This book is for those who cannot look away from cults
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I love books on cults. I have for years, and any opportunity to get my hands on one, I’m going to take. I don’t care if it is fiction or non-fiction; I love to think about how a person or a group of people can influence an entire crowd. How are there people who really believe, for example, that fluorescent water is harmful when decades of science tell us the opposite? How is it that there are people who believe that a book with LGBTQ + characters sitting on a shelf in a library is much more harmful to their children than, say, the weapons that are brought to schools? Why and how do the heads of worship attract attention and take advantage of this power to bring others to do things that, in their right and logical mind, they would never have done otherwise?
It is at the heart of the last non-fiction work of Candace Fleming, Death in the jungle: murder, betrayal and lost dream of Jonestown. Fleming is a master of writing for audiences and adolescents, and his latest book does exactly this by situating the history of Jim Jones and the temple of peoples in the context of young people who were brought into worship (most often by their choice).
I admit that I know little about the temple of the people and Jones himself before diving into the book of Fleming. It is among the few cults in America with a leftist policy. But this book made me crawl in the bed early every night to sneak in a few additional pages. Although knowing how it all ends, I needed to know the background frame to the way hundreds of people were drinking “gladly” the poison in the wild of Guyana to their premature death (or as I called it, “revolutionary suicide”).
Fleming immediately attracts readers, describing Jones’ childhood in Rural Indiana. He spent a lot of time in his young years studying the rhetorical styles of important leaders – both those who were good and those who were far from there – and by practice, he was able to learn to draw the attention of people thanks to his speech. This helped him make his debut in Indianapolis, where the temple of the first people became.
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What attracted a congregation during these first years is Jones’ belief in social justice and equality. He developed an audience in large part of members of the black community during these first years, both partly because of the situation of his church and because of these beliefs which spoke to the social injustices faced by blacks in the 1960s and 70s. And in these first years, Jones practiced more what he preached than otherwise. But when he achieved his power, Jones became an authoritarian figure in the temple of peoples, rather than a partner in the work of change.
Two of the main characters in the Fleming Book are the hyacinth and zip, sisters who started to follow Jones in Indianapolis. Despite certain reservations, the sisters shared on the church during the periods of change – first with the announcement of Jones that the temple would move to California, then later, its movement towards the distant Guyana – we see where and how they were drawn in the promises of not only a better, fairer life. They were discussed by the idea that they could be part of this change themselves, pouring the kindness in the world around them. It ended badly for one of the sisters, while the other sister started from a fully transformed person after witnessing a heap of corpses in Jonestown. Their story was the one I found particularly fascinating, because Fleming makes them completely complex which make decisions in the best places in themselves. They were not “washed by the brain”, as the story often says. They were humans who were trying to live a life that aligned themselves with their values, and they questioned these decisions to many crossroads.
It is obvious to what extent of research and efforts has devoted to developing this book. It did not sympathize towards Jones, but he extends a deep empathy for those who believed in his message.
In the context of history, the Jonestown massacre was not so long. It happened a few years before my time, but the story itself was intertwined so deeply in pop culture that it is difficult to contextualize your reception. As Fleming points out, nobody “gladly drank kool-aid”, as the saying says. Indeed, whether or not people have free will in Guyana is a question that leans more towards a no than yes. There was also no Kool -Aid – it was a different concoction all together.
Jonestown’s recence has been emphasized even more recently, thanks to the current American administration, which has taken the freedom to send people to a brutal prison in Salvador without regular procedure (a right without limiting themselves to “fair” American citizens but to everyone). When Senator Van Hollen has traveled to meet Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, several people on social networks talked about the trip strangely recalling what Senator Leo Ryan did when he went to Jonestown to check his voters who live there.
Ryan did not go home after the trip. Almost 900 members of the popular temple. We can hope that history goes in a different way for Garcia, one of the current victims of the Maga cult agenda in which he had no interest in participating.
The remains of Jonestown are held today. It has not been developed, and it probably will never be.
Fleming’s book is an essential reading for those who are curious about Jim Jones, the temple of peoples and / or types of cults that America brings to the table. Where many historical and contemporary cults of America rely on accidental individualism, which made Jonestown particularly unique, it was the emphasis on community life, on socialist values and on its belief in an egalitarian society.
Maybe what makes this book are worth reading at the moment, even if cults or Jonestown are not your usual reading flavor, it is a story designed with the kind of empathy and compassion that we can all use at the moment. Yes, this story is brutal, and yes, you will read a mass murder. But the voices that Fleming highlight from the inside of the temple highlights his skills as a writer and reiterate that most people who find themselves in cults like Jonestown do not do because they are stupid, weak or easily persuaded. They do it because these groups offer a promise for a better life among the difficult and tumultuous moments.
At a time when the fatigue of compassion is at a record level, any opportunity that we can find to develop these skills of empathy and grace will only help us – and none of this means that we must agree or tolerate the choices that others make (indeed, many are downright terrible). But stories like this remind us that at the end of the day, we are all humans who do our best to be just that: human.
