314. Hall, John R. "The Apocalypse at Jonestown." In In Gods We Trust: New Patterns of Religious Pluralism in America edited by Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981: 171-90. (Reprinted from Society, Sept. 1979: 52-61.)
Uncritically accepts "brainwashing" as a "necessary" cause for these events. The People's Temple was a postapocalyptic sect, but on moving to Guyana it attempted to "transcend the apocalypse by establishing a 'heaven-on-earth'" (p. 173). When this was frustrated the group "was drawn back into a pre-apocalyptic war with the forces of the established order" (ibid.) Suicide was a solution in this system. The People's Temple, despite the "bizarre" nature of its practices, differed little from previous millennial groups (or "other-worldly sects" in Hall's terms) or from more mundane total institutions.
It is an important point that when people convert to these total groups they to some extent de-legitimate their families and other previous networks and their value systems. Conversion in every case implies an attack on tradition. The competition between these contending realities cannot be bridged, there is no room for compromise between commitments.
315. ÷÷÷. Gone from the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1987. Robbins's review (1989) notes that Hall provides a detailed history of the People's Temple, including a sketch of the ways in which it made use of capitalist corporate tactics to avoid taxation and to increase its income yet used the money it raised for real benefit to its followers. At the same time it mirrored American culture, it remained an "alien force outside the matrix of culturally understandable motives" (quoting Hall, p. 105). It used capitalist methods to support its struggle against capitalism. [One is reminded of the Soviet catch phrase that a capitalist would sell the rope to hang capitalism; there is no contradiction in using the enemy's techniques to beat him.]
In Hall's view the opposition roused by the Concerned Relatives was crucial. They viewed the Temple as the Concentration Camp, and the Temple called them the Conspiracy in a vicious circle of mutually confirmed opposition that increasingly strengthened their conflict. This conflict with the establishment forced the Temple to choose between martyrdom and accommodation with evil. The Temple thus had to be both a post-apocalyptic haven removed from the world and an army at war with it.
Jones came increasingly to be concerned with this war, and a showdown became both putatively and in fact inevitable. Mass suicide thus became the [only?] logical way to unite these two functions.
Before that catastrophe, Jones increased the rigidity of his control over his followers. Opposition was an important threat to the movement and its aims and came to be seen as prefatory to a holocaust. The "voluntary" suicide was a "symbolic vindication," a statement of the movement's unity in its cause, and a repudiation of the "fascist" opposition.
Hall evokes other instances of millenarian suicide which were supposed to hasten the millennium but compares this to militant Jewish movements whose suicide was supposed to embarrass opposition and vindicate the cause but was not itself redemptive or millennial.
Return to Indexes