July 17, 2011
Cults
Grace and I just returned this week from vacationing in Michigan and visiting family. While we were back, religion was brought up often, as Bible-Belters are wont to do in such an environment. In one of the more interesting conversations I had with my mother-in-law, I wondered aloud to her whether the belief systems of modern cults were really so far fetched, compared to their more established Abrahamic counterparts. One has to wonder whether those reading the centuries-diluted accounts of Jim Jones a thousand years from now wouldn’t wonder whether he was, indeed, more than a man after all.
Does anyone remember the Jonestown massacre? I’d really like to understand how the collective American psyche grappled with that experience.
(Video: “Go Outside,” Cults)
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I was 21 and had just moved to San Francisco when that happened. It was most shocking that Temple members assassinated Congressman Leo Ryan when he visited. Then the suicides. Then 10 days later Dan White assassinated San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. San Francisco was in shock. Government officials were being murdered. It felt like the city was under attack. Everyone knew someone who was related to someone who was killed in Guyana. It was frightening and seemed out of control.
It reminded me of when JFK was killed – how people acted afterwards. They were stunned, crying, the walking wounded.
The following May there were the White Night Riots which tore the city apart again.
Some time later the People’s Temple building was turned into a punk club.
– Amy Hempel, “The Harvest”
I read a book that made me think similar things about cults. I’d recommend it: Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God.
The Jonestown massacre was just that, a massacre. So many people who died that day were forced to drink the kool aid, including children and babies along with the adults who did not want to do it. Congressman Leo Ryan was murdered trying to rescue people who wanted to leave that cult. People were abandoning the compound, handing over their children, or trying to do that. So, the response here was one of shock, horror and disbelief. Jones was a drugged up mad man.
But your question is a good one. How will he come across in a century or more. Will he be considered a martyr? Will the evidence of his drug use be dismissed as a set up?
It’s a wonder, all of it. On the ground-floor level you have people with certain aims and beliefs, but those are never the same as the ones on the upper layers. The Iowan has a most jaundiced religious outlook. Many reasons (grandson of missionaries to Egypt certainly contributed — ha ha!). But he covered budgeting for various denominations for a religious news agency in New York for years. Actively study the way an institution raises and spends money and you will understand what I mean. The scales fall off the eyes. Follow the money. Always follow the money.
Amen, brother Josh. Scientology and Mormonism are as far as any contemporary Christian need look for an object lesson in their own belief system.
To answer your question, I remember, Josh. I was a kid, but it made sense to me something like that could happen. The interesting thing was the way the story was delivered, in five or ten minute chunks during the evening news, and then maybe an evening special on one of the longer news programs. Today that story would fill every niche for two weeks before we moved on to something else.
I was working in the UPI Birmingham bureau, in Alabama, where the teletypes were pounding out the news from Jonestown. Reams of copy clacked from machines accompanied by bells signaling the urgency of the words on the paper. I couldn’t stop reading or saying “Oh my God oh my God!”
Then later, a year later, Iranian crowds were outside the U.S. Embassy screaming death to us all. I kept telling people LOOK AT THIS, this is not going to end well. But it was before the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and nobody was paying too much attention. Until they stormed the embassy.
I had a unique vantage point. The news was wild back then. But on some nights, it was so very quiet. And I would sit after my shift, going through old yellowed files in that bureau for many hours. Suddenly it would be 4 a.m., Sunday, and I would be surprised to find folders in my hands marked Bull Connor, Birmingham church bombing, Edmund Pettus Bridge Selma. I had been there.
When I think back on those times the image that comes to me is the first views from the air of the Jones compound with the litter of bodies all about it, spilling off walkways, in heaps at the edges of buildings…. Later, when I saw the produced accounts and assembled footage of the history of the cult and its end, I tried to conjure in my mind the mental landscape of the place. How could so many mistakes converge so gradually as spell doom for many people? Memory took me back to a time in the ’60s when, in my mid teens, I lived on the street for a few months on Sunset Strip in LA. The hopes and fears of desperate people make them ripe for a bleak harvest. The radical individualism that sent people to a life on the streets was no match for hunger and pain and a constant bland sense of inescapable anonymity, and the hard swing back to conformity for the sake of survival lacked the benefit, in most cases, of historical perspective or critical thinking. I remember, among those people in LA, just how close everybody was to a sense of the miraculous: suddenly word would get out that 2,000 donuts had been donated to The Digger’s Creative Arts Society over near Hollywood & Vine, and the limping and shambling in that direction would begin. Also, vague news of drug busts in the works and headed for us added a tang of fear to the air, with many quick glances passing between people, and everybody watching for some sign that a rush for exit was about to begin.
Everything is written by the survivors, riding somehow above great tides of loss. Does anybody learn anything in time for it to help them? Perhaps not so often as we think we do.
These are all great thoughts and from what’s been shared, two things are striking to me: A) the sheer difference in how the media seemed to treat this sort of news and B) how I don’t feel like I have anything to compare it to (and by this, I mean my having shared in an experience had by all Americans), save for maybe 9/11 or the announcement of Bin Laden’s death.
I just finished reading Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and there’s a section of the book where she recalls discussing the excitement over Robert F. Kennedy’s candidacy with her father during the evening of the California Primary. There was such a sadness and feeling of defeat in her memory of hearing RFK had been assassinated – as if America was just dusting itself off after taking some punches only to be struck down once again with an unfair blow.
30 years ago, it seems like the country changed during a series of dramatic events and everyone was caught off guard. Today, I feel like the America is changing in a similarly sweeping fashion, but instead of massacres, assassinations and fuel shortages, our changes chug along through the passive whispers of economics and social defeatism.
How old were you 9/11, Josh?
I would have been a freshman in high school – so, 15 or 16.
Strongly recommend Jonathan Z. Smith’s _From Babylon to Jonestown_ for an interesting treatment of that exact tangled ball of questions from an academic historian of religions. Since it’s often a required text for Intro to Theories of Religion, you should be able to find zillions of used copies around.