In this essay, I will argue that phenomenology helps us better understand the religion of the People’s Temple and contributes to repositioning Jonestown’s place in American history by exploring the connection between the Peoples Temple and America’s history. Through phenomenology, the themes of American racial segregation and capitalistic structure are bared to reveal their significance in the not only the conception and exponential growth of Jonestown, but also in the establishment and end of Jonestown. Through Chidester’s phenomenological approach in Salvation and Suicide that requires “we temporarily suspend prejudicial biases and value judgements in order to enter imaginatively into the worldview of others”, the events of Jonestown consequently cease to become unimaginable, or unthinkable, and instead become explicable (Chidester, xiv). Moral categorizations of Peoples Temple such as being ‘cult-ish’ are dispensed with in phenomenology, and the “people who stayed” in Peoples Temple are studied as sane, voluntary agents (xii). An amoral objective study therefore offers an opposite view to the discourse of Jonestown being an “alternative religious movement [that] can only be accounted for in terms of brainwashing, mind control, or coercive mental persuasion” (28), and it achieves this negation by humanizing Peoples Temple by validating the “legitimate, fully human status, consciousness, and will of participants in alternative religious movements” (30). By entering imaginatively into the worldview of Peoples Temple, we create “the living context for a meaningful construction of human identity” (49).
Firstly, phenomenology explains the beginning of People’s Temple by exploring the strong connection between the membership of People’s Temple and the racial oppression in America. Peoples Temple, from the beginning, was less centered on traditional Christianity, or the Bible, but rather on an interracial integration in the height of segregation in the United States that maintained white supremacy. From the beginning, Jones insisted that the churches that he preached in be not only “racially integrated, but that black members of the congregation should sit upfront”; a concern that caused “considerable controversy in the racially divided churches of Indianapolis” (3). Jones message of racial harmony, at a time when racial tensions in America were intensifying and civil rights movements gaining momentum, was very well received by most black people. It was with this same message that Jonestown was designed which Jones envisioned to be “a utopian heaven on earth, a socialist paradise in the jungle where racism…would be eliminated” (10). Using phenomenology, we can see how Peoples Temple classified people into superhuman, subhuman and human of which only a socialist was a “fully human person” (51).
The doctrine and Peoples Temple is explained through phenomenology as having been fueled by dint of its intolerance to capitalism’s discriminative and oppressive nature and promising salvation. In a similar monotheistic fashion put forward by Assman when explaining “counterreligion”, the doctrine of Peoples Temple proclaims a socialist truth that “does not stand in a complementary relationship” with the capitalistic religious truth preached by most Christians (Assman, 3). The Bible, the document upon which most Christians prior to joining People’s Temple had most likely lived their religion by, was termed by Jones in Peoples Temple as “an oppressive text that served the interests of capitalism, slavery, and racial discrimination” (5). Worship of the Sky God was synonymized to capitalism in the exegesis of Jim Jones in the sense that it too, was “always attended by political oppression and suppression of human liberty” (54). The Peoples Temple, and Jonestown extensively, therefore seemed to be a solution to escaping capitalism, a place where “people who have been deprived, discriminated against, and persecuted in America could live in peace and freedom” (10). The participants would be saved from subclassification through socialism, “an inversion of the prevailing system of classification [capitalism] that was perceived to operate in America” (51).
Through phenomenology, we see how “revolutionary suicide was imagined as a way of life and as a way of death within the worldview of the Peoples Temple” (129). One example is how the threat of an impending nuclear apocalypse not only tied to America’s capitalistic culture, but also how the idea of an impending nuclear doom augmented the belief of salvation through revolutionary suicide. A nuclear destruction formed the basis for one of the ways the inhabitants of Jonestown oriented themselves spatially, viewing themselves as the chosen few, who would be saved and “destined to create a new world out of the destruction of the old” (109). The ‘old world’ would be the world filled with forces of oppression, against which they would keep on fighting and if all else fails, then radically attempt to maintain human dignity through revolutionary suicide. Through this approach, the events of Jonestown, radical as they might seem, gain more clarity.
It could be argued, however, that phenomenology leaves out a big part of Peoples Temple: Jim Jones coercive nature and manipulative tactics. It doesn’t shed light on the coercive powers of his charismatic and impassioned interactions and sidelines the restrictive and authoritative control he was purported to have in Jonestown. Be that as it may, we can accept the elision of this discourse as a consequence of phenomenology. Even Chidester writes that his approach, is not about “the private theological, philosophical, or political musings of Jim Jones…but about public sermons, public rallies, and public practices within the Peoples Temple and Jonestown”. Phenomenology, as Chidester uses it, is about those who stayed, “about the contours of a shared worldview, articulated through the discourse of Jim Jones but lived out in the radical commitments, personal sacrifices, and communal involvements of those who remained in the movement” (xii).
In conclusion, phenomenology has offered a different side to the story and understanding of the events of Jonestown. It paints a clearer, more human, picture of Jonestown, deeming Jonestown as neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, but as explicable in its origins, development and abrupt end. Phenomenology overcomes “the distance most people have experienced when trying to imagine Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown” (xv). This distance to Jonestown through “perceived dangers of defilement by the bodies of Jonestown”, speaks to the exclusion and dehumanization that most congregants of Peoples Temple faced in a way that emphasized their “strangeness, foreignness, and ultimately its otherness in relation to ordinary American beliefs, values and experiences (24). Even in the political arena, Chidester writes, “[l]ittle concern was raised about what the life and death of Peoples Temple might reveal about America” (33). Phenomenology, by underlining the humanity of the participants, reduces this perceived distance between Jonestown values and American values and shows instead, how they are inextricably connected.
Bibliography
David Chidester. Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown. Kindle Edition.
Week 6 Readings: God
Reading: [online] The Price of Monotheism by Jan Assmann, Introduction and ch. 1