Jim Jones’ “sect was doomed to failure for it was founded on the lie that religious Socialism can save men,” wrote late Catholic priest and commentator Vincent P. Miceli in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior. Recently republished by Sophia Institute Press, this volume’s previously examined incisive analysis of leftist evils contains provocative thoughts about Jones’ cult, which shocked the world in 1978 with a mass suicide.
With mad conspiracy theories, Jones incited his Peoples Temple cult members to kill themselves and each other on November 18, 1978, in the cult’s self-contained community of Jonestown, deep in the South American backcountry of Guyana. While he and some other cultists met their ends through gunshots, most of Jonestown’s inhabitants drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. This beverage has since become a byword for fanaticism, and exemplified for Miceli another example of modern tyranny, what he termed a “Moloch state.” “When they had all drained the chalice of cyanide, the Peoples’ Temple became a Church of the dead. The modern Moloch state was left a city of suicides-murders, a city of 911 rotting corpses,” he wrote.
Leftists commonly ascribe rationality to themselves and dismiss conservatives as fanatics, but Miceli, writing so soon after Jones’ demise, noted that this crazed man was thoroughly of the Left. Often forgotten in the intervening decades, Jones’ utopian and socialist obsessions found expression in his advocacy of what he called “Apostolic Socialism.” As Miceli wrote,
Jones himself was always a liberal, or rather, a zealous Communist posing as a liberal; to keep up appearances he preached the gospel of social salvation camouflaging it with a thin veneer of Christianity; his faith was a false and cruel caricature of Christianity.
Jones exhibited the pitfalls of the Social Gospel, a collectivist, secularist distortion of Christianity that megachurch pastor Rick Warren, himself no conservative, has denounced as “Marxism in Christian clothing.” As Miceli wrote, ultimately a “church of naive, hoodwinked, simple folk was led astray by an evil, militant Communist, posing as a God-man liberal do-gooder.” Indeed, after the Jonestown slaughter letters appeared “testifying that the cult leaders were planning to bequeath more than 7 million dollars to the Communist Party that rules the Moloch state known as the Soviet Union.”
Yet Jones, “while doling out liberally social goodies…claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus,” Miceli astonishingly observed. In Guyana’s jungles, this false prophet to the last “demanded the service of adoration from his faithful,” Miceli added. “Jonestown, the Marxist-liberal-socialist caricature of a Christian Church, conferred on its faithful but one sacrament—the sacrament of death, of suicide.”
Over four decades after Jonestown’s horrors, Miceli’s reflections remain pertinent for an age of rising atheism:
What were the spiritual influences that unleashed the floodgates and fostered the mass suicides and murders in Jonestown? By way of preparing the social milieu for the creation of the Peoples’ Temple, one of the most basic causes must be the massive apostasy by Christians in the West from faith in the Judeo-Christian God of revelation.
With words no less relevant today, Miceli concluded with a
warning and somber lesson to be learned from the carnage exacted by the modern Moloch state, whether that takes place in the jungle of Jonestown or in the abortion mills of Western cities. The warning is that established forms of Christian religions have lost their hold on and power to attract most people—especially the educated middle class and even the masses of the poor. Why is this so? Because such religions have secularized the Christian message. They teach in favor of the Christ of Karl Marx instead of the Christ of the Gospels.
Thus, Jones stands on a smaller scale amidst history’s Marxist mass murderers such as Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong, who counted victims in the millions. Jones is yet another precedent of how ruthless wolves in sheep’s clothing exploit the vain search for salvation in this world, or even the next, in socialism. However, this ideology does not exhaust modern madness, as Miceli studied, for interrelated with this fanatical fool’s errand is also a distorted understanding of the male and female sexes, as a forthcoming article will examine.
wpm says
Jim Jones would a main stream democratic if he were alive today standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Sanders and Warren. How many store front “preachers” are on the democratic bandwagon ?
mortimer says
Obama’s neo-Marxist and very antisemitic mentor, Jeremiah Alvesta Wright Jr. (born September 22, 1941) is now a pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a congregation he led for 36 years, during which its membership grew to over 8,000 parishioners. Following retirement, his beliefs and preaching were scrutinized when segments of his sermons about terrorist attacks on the United States and government dishonesty were publicized in connection with the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Obama and Wright both espoused the neo-Marxist equity doctrine which means equality of outcome.
Not so much now, in the case of Obama who owns oceanfront properties on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Obama doesn’t believe in equality of outcome anymore.
mortimer says
ANDREW HARROD has written a suberb summary of the theological and political errors of the revolutionary cultist Jim Jones.
One of the greatest similarities between the American Leftist and Jim Jones is the constant VIRTUE-SIGNALLING that they both use to pump up their egos and feeling of omniscience (‘We know better and are more virtuous because we believe ‘X’.’ People who disbelieve ‘X’ are unvirtuous scum that we must eradicate.)
There are some very interesting parallels between Mohammed and Jim Jones, including unlimited polygamy and the fact that both of them died from poisoning.
SKA says
Mortimer: Jim Jones also raped little girls and sodomized little boys. He also Cosplayed by dressing up in a Castro-style uniform. He wore dark sunglasses not just because of the tropical sunlight but also to disguise his contracted pupils due to his heavy use of opiates. There are photos of him shaking hands with First Lady Carter when she was being received by the Democratic elites of the Bay Area with whom Jones mingled.
somehistory says
jones was adored by politicians in CA before he went off to form a base for raping the wives and children of his followers.
jones was a snake, following in the footsteps of his father, satan the devil.
The dishonest look at jones and put down Christianity, as if he was really an example of what Christ taught. Just as they do about David koresh. Cult leaders like to use the Bible in the same way satan used the Bible in an attempt to seduce Jesus Christ into serving him instead of being faithful to His Father, Jehovah God.
Some who seek God are lead astray by “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” just as Jesus warned would happen. those people who followed jones were mislead and they and their children suffered in the worst possible ways.
A government rep, Ryan, went down to hear the people gathered there, but was prevented from learning all he needed to, and was then murdered by jones’ guardsmen. jones was never “reverend” and should not have ever been called that. jones was an agent of satan the devil.
GreekEmpress says
When I was a kid, Jim Jones was the head of our San Francisco Housing authority. I knew other kids that attended the “people’s temple”. They were often out in the streets at red lights collecting donations. I shudder to think that some of them maybe went to Guyana.
somehistory says
Newsweek did a long article on jones and his “temple.” there were some who decided not to go with him and were allowed to abandon his cult. The ones who went, were not allowed to leave.
It’s terrible to think about those, esp the children, who were sacrificed to moloch. Esp for you, having seen some of them.
Barbara says
I believe he had paranoid schizophrenia near the end of his life. The fact that the community was organized around his personality was the problem. He had too much power. The Hutterites, a Christian communal group does not believe in private property, but their leadership structure has checks and balances. Thus, they have operated successfully for hundreds of years. They never let any leader have too much power.
somehistory says
he wasn’t a Christian and was using the needs of people to bolster his evil ego. Even before he talked those people into going to Guyana. His designs were evil and that was the “problem.”
SKA says
Dear Barbara: the Hutterites and the Amish have formed lasting functional communities because they adhere to a consistent reading of the Old and New testaments. Jim Jones on the other hand at one point in an angry sermon said to his followers while holding aloft a copy of the Bible words to the effect “The problem with some of you is that you look to THIS instead of looking to me!” A handful of people walked out on that occasion. A choice that literally saved their lives.
Peter Lucey says
The best book on Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple is Shiva Naipaul’s “Journey to Nowhere” (“Black and White” in the UK).]
The late Shiva Naipaul’s marvellous account of the corruption and intellectual collapse that Jim Jones fed off; that he harvested at Jonestown.
Many of the “survivor” accounts are understandably self-serving: Naipaul skewers them. I was astounded to see how many celebrities and politicians praised Jones, even when he was claiming to raise from the dead…
He was in the Democratic machine in SanFran, famously the Peoples temple provided cheering crowds for Rosalynn Carter’s visit.
A pedant writes: the deadly potion the poor cultists took was not Kool-Aid, but grape-flavoured “Fla-Vor-Aid” – laced with cyanide and, I think, valium