Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

← Back to People

Jim Jones, born James Warren Jones in Indiana in 1931, founded the Peoples Temple as a racially integrated Christian congregation in Indianapolis in the 1950s, held ministerial standing in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from the 1960s, and moved the group to California and then to a settlement in Guyana that his followers named Jonestown. On 18 November 1978, gunmen from that settlement killed United States Congressman Leo Ryan and four other people at a nearby airstrip, and more than 900 people at Jonestown died from cyanide poisoning within hours. Around a third of the dead were children.

What follows is a factual account of how a congregation that once ran free meals, drug rehabilitation and legal aid became the place where those deaths happened. The sequence matters more than the ending, because the ending is the part nobody chose in advance and the sequence is the part that was chosen, step by step, over more than twenty years.

Where the Peoples Temple began

The Peoples Temple started in Indianapolis in the middle of the 1950s as a small storefront congregation led by a young preacher with no seminary training and an unusual instinct for what a poor neighbourhood needed. Jim Jones was born on 13 May 1931 in rural Randolph County, Indiana, and grew up in the town of Lynn during the Depression. Accounts from people who knew him as a boy describe a child fascinated by preachers, by funerals and by religion generally, in a home where his father was distant and often ill and his mother worked.

He began preaching in Indianapolis in his early twenties, worked briefly within Pentecostal circles, and by 1955 was running his own congregation. It went through several names before settling on Peoples Temple. From the beginning it did two things that made it locally notable.

• It was deliberately integrated. In an Indiana city where the colour line ran through nearly every church, Jones built a congregation of black and white members together and refused to segregate seating. He and his wife Marceline later adopted children of several races and spoke of their household as a rainbow family. In the 1950s this took real courage and it cost him.
• It ran practical services. The Temple operated free meals, a soup kitchen, help finding work and housing, and care for people nobody else was helping. Members did that work themselves, in shifts, week after week.

Jones was appointed to run the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in the early 1960s and used the position to press for desegregation of local businesses and public facilities. That record is documented in the city's own history and it is not a small thing. A very large number of the people who eventually died in Guyana had been drawn to the Temple because it was the one church in their city that treated them as equals and then did something about it.

The Disciples of Christ affiliation, stated fairly

The Peoples Temple was formally affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) from 1960, and Jones was ordained in that denomination in 1964. That affiliation is a documented fact and it should be stated accurately, in the terms the denomination itself would recognise, before anything else is said about it.

The Disciples of Christ are a mainline American Protestant body that emerged from the nineteenth-century Restoration Movement, with roots in the work of Barton Stone and Thomas and Alexander Campbell. Their governing principle is congregational: local congregations own their property, call their own ministers and set their own practice, and the regional and general expressions of the church have limited authority to direct or discipline a congregation's internal life. Their historic watchwords stress unity among Christians and freedom in matters of opinion. Our guide to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) sets out that history and their beliefs in their own terms.

That polity is the reason the affiliation meant less in practice than the word "denomination" suggests to a Catholic ear. The Disciples of Christ received the Peoples Temple as a member congregation with a large and growing membership and an impressive record of social service. They did not run its finances, supervise its meetings, or hold a mechanism to remove its minister from his own pulpit. After 1978 the denomination stated publicly that it had no power to control the Temple's internal affairs and expressed grief at what had happened. Subsequent commentary from within the denomination has treated the affiliation as a serious institutional lesson about oversight.

Two conclusions follow and both should be held. Attaching Jonestown to the Disciples of Christ as though the deaths expressed their theology is false: nothing in Disciples doctrine resembles what Jones taught in private, and their congregational structure gave them almost no lever to pull. It is also true that a recognised affiliation gave the Temple a public respectability it used, and that an oversight structure with more reach might have asked earlier questions. Both of those can be said without accusing anyone of complicity.

The move to California

In 1965 Jones moved about seventy families of his congregation from Indiana to Redwood Valley in Mendocino County, northern California. The stated reason was survival. Jones had told the congregation that a nuclear war was coming, citing a magazine article that had listed places likely to escape the worst of a nuclear exchange, and northern California was on the list.

Redwood Valley is where the shape of the later group was set. The Temple ran care homes, a ranch for boys placed by the state, and agricultural work. Members pooled income. Many sold their houses and moved into communal accommodation. The congregation grew, drawing new members from the Bay Area, and by the early 1970s the Temple had opened branches in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with the San Francisco building on Geary Boulevard becoming the main centre.

In San Francisco the Temple became a political force. It could turn out hundreds of disciplined volunteers for a campaign or a demonstration at short notice, and local politicians took the endorsement seriously. Jones was appointed chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission in 1976. He received civic honours, sat on platforms with elected officials, and was photographed with figures of national standing. That standing later made the warnings about him harder to act on, because the people best placed to raise an alarm were the people who had publicly praised him.

The membership numbers claimed by the Temple in this period were inflated by the organisation itself, and the figures reported in the press at the time varied widely. This page does not give a membership total, because there is no reliable one.

Note on figures: the death toll at Jonestown and the number of children among the dead come from the recovery operation carried out by Guyanese and United States authorities and the official reporting that followed it. Every other number on this page is given as an approximation drawn from contemporaneous reporting and later published accounts, and is written as an approximation for that reason. No membership total is given.

What Jim Jones actually taught

Jones taught two religions in parallel, and the difference between them is the centre of this whole story. In public and to newcomers, the Peoples Temple was a Christian church with healing services, hymns, an integrated congregation and a social gospel. Inside, in members' meetings and in the sermons recorded on the Temple's own tapes, he taught something else.

Apostolic socialism

Jones called his system apostolic socialism and grounded it in Acts 2 and Acts 4, where the first believers held their goods in common. Christian communities have read those passages seriously for two thousand years, and religious orders live from them. Jones took them somewhere else. He taught that socialism was itself the divine principle, that God simply meant the principle of love realised in a collective, and that the kingdom would be built by the community here, under his direction. Heaven was to be made on earth by the Temple, and salvation meant the survival and success of the group.

The attack on the Bible

Recordings preserved from Temple services and the accounts of former members describe Jones ridiculing the Bible from the pulpit in front of his own congregation, calling it a book that had been used to enslave black Americans, throwing it down, and telling members that a God who sat in the sky and answered prayers had never existed. He described that God as a sky god who did nothing, and offered himself as the god who was actually present and actually feeding people. Members who had joined a Christian church watched their pastor dismantle Christianity in stages, and many stayed because he had also fed them, housed them, and treated them with dignity when no one else would.

His claims about himself

Jones made escalating claims about his own identity over the years, in language that shifted with the audience. He presented himself as a figure in whom divine principle was embodied, told followers that whatever they needed him to be he would be to them, and encouraged the belief that he could see the future and read minds. He also spoke of reincarnation and at various points associated himself with earlier figures. He did not build a stable doctrine out of these claims. The claims functioned to make him the one authority in the room.

The healings and how they worked

Healing services were central to the Temple's growth. Jones would call people out of the congregation, name illnesses he said he had discerned, and produce dramatic public recoveries, including the passing of what he presented as cancerous tissue.

Multiple former members who worked as staff later stated publicly that these healings were staged, and described the mechanics: information about attenders gathered in advance so that Jones could appear to know things he could not have known, Temple members planted in the congregation to play the sick and be cured, and animal tissue presented as tumours passed by the healed. Those accounts were given in sworn affidavits, in interviews with journalists in 1977 and after, and in books written by survivors. Jones denied fraud publicly at the time. He also, according to those same accounts, defended the practice privately to his inner circle on the grounds that the deception drew people in to hear the real message.

Catholic teaching does not deny that God works miracles, and the Church investigates claimed miracles with a deliberate and slow scepticism precisely because false claims are so easy to make. Our guide to what the Church teaches about miracles sets out that process. A ministry that manufactures a miracle is committing a straightforward fraud, and the fraud is not made harmless by whatever message it was intended to serve.

How the community was held together

The Temple's internal discipline hardened through the 1970s, and former members have described the methods in detail in affidavits, in congressional testimony gathered after the deaths, and in published memoirs. The elements below are drawn from those accounts and are consistent across many of them.

• Public confession sessions. Meetings known as catharsis required members to accuse themselves and each other in front of the congregation. Private matters became community property, and everyone knew that everyone else held material on them.
• Signed statements. Members were asked to sign blank sheets, false confessions to crimes they had not committed, and documents surrendering custody of children. Former members described these as insurance against leaving.
• Total financial commitment. Members gave income, savings, houses and pension and welfare payments. Someone with no money and no property has no way to walk out.
• Sleep deprivation and exhaustion. Meetings ran deep into the night, and the working days were long. Chronic tiredness undercuts the capacity to weigh what you are being told.
• Isolation from outside relationships. Contact with sceptical family members was discouraged and then, in Guyana, effectively impossible.
• Punishment. Accounts from Jonestown describe physical discipline, confinement, and the forced use of sedating drugs on members judged to be a problem.

None of that is unique to the Peoples Temple, which is the reason it is worth listing. The same machinery appears in group after group. The general framework for recognising it is set out in our guide to what separates a cult from a church, and the biblical tests for weighing a teacher are covered in our guide to how to recognise a false prophet. This page is about one man and one community.

The 1977 press investigation and the flight to Guyana

In the summer of 1977, New West magazine published an investigation into the Peoples Temple based on the accounts of former members, reported by Marshall Kilduff and Phil Tracy. It set out allegations of beatings, of financial coercion, and of faked healings, in the words of people who had been inside. The Temple had campaigned hard to stop the article, including a letter and phone campaign directed at the magazine.

Jones left for Guyana as the article was appearing, and a large-scale migration of members followed over the following months. The agricultural project in the northwest of Guyana had been leased and begun in 1974 with a small pioneer group. Through the second half of 1977 it grew from a settlement of dozens into a community of roughly a thousand people.

The stated reason for going was to build an integrated socialist agricultural community, free of American racism, in a country with a socialist government that had agreed to the lease. The timing tied the move to the investigation, and former members have consistently said the move was a flight from scrutiny. Both motives can have been present. Guyana's practical advantage to Jones was that it put every member at the end of a river and an airstrip, in a country where none of them had standing, hundreds of miles from any American authority.

Jonestown, 1974 to 1978

Jonestown was a clearing carved out of the jungle in the Northwest District of Guyana, several hours from the capital, Georgetown, and reachable in practice by boat and by a small airstrip at Port Kaituma. The settlement had dormitories, a central pavilion, a school, a medical building, fields and livestock.

Life there is described very differently by different survivors, and both descriptions belong on the record. Some members, including people who lost their families there, have said that the early period contained real community and real work they were proud of, and that they had never lived anywhere so free of the racism they had grown up with. Others describe from the start long hours of field labour in tropical heat, thin and monotonous food, crowded quarters, malaria and other illness, and constant broadcasts from Jones over the settlement's loudspeakers, day and night.

What is not in dispute is that leaving was not a practical option for most people. Passports were held centrally. There was no money. The nearest town was hours away through jungle, and the settlement had armed guards on its perimeter, described by the Temple as protection against outside attack. Members wrote letters home that were read before they were sent.

Jones's own condition deteriorated in Guyana. Aides and survivors have described heavy use of prescription drugs, slurred broadcasts, escalating paranoia about a coming attack from the United States government, and long night-time monologues over the loudspeakers about enemies, betrayal and death. Post-mortem examination reported drugs in his system.

White nights: the rehearsals

The most important fact about 18 November 1978 is that it had been rehearsed. Former members and survivors have consistently described events called white nights: emergency alerts, sometimes in the middle of the night, in which the whole community was assembled and told that an attack was imminent and that the group would die together rather than be taken.

On several of these occasions members were given a drink they were told was poisoned and instructed to drink it. After a period of waiting, Jones informed them it had been a test of loyalty. Deborah Layton, who left the Temple in mid-1978 and swore a public affidavit before the deaths, described exactly this practice and stated plainly that the community was being prepared for a mass suicide. Her affidavit was circulated to United States government officials and to the press months before November.

The rehearsals did two things. They made the final instruction familiar rather than shocking, and they trained the community to associate compliance with reassurance, because every previous time the drink had turned out to be harmless. On the last day, roughly 900 people were asked to do a thing they had already done.

Concerned Relatives and the warnings that were on the record

By 1978, a group of family members of people in Jonestown had organised in California under the name Concerned Relatives. They included parents of adult members, former members, and people fighting custody battles over children taken to Guyana. They wrote to the State Department, lobbied members of Congress, spoke to journalists, and issued a public accusation of human rights violations at Jonestown, which they delivered to the Temple.

Their central claims were that members were being held against their will, that mail and contact were controlled, that people were being punished physically, and that Jones had prepared the community to die. Officials responded with the limits of their position: the members were adults, they were on foreign soil, consular visits had reported no complaints, and there was no legal basis for the United States to remove citizens from a lawful settlement in another country. The Temple's lawyers denied every allegation and produced signed statements from members in Guyana saying they were there freely.

That is the situation Leo Ryan walked into. He was a Democratic congressman from San Mateo County, California, whose constituents included relatives of Jonestown residents, and who had a record of investigating things in person. He announced a visit to Guyana, invited the Temple to cooperate, and travelled in November 1978 with a delegation that included journalists and members of Concerned Relatives.

Congressman Leo Ryan's visit

Ryan's party reached Jonestown on the evening of 17 November 1978 after protracted negotiation over access. The reception that night was arranged: a meal, a concert, a crowded pavilion, and a performance of a community that was happy. Members told the visiting journalists that they were there by choice.

During the evening, a note was passed to an NBC correspondent naming members who wanted to leave. The next day, 18 November, more people came forward. By the afternoon around fifteen people had asked to go with Ryan, some of them from families that would be split by leaving.

The defections broke the performance, and the mood changed within hours. A Temple member attacked Ryan with a knife before he left the settlement; Ryan was not seriously injured in that attack and the man was restrained. Ryan and his party, with the departing members, went to the Port Kaituma airstrip in the late afternoon to fly out on two small aircraft.

The killings at Port Kaituma

At the airstrip, a tractor and trailer carrying armed men from Jonestown drove up to the aircraft, and the gunmen opened fire on Ryan's party as they were boarding. Five people were killed: Congressman Leo Ryan; NBC correspondent Don Harris; NBC cameraman Bob Brown, whose camera recorded the beginning of the attack; San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson; and Patricia Parks, a Temple member who was leaving with the delegation. Others in the party were wounded, some seriously, and survivors hid in the bush overnight before help arrived the following day.

A separate shooting occurred inside one of the aircraft, carried out by a Temple member who had joined the departing group. The Office of the Historian of the United States House of Representatives records Leo Ryan as the only member of Congress killed in the line of duty.

The killings at the airstrip are the point at which any account of that day must be careful about the word suicide. The first deaths of 18 November 1978 were the murders of five people who were trying to leave, and one of them was a member of the group.

What happened at Jonestown that evening

Within a few hours of the airstrip attack, Jones assembled the community in the central pavilion. Much of what followed was recorded on an audio tape that was recovered afterwards by the FBI and later released, and the tape is the principal reason the sequence is known rather than guessed at.

On the recording, Jones tells the community that the congressman has been killed, that the settlement will now be destroyed by outside forces, that their children will be taken and tortured, and that the only course left is what he calls a revolutionary act of dying with dignity. A large vat of fruit drink mixed with cyanide and sedatives was prepared and brought out. Infants and small children were given the mixture first, squirted into their mouths by syringe, administered by adults including their own parents and by the settlement's medical staff.

The tape records at least one member, Christine Miller, arguing openly against the plan, proposing that the community fly to the Soviet Union instead, and asking whether the children have a right to live. She is answered by Jones and then shouted down by others in the crowd. Armed guards stood around the pavilion. Jones is heard repeatedly urging people to hurry, telling them to stop the crying and to die with dignity.

More than 900 people died. The dead included around 300 children and minors. Some adults were found with injection sites, indicating they were injected rather than having drunk the mixture. A small number of people survived: some who hid in the settlement or fled into the jungle, some who were away in Georgetown, and some who slipped out during the confusion. In Georgetown, a senior Temple member killed her three children and then herself the same night.

Jim Jones was found in the pavilion with a gunshot wound to the head. Whether the shot was fired by his own hand or by another person has not been definitively established.

The recovery of the bodies was carried out over the following days by Guyanese authorities and by a United States military operation, and the remains were flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Many of the dead were never claimed by relatives, and a large number were buried together at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, where a memorial now lists the names of those who died.

Why "mass suicide" is not an accurate description on its own

Jonestown is filed in most people's memory as a mass suicide, and the phrase does real damage to the truth of what happened. Four facts stand against it.

• The children could not consent. Around a third of the dead were minors, and the youngest were infants who had the poison administered to them. A child who is given cyanide by an adult has been killed. There is no other word for it, and it applies to roughly 300 of the dead.
• Five people had already been murdered. The day's first deaths were at the airstrip, and they were killings of people trying to leave, carried out by armed members of the group.
• The setting was coercive. The pavilion was ringed by armed guards. The tape records objection being shouted down. Members had no passports, no money, no way out of the jungle, and years of conditioning behind them. Consent given under those conditions is not consent in any ordinary sense.
• Some adults were injected. Post-mortem findings of injection sites indicate that some of the dead did not administer the poison to themselves.

The honest description is that Jonestown was a mass murder, which included the coerced deaths of many adults and the genuinely willing deaths of some. Survivors and relatives have argued this point for decades and they are right to. Calling it a mass suicide assigns the responsibility to the people who died and takes it away from the man who prepared the poison, rehearsed the procedure, and ordered it carried out.

The same objection applies to the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid," which came into ordinary English from Jonestown and is now used lightly to mean going along with a group. The drink was mostly a different brand, and the deaths of 300 children are not a figure of speech.

What followed

The Peoples Temple as an organisation did not survive. Its remaining assets went into receivership in California and were distributed to claimants, including relatives of the dead. A House of Representatives committee investigated the killing of Leo Ryan and published a staff report the following year examining the events and the conduct of the American agencies that had received warnings.

One person was ultimately convicted in a United States court in connection with the attack on Ryan's party. Larry Layton, the Temple member who fired inside one of the aircraft at the airstrip, was prosecuted federally on conspiracy charges relating to the killing of a congressman. His first trial ended without a verdict and he was convicted at a retrial in the 1980s. He served a prison term and was later released on parole. Guyanese authorities prosecuted a separate case locally. The men who fired at the airstrip and survived largely died at Jonestown or were not brought to trial in the United States.

The survivors carried the rest. Several hundred people lost their entire families in a single evening. Some survivors have spoken publicly for decades, given testimony, written books, and worked to have the dead named and remembered as people rather than as a punchline. The memorial at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, which lists the names of all who died, was completed after a long campaign by survivors and relatives, and it includes the name of Jim Jones, a decision that was itself argued over and that some relatives opposed.

Jonestown also shaped how Western governments, journalists and churches thought about new religious movements for the following decade, and it fed both careful research and a wave of loose accusation aimed at groups that had nothing to do with any of it.

What this page does not claim

Some parts of this record are settled and some are not. This page keeps the difference visible.

• Whether Jim Jones shot himself. A gunshot wound to the head was established. Who fired it was not.
• Exactly how many of the adults who died did so willingly. The recording, the guards, the injections and the conditioning make any confident division of the adult dead into willing and coerced impossible. This page does not attempt one.
• What Jones privately believed about himself at the end. His public statements were contradictory and his physical condition was deteriorating. His intentions are inferred from what he did.
• Whether earlier action by American officials would have prevented the deaths. Warnings were made and were on the record. Whether any available legal action would have worked is argued about, and this page does not settle it.
• Any judgment on the eternal standing of Jim Jones or of anyone who died at Jonestown. That belongs to God alone, and Scripture forbids Christians to take it up (Romans 14:4, Matthew 7:1). What can be judged is the teaching and the conduct, and both were gravely wrong.

The Catholic response

Catholic teaching answers the specific moves Jones made, and it answers them on grounds that were available long before 1978.

The kingdom is not built by us within history

Jones taught that heaven would be constructed by the community, under his direction, in this world. The Catechism addresses this directly. It teaches that the Antichrist's deception begins to take shape whenever a claim is made to realise within history the messianic hope that can only be realised beyond history through the final judgment, and it names the political form of that falsification, a secular messianism, as intrinsically perverse (Catechism of the Catholic Church 676). Christians work for justice with everything they have. They do not confuse the result with the kingdom of God, and they do not hand a man the authority to declare that his community is it.

One mediator, and public revelation is complete

"There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5). No one else occupies that place, and no leader may be made the necessary channel between his followers and God. The Church also teaches that God's public revelation is complete in Christ and that no new public revelation is to be expected before his glorious return; private revelations do not improve on it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 67). A preacher who announces that the Bible is exhausted and that he is what remains has claimed exactly what Christian teaching says cannot happen.

The community of goods is real and it has a shape

Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-35 describe the first believers holding their possessions in common, and the Church has never treated that as an embarrassment. Religious orders live it under vows. The differences from what Jones built are precise and they are worth naming. In the Acts account the sharing is voluntary, Peter tells Ananias that the property was his to keep and the sin was the lie rather than the retention (Acts 5:4), and the goods are distributed to those in need rather than gathered into the leader's control. Catholic religious communities hold property in common under a rule that binds the superior as well as the members, with recourse beyond the house, and with the vow freely made and able to be dispensed. Common ownership is Christian. Common ownership with no appeal above one man is a trap.

No calendar, and no imminent doom to justify anything

Jones held his community in a permanent emergency: a nuclear war, a coming attack, an enemy at the gate. Emergency is the most reliable tool for suspending a person's judgment. Christ ruled out the certainty such emergencies claim: "But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32). Readiness is asked at all times and a date is never given. Our guide to what the Church actually teaches about the end times works through this.

Despair is not martyrdom

Jones told his community that dying together was a revolutionary act with dignity, and dressed the deaths in the language of witness. Christian martyrdom is the acceptance of death inflicted by others rather than deny Christ. It is not the taking of one's own life, and it can never be the taking of anyone else's, least of all a child's. The Church teaches that we are stewards of the life God has entrusted to us rather than its owners, and that we are not free to dispose of it (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2280). Whatever happened in that pavilion, it was the opposite of witness.

How a church becomes that

The people who died at Jonestown were, in overwhelming proportion, ordinary and decent. They included elderly people who had given their pensions, families with young children, nurses, teachers, students, and a very large number of black Americans who had joined a church that offered them equality and delivered it before it took everything else. Understanding the sequence is more useful than condemning the ending.

The good work came first, and it was real

The Temple's meals, housing help and integration were genuine. That is what gave Jones the moral credit he later spent. When someone has demonstrably helped you, disbelieving them later takes far more evidence than disbelieving a stranger, and he knew it.

Every change was small

No one was asked to join a group that would die in a jungle. They were asked to move to California, then to pool income, then to attend more meetings, then to sign a statement, then to move again. Each step was a short distance from the one before. The full distance only becomes visible from outside, which is why keeping people outside your life is the thing a coercive group must prevent.

The standard was removed before it was needed

Jones dismantled the authority of Scripture in front of his congregation years before he needed there to be no standard. A leader who teaches you that the text cannot be trusted has told you something important about what he intends to do next. Our guide to the marks of a wolf in sheep's clothing works through the biblical tests in detail, and David Koresh at Waco shows the same removal performed by the opposite method, by making one man the only person who could read the book.

The doctrine kept transferring things to one man

Money, houses, custody of children, sexual access, the right to define reality. When a teaching moves those toward the person who announced the teaching, the direction of benefit is the evidence, and no theological explanation is needed to see it.

The practical safeguards are unglamorous

Keep your own passport, your own bank account, and relationships with people who are not in the group. Read Scripture yourself, in a version you chose, alongside the Church's teaching rather than one man's summary of it. Test what you are told: "do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God" (1 John 4:1); "test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Ask what happens to a person who disagrees out loud. In a healthy church, nothing much. That single question would have answered everything about the Peoples Temple by 1973.

Prefer to support the work instead? Make a donation.

Frequently asked questions