Peoples Temple and Black Religion in America

Introduction

I N T R O D U C T I O N Peoples Temple began as a racially mixed, independent congregation in Indianapolis, Indiana, in the early 1950s. Initially called “Community Unity,” in 1955 the congregation took the name “Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church.” In 1959, the congregation affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). In 1965, some 70 members of the congregation, including both white and black families, relocated to Redwood Valley, California, where they were known as the Peoples Temple Christian Church. In 1966, the total membership was 86 and by 1968 it had grown to 136. Throughout the late 1960s, a number of young white people—who had either “dropped out” from society and become part of the counterculture scene, or who had been influenced by the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements—were drawn to the movement. Some of them came from religious backgrounds; more of them were committed to secular ideologies of racial integration and economic democracy.1 In 1968, the Temple began establishing relations with black churches in San Francisco by attending special events at those churches, winning the trust of the local black ministers, and inviting their congregations to visit Peoples Temple in Redwood Valley in an exchange of fellowship. In 1970, a large building was purchased in San Francisco, which enabled Peoples Temple to hold services in the city. Within a short time the membership had grown to three thousand , with the numbers of visitors swelling to thousands more. During these years, Peoples Temple members also went on bus tours to other large cities on the West Coast (a branch church was purchased in Los Angeles) and throughout the country, where they held evangelisticstyle services and recruited hundreds more to the movement. In 1976, the headquarters of the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ were relocated to San Francisco.2 Some of the individuals who became part of Peoples Temple in its San Francisco years were black youth and young adults who were taken in off the streets to be placed in drug rehabilitation, employment , and educational programs. Some had been placed in the custody of state agencies or were under the supervision of probation or parole officers. But many African Americans who joined the Temple came from San Francisco’s black churches. Quite commonly, two- and even three-generation families would join as a unit, although a sig- xii introduction nificant number of those who came from churches were retired or elderly, and many of these were women. In the Bay Area of the 1970s, black churches were expressive of two different strands of the black Christian tradition. One minister who was active at that time, speaking of the majority of black churches in San Francisco, recalls that “we were just gospel-preaching, fundamental churches” which were not given to an activist role.3 San Francisco itself was less affected by the Civil Rights movement than by the secular “New Left” political movement; most black churches were in- fluenced by neither. Their focus remained evangelization, individual salvation, and life in the hereafter. Many of them emphasized the gifts of the Spirit—including healing—as did Peoples Temple. But other models of black religiosity were present at that time, including the social action ministry of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco and the ecumenical body in Oakland known as Alamo Black Clergy. Alamo Black Clergy was one of numerous ecumenical groups that came into being across the nation in the 1970s in response to the development of black liberation theology. But its members represented the very small, prophetic remnant of Bay Area black clergy.4 There was, too, a highly visible, non-Christian expression of black religion—the Nation of Islam—that had been made popular in the early 1960s by Minister Malcolm X. Added to the theological and ideological mix of the times was a communist perspective held by individuals such as scholar/activist Angela Davis and by numerous socialist organizations. It seems decidedly a stretch of credibility to think that African American members of Peoples Temple were uninfluenced by these religious-political currents, both in their decision to join the Temple— which was itself engaged in a variety of social protest and social service activities—and in the subsequent decision of many of them to leave the United States. In 1974, the leadership of Peoples Temple negotiated an agreement with the government of Guyana—a cooperative socialist republic whose citizens...