Hearing the Voices of Jonestown: Putting a Human Face on an American Tragedy (Religion and Politics) - Hardcover

Maaga, Mary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0815605153 ISBN 13: 9780815605157

Publisher: Syracuse University Press, 1998

Synopsis

When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired Peoples Temple members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created―and destroyed―at Jonestown, and why.

Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. The book analyzes the historical and sociological factors that, Maaga finds, contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the larger community and the influx of an upper-class, educated leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its members.

Hearing the Voices of Jonestown puts human faces on the events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions, such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary McCormick Maaga has taught in the Religious Studies Department of the University of Stirling, Scotland, as well as served as an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. Presently, she writes fiction and lives with her two children in northern California.

From Publishers Weekly:

Almost 20 years ago--November 18, 1978--news media across the U.S. brought into the nation's living rooms pictures of mass suicides committed by members of Jim Jones's People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. Maaga, a United Methodist pastor, became interested in the events at Jonestown when she learned that the daughters of her mentors, Reverend John and Barbara Moore, had been members of the Temple and had died in Guyana. While Maaga began her research wanting to know how two daughters from such a committed Christian family could have become involved in the People's Temple. Maaga discovered that the media perception of Jones group as a cult of "crazies" who foolishly gave up everything in exchange for a dangerous and irrational new religion was not justified. She found instead a community whose earliest activities were marked by a desire for social justice, racial harmony and sexual equality. Maaga traces the beginnings of the People's Temple to 1954 when, as a student pastor at a Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Jim Jones became disenchanted with the segregated Christianity he experienced and began a social ministry. By the time the group moved to California, it was providing food, housing, quality medical care and fellowship to low-income blacks and whites. Maaga chronicles the decline of the People's Temple and Jones's psychological disintegration, which was brought on by drug abuse, and the desires of the members to see themselves as courageous martyrs. In the end, Maaga writes, the People's Temple was a contradictory movement based on deception, fabricated healings and the tyranny of charismatic authority fueled by a sincere desire to emulate Jesus and care for society's neediest members. Maaga's penetrating portrait of the Jonestown event will leave readers asking "How different am I from those who died at Jonestown?"

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0815605153
• ISBN 13: 9780815605157
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216