Customer Reviews

Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Religion in North America)

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This book is not about true crime but about the religious outlook and theory regarding about revolutionary suicide, cults, and Jim Jones' religious teachings. It's not about the mass murder that occurred in Jonestown but about the author's research into the religious aspect of Jonestown. I wished the author had placed some pictures besides the one on the book. The horrible, tragic mass murder that occurred on November 18, 1978 was not the first white night which were mass suicide drills. This time, it was real for everybody. There was poison in their drinks and Jim Jones was not joking that this was it. But why did he think this way? Where did this theology come from in the first place? The book attempts to answer the questions about the event's religious impact. I read about revolutionary suicide which I did not know before. As the years pass, the Jonestown Holocaust slowly goes unnoticed except for the few documentaries and visits. Jonestown was not just about Jim Jones but about the socialism, communism, and collective lives there in Guyana which went horribly wrong. I encourage anybody interested in reading about Jonestown, the People's Temple, and Jim Jones beyond the criminal acts and the governments' failures in preventing this tragedy.

In a way, it is odd that the People's Agricultural Church (name of the "church") is treated as a religious "cult" at all, given the many overlaps with political players that have always been mentioned, and the fact that the leader was on record many times as denying God and saying it was a socialist "church without God." The wife ensured that the Jones assets would be sent to Soviet Union, with a signed will before she died at the scene. Rarely is the socialist aspect delved into, to a degree that would tie together these activities with political use of the cult--- such as in the Muscone election. Would suggest this, but maybe some of the other books, and the real live tapes of his sermons, so one can hear just how little it was any kind of church. Many did not seem to see it so, and the move to Guyana involved the socialist aspect (a communist country that would be friendly and with whom Jim Jones had relations with higher ups.) No one seems to have minded, and social security type payments went there for 65,000 dollars a month for the elderly people. It's a story that continues to fascinate and more to be written.