Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America

9. America Was Not Hard to Find

9 America Was Not Hard to Find muhammed isaiah kenyatta In these, our troubling times, I find no clearer signal of God’s call to repentance than the phenomenon called Jonestown. Whether American Christians comprehended Jonestown may well determine their answer to an important question: Did those nine hundred shed the fertile blood of martyrs, or did they do nothing more than add another pointless footnote to the annals of bizarre decadence which chronicle these last days of the American empire? As Christians, our only authenticity is in living and telling the greatest Good News. We should therefore know better than any others that transcendent significance is not simply in events. It is also in the stories that illuminate the meaning of events. So whether Jonestown is merely superfluous evidence of the banality of evil or becomes a precious lesson which renews our faith depends largely upon our articulate understanding of these nine hundred lives and deaths. But beyond that, our understanding of Jonestown hangs on the cross of our understanding of ourselves and on our call to continual witness in America. First, we need to look squarely at the bare facts, unadorned by the meanings ascribed to them in pop journalism. Peoples Temple embraced two congregations affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) communion or “denomination.” These two, one in California and one in Guyana, are reported to have been among the five largest congregations of the Disciples. Pastor This article first appeared in The Other Side 93 (June 1979), and is reprinted by permission. The ellipses which appear are in the original. America Was Not Hard to Find 159 James Jones, by all indications, was a minister in good standing within his denomination. The Disciples have long been recognized as a bona fide ecclesiastical body, according to secular law and to the maxims of various local, national, and international Protestant ecumenical groupings . Peoples Temple was no more or less legitimately Christian than many other local churches, be they Episcopalian or Southern Baptist or United Methodist or Lutheran or African Methodist Episcopal or what-have-you. Disclaimers after the fact that Peoples Temple was a renegade cult are both self-serving sophistry and conspicuously hypocritical exercises in self-denial when propounded by less-thanChristian American Christians. Furthermore, Christians ought to be very wary of attempts to minimize the significance of Jonestown. Some do this by scapegoating James Jones as a mind-manipulating, charismatic leader. (I’m using the term charismatic in the sociological sense.) American Protestant Christianity, especially as expressed by the poor and marginalized classes, is notoriously inclined toward the elevation of charismatic personalities. But we cannot, with integrity, nail James Jones to the cross of the cult of personality. For if we do, we must also raise the hammer to such cherished figures as Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr. (not to mention such lesser lights as Chuck Colson, James Cone, William Sloane Coffin, or our favorite local preacher). What we do know is that Jones and Peoples Temple undertook a ministry largely focused on the poor, on oppressed minorities, and on others alienated from mainstream U.S.A. We know that ministry flourished (if the numbers of adherents and the dollar value of contributions are indices of successful ministry). And numbers and money are appropriate measures of evangelical success and commitment, if we are to believe the wide range of effective media campaigns with which we are regularly bombarded. (I think of the efforts of such diverse ministries as those of Robert Schuller, Tom Skinner Associates, the Christian Broadcasting Network, the Presbyterian Major Mission Fund, and many others.) Of course, numbers and money are not the only signs of effective ministry. All of the aforementioned (and the vast majority of Christians ) also affirm our responsibility to heed the charge of our risen Lord, who said, “Feed my sheep.” Contemporary missions, from the Voice of Calvary in Mississippi to the World Council of Churches’ Program to Combat Racism, recommend themselves to us. And they recommend themselves to us as creative models of sheep-feeding in 160 muhammed isaiah kenyatta the context of current social realities. So, too, do efforts like Bread for the World or the American Friends Service Committee or the American Committee on Africa, all of which owe their inception to impulses of Christian service. Additionally, there are more traditional approaches to Christian service. I...