I was looking through a rather old syllabus for a sociology course taught at my university about new religious groups some weeks ago. I mainly did it because I wanted to find more reading material about Peoples Temple (because of fucking course I would), and I wanted to see what a professor would recommend. One of the required readings for the subject was a chapter about Peoples Temple in the book Killer Cults (James J. Boyle, St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1995), entitled "Dad Knows Best".

But first, let's see what the introduction to this book says:

Each month, we [St. Martin's True Crime Library] offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. [...] St. Martin's True Crime Library gives you the stories behind the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martin's True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because it's all true!

Well, then. I could go on about how popular historiography has treated the subject of Peoples Temple, but that might take a rather long time. Of note, I would like to point out that the first thing that the publisher is focused on is sensationalization. Sensationalized stories about Peoples Temple have been published way before this; the instant-history book The Cult that Died is a prime example of what has been called the pornography of Jonestown. So you get an idea on what is being emphasized here: thrilling sensationalization. To that end, the chapter on Peoples Temple is riddled with errors.

The preface to the book describes "the queue of the doomed", who are "mechanically dipping cups into vats of death". Take three guesses as to what this book is describing. It's really a loser's bet.

They'd [Jim Jones and Marceline Baldwin] met and married when he was seventeen and starting a career as an apprentice Methodist minister in Indianapolis. (p. 34)

No, they met when Jim Jones was working as an orderly at the same hospital where Marceline was a student nurse^1. Jones was still a high school student at the time^2. He would not become a student minister until 1952^3, several years after he and his wife were wed^4.

In 1957, after raising cash selling South American monkeys door-to-door for twenty-nine dollars each, Jones hung a shingle, "People's Temple", outside a rented storefront in an Indianapolis neighborhood whose population was rapidly changing from white to black. Just like that, he had founded his own religion. (p. 34)

The church that would later be called Peoples Temple was founded in 1954^5. It was first "Community Unity", then became "Wings of Deliverance" in 1956^6, and then "Peoples Temple" very shortly after^7. By the time the church was named "Peoples Temple", Jones had paid for an actual church building^8. Furthermore, many of his early members were former members of Laurel Street Tabernacle. They had followed Jones when he had walked out, angry that Laurel Street officials were uncomfortable with his pro-integration message and actions attempting to fully integrate the church^9.

To those who had known the intensely religious young man as a teenager, this seemed somewhat unusual. Jim Jones had always been a bigot as a youngster. (p. 34-5)

Many people have been interviewed regarding Jones's childhood years^10. In all of the accounts that I've heard and/or read, I have never heard anything suggesting that he was a "Bible-thumping white racist with 'nigger' on his curled lips" as a young child. Certainly, he swore like mad, and you can definitely make the argument that Temple leadership reflected racism on behalf of wider society and/or Jim Jones. However, there is little evidence to suggest that he was a cynical opportunist who did not believe what he preached, that being advancing social justice and ending racial and class inequalities.

The Temple was a beehive of activity during the rest of the week too, as Jones expanded his base, leading his followers in fair-housing demonstrations and other New Left protests that generated respectful media attention and quickly established the charismatic young preacher as a new community leader. (p. 35-6)

I'm left wondering if the author confused it with political activity undertaken in San Francisco in 1976-77. While Peoples Temple did establish themselves as community leaders, it was through promoting an integrated church, operating nursing homes, feeding the poor, etc.

[still discussing the Indianapolis years] With these successes came the flashy symbols of status -- diamond rings, alligator shoes, frequent trips out of town in the style of a touring dignitary. (p. 36)

Jones is known for being extremely frugal^11. In fact, the only time that he was uncharitably show-offish with wealth was when he and his family moved to Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1962^12. Even then, his family set up a food program to feed starving children that they met on the streets, and the family lived on rice and beans^13.

Some of his flock might well have remarked on the fact that Jones's top aids all were white--while the congregation was overwhelmingly black. If so, there's no record of it. (p. 36)

This is still discussing the Indianapolis years. During this time, Archie Ijames, a black man, was made one of the associate pastors¹⁴ (although, to be fair, he was the only black man in the associate pastor role).

The section about remarking about the racial disparity in Temple leadership is true during Indianapolis, but not so true when the community moved to California, as seen in this letter by the Eight Revolutionaries^15. I'm willing to be generous and assume that the author just meant Indianapolis, but if the statement is meant to be read generally, it's wrong.

Imposters were hired to fake being cured, even putting on ghoul faces to stage demonic-possession seizures to allow Jones to exorcize the beast. (p. 43)

It's generally understood that Planning Commission and staff members helped to fake the faith healings^16.

Now organized into a group called Concerned Relatives, the defectors--along with relatives of followers who claimed Jones was holding people hostage in a messianic cult--had no luck getting a hearing from news organizations like the San Francisco Chronicle, which had invested years of positive coverage.

The entire story is described in The Cult that Died from the point of view of Klineman, Butler, and Conn, two who were instrumental in getting the New West piece written in the first place. The same story, including a description of meetings with defectors, is also described in Raven, on pgs. 313-31. Kilduff was the person who tried to propose an article intending to profile what he saw as an odd political figure, not the defectors who would later become the Concerned Relatives. Kilduff's article had been rejected from the Chronicle because it was not substantial enough. Quoted in Raven, "Kilduff had neither proved his suspicions nor drawn a concise portrait of Jones"^17.

In fact, defectors did not come forward with their stories until after the Temple began to hound New West with letters testifying to Jones's good character. New West wrote an article describing the Temple's overreaction, hoping to find people who were willing to testify about Temple misdeeds, and the bait worked. Before then, the defectors had been too terrified of Jones to come forward (or had not known that reporters did want to hear and publicize their stories).

Finally, the Concerned Relatives group was not formed until late 1977, several months after the New West article was published^18.

New West's editorial offices were burglarized; a rough draft of the Kildruff article was stolen (p. 47)

The police investigation concluded that there was no link to Peoples Temple. In fact, the conclusion was that a New West staff reporter had locked himself out of the office and broke in through the window. Most histories, including Raven, make the mistake of omitting the police findings, but I'm not going to.

At this point, I got really fucking bored of the chapter, and extremely frustrated. There is probably more stuff I could debunk (descriptions on what happened on 17-18 November 1978 are generally juicy in that regard), but oh my gods, my brain was turning into mush from all of the bad history.

I'm honestly surprised that a sociology class taught at my university would assign this chapter, especially when there are much better books to read regarding Temple history, even in 2008 (Gone from the Promised Land by John V. Hall, for example, or Raven, which I was using throughout this entire post). That one chapter on Peoples Temple was so full of bad history that it makes me doubt the veracity of the description of the other groups named in the book.

1. Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People, Reiterman with Jacobs, 1982, p. 30
2. Ibid, p. 33
3. Ibid, p. 41
4. Ibid, p. 36
5. Ibid, p. 47
6. Ibid, p. 49
7. Ibid, p. 50
8. Ibid, p. 49
9. Ibid, p. 49
10. Check out chapters 1 and 2 of Raven, or the documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple.
11. Like, seriously. During the Redwood Valley/Ukiah years, there used to be a sign talking about how he wore old church robes and how his suit was second-hand. Jones didn't take a salary for years. Probably the nicest thing he owned in Indianapolis was his car.
12. Raven, p. 77
13. Ibid, p. 80
14. Ibid, p. 53
15. The Eight Revolutionaries (sometimes called the Gang of Eight) were an integrated group of young, college-aged adults who defected from the Temple in 1973. They left behind a letter to Jones and Temple leadership, blaming staff for, among other things, obsessing too much about sex and not enough about socialism, not encouraging revolutionary attitudes or teaching the congregation about socialism, the lack of active black socialist leadership and the difficulties for black members to be elevated to staff positions, and divisiveness within the Planning Commission (a second-tier level within Temple leadership, generally consisting of around 100 members). For more information, check out the chapter on the Eight Revolutionaries in Raven, p. 219-29.
16. See: The Cult that Died: The Tragedy of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple; Klineman, Butler, and Conn; 1980. There's an entire chapter that discusses this topic, but I returned the university copy to the library some weeks ago, so I can't get the page numbers. It is also mentioned in Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, as well as the book Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple (Moore, 2009).
17. Quote from Raven, p. 325.
18. Ibid, p. 408

(I realize that I hate 'Ibid' with a passion, but I was just so fucking irritated with this book that I just said 'screw it' and used it for the footnotes. Also of note, most of my sources predate 1995, when this so-called "True Crime Library" book was published, so this author has absolutely no excuse getting his details this wrong. This is seriously a research fail, although, in my personal opinion, it's not as big of a mistake as the accidental white-washing of a black woman.)