a lot of folks who join these groups are
- not white
- not cis women
- not wealthy
- not straight (OR just not doing sex in “normal” ways)
- not traditionally Christian
So when I say “cult” is racist, sexist, and classist — this is what I mean. [keep in mind when considering the lived complexity of Peoples Temple in tension with how we as a country remember the movement]
The mass murder that most would come to know as simply “Jonestown” [SLIDE] occurred the weekend before Thanksgiving 1978. The weekend before Thanksgiving is when the American Academy of Religion usually holds its annual meeting; 1978 was no exception. Which means thousands of religious studies scholars were gathered in one place as news broke that hundreds of Americans had seemingly taken their own lives in Guyana at the command of one white man: Jim Jones.
JZ Smith was at that meeting. In Imagining Religion, he wrote that
one might claim that Jonestown was the most important single event in the history of religions, for if we continue… to leave it ununderstandable, then we will have surrendered our rights to the academy.
[SLIDE] Smith’s challenge to scholars was not to dismiss this event as a freak tragedy, an event occurring outside history, lacking precedent or explanation. But scholars of religion have mostly ignored Smith’s imperative — there is, as we have discussed, no market for the study of minoritized religions. And the meaning most Americans have made of Jonestown is just…incorrect. And worse than incorrect. It is dangerous. Let me tell you why.
When you hear “Jonestown,” you probably think “drinking the Kool-aid.” You think mass suicide. You think brainwashing. Most of all, you think Jim Jones.
You might, but probably don’t, think “mass murder.” You most likely do not think “antiracist utopia.” Or “radically inclusive community dedicated to mutual aid.” Or “anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist organizers and activists.” You almost certainly do not think Black religion.
There is so much to unpack in the brief and heartbreaking history of the Peoples Temple; we barely have time to scratch the surface. I honestly want to say as little as possible about Jim Jones — as Judith Weisenfeld compellingly argues, the true founders of any movement are its participants.
The people of Peoples Temple lived communally, pooling their resources and providing care for members and neighbors. They provided rental assistance, health exams, legal assistance, scholarships, and elder care.
[VIDEO] “There is the largest group of people I have ever seen who are concerned about the world and are fighting for truth and justice for the world,” Annie Moore wrote of Peoples Temple to her sister, religious studies scholar Rebecca Moore, in 1972. “And all the people have come from such different backgrounds, every color, every age, every income group.” [should have space to play the whole tape]
[SLIDE] Peoples Temple members were, as Rebecca Moore writes “teachers, postal clerks, civil service employees, domestics, military veterans, laborers.” They came from working class and professional backgrounds. Together they built the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana, an attempt to create a racially integrated, socially conscious haven beyond the reach of American capitalism and imperialism.
They were scholars and revolutionaries, activists and optimists. They lived together, worked together, celebrated and worshipped and mourned and protested together. Most of all, they were human beings working as hard as they could to build a kinder, more just world — a world worth living in, worth saving.
They were people.
Over 900 of them–including 300+ children and Annie Moore, who wrote to her sister about their collective fight for truth and justice–died in Guyana in November 1978 at the command of one erratic and ultimately homicidal white man. Jones’ orders were carried out by the overwhelmingly white leadership of Peoples Temple; so many of those leaders were white women. Nearly half of those who died were Black, and so many of them were Black women.
JONESTOWN AS BLACK RADICAL RELIGIOUS INNOVATION
[SLIDE] We do not remember Peoples Temple as a Black religious movement, despite its membership being 75% Black. We do not remember the murders at Jonestown–and they were murders, as coercing people to poison themselves and their children at gunpoint IS murder–as white supremacist violence.
We do not remember that Guyana refused to bury the Jonestown dead — “overwhelmingly Black bodies,” “so many Black women,” as Sikivu Hutchinson writes, naming this erasure both historical amnesia and misogynoir (Maya Bailey’s term for gendered and racial oppression of Black women).
We do not remember those same bodies shipped in rubberized bags from a Guyanese jungle to an Air Force base in Dover, Delaware, where they would be stored for six months until the city of San Francisco agreed to inter the unclaimed remains of 378 members of Peoples Temple. “No one wanted these bodies, the remains of Jonestown,” David Chidester writes (1988, 683).
“Americans came to terms with the event by dismissing the people of Jonestown as not sane, not Christian, and not American, thereby reinforcing normative psychological, religious, and political boundaries around a legitimate human identity in America,” Chidester argues (1988, 700). That is: America ultimately decided that the Jonestown dead were not human and therefore not America’s problem — rendering these teachers and veterans, workers and revolutionaries, as Christina Sharpe might put it, unmournable.
Jones stole so much from faithful Black Americans, from American Black-led new religious movements, like Father Divine’s Peace Mission [SLIDE], and from Black revolutionaries, like Huey Newton [SLIDE]. The very first song in the Peoples Temple songbook is “Lift Ev’ry Voice,” [SLIDE] colloquially known as the Black national anthem. But I DON’T want to us focus on what Jones stole from Black Americans. [SLIDE] Rather I want us to consider what we steal from the Jonestown dead — overwhelmingly Black, so many of them Black women — by monstrofying Jones.
Let me explain.
It is common — too common — for public interest in so-called cults to focus on a so-called charismatic leader. This is an incorrect approach for a number of reasons: as Weisenfeld teaches us, while many might join a movement for a leader, they stay because of a community. Also many new religious movements had perfectly dull leaders; EG White and Mary Baker Eddy were not exactly barn burners, and Marshall Applewhite was downright off-putting.
Highlighting a single, usually male founder as central to understanding a religious tradition is also a christian imperialist approach to studying religion — one visibly prevalent in the world religions model (and if this sort of thing interests you, check out the last season of Keeping It 101 for more yelling about what’s wrong with the World Religions Paradigm).
So yes, focusing on a charismatic leader is incorrect and misleading. But this lens is also dangerously distorting. Explaining unconventional, controversial, troubling commitments away as gullible people falling prey to brainwashing (which is not a thing, see Rebecca Moore on this as well).
Handwaving NRM belonging as inherently irrational becomes exponentially more problematic when we survey the history of American groups called “cults” and see that their members were very often women, very often people of color, very often poor, very often drawn to sexual difference. Focus on a charismatic leader is easily extrapolated into assumptions about, for example, Black women being “naturally religious,”(please hear my scare quotes, more susceptible to exploitation by, say, a particularly charming white man. Focus on a charismatic leader reinforces assumptions that religion itself is dangerous, and so religious freedom must have its limits, even within American democracy.
(Small-c christianity sets those limits; see Winnie Sullivan for more on this; and as Sylvester Johnson reminds us, the freedom of some requires the unfreedom of others.)
Finally, focus on a charismatic leader distracts from the systemic inequalities and injustices that make belonging to a marginal community desirable and rational in the first place.
But Americans have done more than reduce the complexity of Peoples Temple to Jones’ supposed charisma. Rather than remember the Jonestown dead in their full humanity, we tell ourselves stories about seemingly gullible people brainwashed into ending their own lives at the whim of a madman. We have spectacularly abjected the Jonestown dead and used religion to make a monster out of Jim Jones.
SPECTACULAR ABJECTION
“Making monsters is a process of social persuasion,” Edward Ingebretsen writes in “Death by Narrative” (155). We make monsters to reinforce and renew social boundaries, to simplify complex cultural anxieties, and most of all to absolve ourselves of culpability in their justifiable, indeed inevitable and necessary, deaths (158, 173). [SLIDE] “And why does one make a monster?” Ingebretsen asks. “In order to watch it die, of course,” (153). It is not enough that the monster dies — it must be seen to die, to reinforce the severe consequences of insubordination and redraw the boundary between the permissible and the incorporable, between us, that is, and the monster. The spectacle is the point.
When I say that America has made Jim Jones into a monster, I mean we glanced at the tragic deaths of over 900 people who just wanted to live in a world where we all took care of one another like each one of our lives was sacred and decided the lesson was that religion done wrong is dangerous. That the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project emerged solely as a shrine to Jones’ charisma, rather than as a radical rejection of American nationalism, capitalism, and white supremacy — a utopian community that Jonestown survivor Laura Johnston Kohl still recalls as “heaven on earth.”
“I never believed in Heaven in my whole life,” Kohl says in Jonestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Firelight 2006). “You know, that’s not the way I operated — but when I was in Guyana, and when I’d watch the sun rise, I actually thought there was a heaven on Earth. And now, I can’t believe in heaven anymore.”
America looked and looks at Peoples Temple and sees a group that is
- community-focused
- ecstatic
- practice-oriented
- uncivil
- based primarily on experience, orality, and revelation
- not bounded by time/location [part of daily life]
- critical of American imperialism
America looks at Peoples Temple and sees a cult. A cult led by a deceptive, abusive, exploitative figure with seemingly inhuman influence over their lives and minds, who terrorized and ultimately murdered his followers. America uses small-c christian values, assumptions, and worldviews to make Jim Jones out to be a monster [a process I’m thinking of as religio-monstrofication, both in conversation with and with all apologies to Weisenfeld].
Though she allows that “all religious groups in the United States could be characterized as religio-racial ones, given the deeply powerful, if sometimes veiled, ways the American system of racial hierarchy has structured religious beliefs, practices, and institutions for all people in its frame,” Weisenfeld is very resistant to making “religio-racial movements” or “religio-racial identity” theoretically portable (14). Her focus is on specific communities in specific times and specific places. She’s expressed concerns that her terminology might be used to obscure rather than highlight the co-constitutive nature of race and religion–the making of race through religion; the making of religion through racialization in what’s now the United States–and draw focus from the radical and life-giving creativity of the movements she engages in New World.
I read both her hesitation and her meticulousness as a call to use language about these movements with care, both to honor the full humanity of members of these communities and to reckon with what Toni Morrison calls our vulnerability to language. There is not one good descriptor for these groups. There are as many labels for them as there are ways of doing religion, which is to say their labels are legion. As JZ Smith famously wrote, it’s “not that religion cannot be defined, but that it can be defined, with greater or lesser success, more than fifty ways,” (281).
I want us to resist the urge to think religion is simple, that there are easy ways of describing it. I want us to recognize that HOW we talk and think about religion MATTERS, and that getting it wrong can have dire consequences.
I also want to use Weisenfeld’s theory of religio-racialization as a way for us to name what happened at Jonestown as a monstrofication of Black radical religious innovation: a means by which American civil religion defines itself by what it excludes, a moment that shows us the machine of AMERICA creating and recreating itself as inherently, inarguably, inescapably white and christian by making monsters of American religious outsiders.
I will remind you that we make monsters to watch them die. Making Jones into a monster makes his destruction inevitable, necessary, virtuous, and most of all not our fault. The religio-monstrofication of Jones exculpates Americans for the nationalist, capitalist, white supremacist conditions that rendered America unlivable for the people of Peoples Temple. If Jones is a monster, the Jonestown dead are merely collateral damage in his fearsome wake.
We should understand Americans’ smug consumption of the horrorshow that was the Jonestown massacre as an act of what I’m calling spectacular abjection, drawing close enough to monstrosity to be overwhelmed by it and to ultimately repulse it, reaffirming existing hierarchies and social orders. As I said at the beginning of this talk, my understanding of Americans’ reception of Jonestown as an act of spectacular abjection draws upon Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, in which she laments “the spectacular nature of Black suffering and…the dissimulation of suffering through spectacle,” (1997, 22). Again, making a spectacle of Black suffering both reinforces the power of those causing the suffering and obscures the humanity of Black people by making a horrorshow of their pain.
Remember, the community of Peoples Temple was 75% Black. Nearly half of those who died in Guyana were Black. But Americans do not remember Peoples Temple as a Black movement, nor do we remember the Jonestown massacre as white supremacist violence and betrayal. We remember brainwashing. We remember Kool-aid. We remember the monster: Jim Jones.
How can we learn to look past the monsters of American religion? Islamic historian Ali A Olomi offers us a different approach. Olomi says he thinks of historians as necromancers:
We either raise the dead so that we can see that we’re just like them, or we lay the ghosts of our past down… This is the work of decolonizing, this is the work of dismantling white supremacy, the ghosts that continue to haunt, the ghosts built into the machines… But the other component of [historians] is to…reawaken the ghosts or the dead that have been silenced…to remind us, to say, look, there is a real person here.
The dead of Jonestown are still speaking, if we’re willing to listen. We should listen. We should allow them, invite them to haunt us. Indeed we must, as James H Hill writes, “lean fully into the haunting, irrational, atheological dislocation of a nightmare otherwise known as the United States of America.” The Jonestown dead still have much to teach us, if we can pull our focus from the monster we have made Jim Jones into, if we can learn to think of groups like Peoples Temple as more than just a “cult.”
“Nobody joins a cult,” as Peoples Temple member Deborah Layton says in the opening sequence of Jonestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Firelight 2006). Cultifying Peoples Temple–making Jim Jones the religious monster at the center of the movement’s story, its moral and its ultimatum–dehumanizes and does further violence to the victims of Jones’ homicidal agenda. Their stories matter. Their lives matter. We have to learn and teach their history, to think past what JZ Smith called the pornography of Jonestown and what I’ve called the religio-monstrofication of Jones.
I can confidently say that America does not need another monster. What we need are more necromancers — like Ali Olomi, like Sikivu Hutchinson, like Judith Weisenfeld — reaching back through tangled histories to let our unquiet dead speak for themselves.
Thank you.
