The Fatal Combination of Ideology and Charisma

In January 1977, not two years before Reverend Jim Jones would orchestrate his followers’ deaths by the hundreds, a San Francisco church bestowed its Martin Luther King Jr.

Humanitarian Award on him.

Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, had managed to become a major player in the city’s politics.

No one foresaw the horrific depths to which the combination of a charismatic leader, an all-encompassing belief system, and the human need for community and redemption would soon descend.

On November 18, 1978, at Jones’s eponymous farm commune deep in the jungles of northwest Guyana, 908 members of the Peoples Temple, which had become a Pentecostalist-inspired socialist personality cult, either ingested cyanide-laced punch or were shot for refusing to do so.

Most of the victims were poor Black Americans; more than 300 were children.

Multiple generations of families died at Jonestown—grandmothers administered the deadly concoction to their screaming grandchildren before swallowing it themselves. (Based on a recording and other evidence from the incident, no one can say how many died willingly; men with guns oversaw the operation.) Just hours before, at a nearby airstrip, gunmen acting on Jones’s orders had murdered three journalists, a temple defector, and Representative Leo Ryan, a Bay Area Democrat who had traveled to Jonestown on behalf of temple members’ concerned relatives.

Jones himself died from a gunshot wound to the head.

Until 9/11, Jonestown had been the largest premeditated mass killing of American civilians in history.

In his 1980 book, Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy , the author Shiva Naipaul examines how ideologies related to the American counterculture helped bring about the massacre, and what he finds is deeply disturbing: Jonestown wasn’t just the work of only one man, Naipaul argues; it was also the product of a morally corrupted environment. [ James Kirchick: The DSA is a parasite ] The phrase drinking the Kool-Aid , a metaphor for unquestioningly holding a belief, was inspired by the fatal cocktail administered at Jonestown.

But dark jokes about a nearly half-century-old massacre have a way of obscuring its continuing relevance.

In recent years, totalizing ideologies such as communism, fascism, and Islamism have found dedicated audiences on social media, and the proliferation of demagogues manipulating people for malign ends is an ever-present worry.

Jones himself was a mentally unsound megalomaniac.

But the people who followed him to South America were not—poor and vulnerable, yes; crazy, no.