Religion and Politics

The Divine Inspiration of Jim Jones

In The Believer, Adam Morris traces the ideological roots of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple back to Brooklyn, where spiritual leader Father Divine fueled Jones’ ambitions for the socialist utopia he later founded in Guyana. Divine’s interracial, communalist organization had the power and popularity Jones desired—and later used—to persuade his religious followers to embrace socialism and to die for it, Morris writes. “Seen in this light, the Guyana massacre cannot be considered merely the eschatological flare-out of an irrational ‘religious cult.’ It was also a perverse display of commitment made by determined political activists.”

Read at The Believer

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