Darryl Cooper — #12 - God's Socialist, pt. 2: What Child Is This?

Hey

Speaker 1: everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, and you're listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You're about to hear the second episode of God

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): Socialist: The Rise and Fall of People's Temple, better known as the Jonestown Cult

If you

Speaker 1: haven't heard the first

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): episode, I highly recommend that you start with that one and work your way through chronologically

If you

Speaker 3: enjoy this series, please consider subscribing to my Substack page. It can be found at

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): martyrmaid.substack.com. It's where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes

that are

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year. To

all of you

Speaker 2 (lower-pitched voice): who are already contributing, I very

much

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): appreciate you allowing me to do this. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Here

we go. I am

Speaker 5: content to die for

my beliefs, so cut

Speaker 5: off my head

and make

Speaker 5: me a martyr. The people will

always remember it

Speaker 6: no, they

will forget

Speaker 7: Hell does exist. God is a thought, God is

Speaker 8: an idea

It is a

Speaker 7: place

Speaker 9: it is somewhere

Speaker 10: Hell does exist. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking

I'm asking why we must tear ourselves

Speaker 11: apart for this small question of religion

As we

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): move into this next stage Of the story There's an aspect of the Cold War Or of the 20th century struggle With communism in general That

I want to

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): talk about That can be very difficult to relate to In the early 21st century It's difficult for me to relate to Take

yourself back

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): to 1914 The outset of the First World War There

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): are no communist countries Anywhere on the planet There

are no communist countries By the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): late 1940s, just a few

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): decades, a blink of an eye, historically, all of Russia, China, and

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): half of Europe are communist. Communists

would soon be

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): leading the anti-imperialist revolutions getting underway in the colonized world, in Africa and Asia and other places. Communist

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): parties were making gains, and even revolutions on multiple continents and countries where merely associating with them could get you arrested

And this

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): happened in just a few decades through the efforts of

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): what was, without exception, in every country where they operated, just a committed minority, a small group of people

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): And despite extremely powerful propaganda, police, and

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): even military resistance by the non-communist

world, this did not just

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): happen by

Speaker 18: accident. The

communists on

Speaker 18: the ground from London to Hanoi were

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): unbelievably dedicated and effective people

They were

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): driven by a zeal that only comes from believing, really believing that they were the vanguard engaged in a historic project that was going to transform the world for the better

This is a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): thing that we can struggle with a bit today because we don't have a whole lot to compare it to in the contemporary world. We have individuals who are dynamic and dedicated, no doubt, organizations even that

are, But

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): nothing

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to compare to the worldwide communist movement in the first half of the 20th century

Maybe the closest

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): thing is the global Islamist movement, but these are obviously very

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): different in substance and... A major difference, I think, in how they develop is there's sort of a self-defeating mechanism built into the jihad

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): movement. Whereas the communists tend to develop and nurture their recruits, Islamism often uses them

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): up

Today, if someone

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): calls themselves

a

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): communist, it's kind of viewed as a fashion statement or something. Even if people hit the streets in their black mass to protest

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the World Trade Organization or go fight the fascists

We

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): sort of look at that as a lifestyle choice. You know, it's like being into extreme sports or something like that. It's

a mask you

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): can put on and take off. Back in the early to mid-20th century, that's

not how

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): it was. We're talking about very serious people who really believed

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that they were engaged in a project that was going to overturn the global order, that was going to overturn the global order

and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): result in revolutions around the world

The only thing

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): that eventually slowed these people down and defeated communism was the fact that its believers finally lost their faith

There's a great

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): little book. It doesn't get read enough anymore, or very rarely read

but I

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): push it on people whenever I can. A great little book written in the early 1960s by a former British communist named Douglas Hyde. It's called Dedication and Leadership

Hyde had

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): been

a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): mentor and leader in the British Communist Party for a couple decades

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): until in 1948 he left the party and converted to Catholicism

So a decade

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): and a half later in the early 60s he's giving a series of talks to groups of Catholic leaders and this book was the result

And in it

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): he tries to clear up for his Catholic audience some misconceptions, common misconceptions that they'd had about the human material that the communists were working with. as well as about the methods employed by the

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): communists for developing that human material

for

Speaker 24: developing recruits into dedicated, effective workers for the revolution

The very first

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): thing he points out

is that the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): communists understood

and not just intuitively, they

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): understood it as a matter of doctrine

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): as a matter of policy

that you

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): tend to get what you ask for from people

You know, that

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): is

If

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): you ask for a small effort, you'll get a small effort

But if

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): you demand a major effort and major sacrifices

very often the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): response

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): you get from people is heroic

This is especially

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): true of young people

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): who, you know, they haven't yet given up on idealism out of despair at ever finding a suitable outlet for it

As a party

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): leader

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Douglas Hyde had traveled around the world with... you know, with the party, working with local revolutionaries

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): He had spent time in jail on several continents. I mean, he was in the thick of it. And he shares several anecdotes like this one to convey his point

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Quote, On

the other side of

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the world, in Kuching, Sarawak, Borneo

recently a

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): security chief mentioned to me, almost with awe, the case of a young

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): man who had gone to join the underground communist organization. He

came from a

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): well-to-do Chinese family

His

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): father had no idea that he was in any way associated

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): with the communists until one day he disappeared. In

due course, the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): father learned that his son had gone to work as a rubber tapper for a few cents a day in a mixed area. That

is to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): say, it was an area in which poor rural Chinese and Dayaks lived in close proximity to each other even though they hardly ever mixed

Above all else

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Sarawak's communist organization

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): which is exclusively Chinese, wants to gain a following among the indigenous people

And so

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): its leaders had called for volunteers to go and live among the dyaks in their longhouses. The

Chinese find the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): dyaks' food unpalatable and practically uneatable. The

lack of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): sanitation and regard for

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): personal hygiene appalls the Chinese

Most of the

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): volunteers soon go down sick

but there are

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): always others who step forward to take their place, just as this boy had done. Unquote

Now, some people

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): might hear that and say, "Okay, what's the big deal?" It's like the boy joined

the Peace

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): Corps, except that this is a version of the Peace Corps where you would be hated by most of society

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): and your family for joining. And if you're caught, you'll be jailed and very possibly

killed in a horrible

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): way. And

Speaker 18: this kind

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): of dedication was not uncommon in communist movements

Speaker 28: In fact, it was the

norm. Again

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): keep in mind, there were no communist countries in 1914, just a bunch of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): underground groups reading the same books in different languages. And by the late 1940s, a good chunk of the world was under communist control. It

was mounting a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): serious challenge to the American-led

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): NATO world order. It didn't just happen. People did that

Sure

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Germany put Lenin and his boys on a train and sent them to Russia, but when they got off that train, it was up to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): them. Can

we even

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): imagine the difficulty involved in being a Vietnamese communist opposing the French and then the Americans? Or just

think of how

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): much easier it would have been

for any of

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): those people to

have just been

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): a communist sympathizer

You

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): know, doing enough to avoid being called a collaborator, but little enough to avoid becoming a target of the imperialists

Hyde tells another

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): story that was told to

him by

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): a Vietnamese Catholic

He's a

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): Catholic. This man is

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): no friend of communists or communism

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Quote, I

remember some years

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): ago talking to a man from Indochina who had fought with the communists at the great siege of Diem Bien Phu. Dien Bien

Speaker 29: Phu was the final big battle that drove the French out of Vietnam

I met

Speaker 29: him in Hong Kong. He was a Catholic from North Vietnam who had been conscripted into

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): Ho Chi Minh's army. Our Western press had been full of the glory of the French army which had put up such tremendous resistance at what was to prove

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): to be its last-ditch stand against the communist-led assault. The French held onto the fortress for weeks on end, enduring all the immense suffering that a protracted siege entails

We did

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): not, however, hear much about the men and the experiences on the other side. How about the people who were fighting

against the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): French? Besieging a fortress is a difficult and bloody business, too. I asked my Catholic from North

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Vietnam, "What sort of briefing did they give you before they sent you into action?" The briefing they

were given was

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): this: "You will almost certainly die

To

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): get within gun range, you have to clamber and slither over men's rotting bodies, the

Speaker 30: bodies of your own comrades. The probability is that you will die, just as they

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): have done

If you

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): do, you will not just be dying in the fight against French colonialism. You will

not just

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): be dying

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): for Vietnam. You

will be dying

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): for suffering, oppressed humanity all over the

Speaker 30: world. Your death

will

Speaker 30: help to make the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): world a better

place. Now, that

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): was the briefing atheist leaders gave to their

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): followers before they went into action

They were

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): not afraid to call on them to die, and they did not hesitate to base this upon an appeal to the idealism which is deep in the heart of every

man. They

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): demonstrated, as communists have so often done, that this is a powerful

thing. And

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): their followers went into action, wave

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): upon wave, ready to die so that others might

live. They

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): were sent into battle morally prepared to fight, end quote

Now, of

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): course, in the West, communists in the West were not risking execution by death

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): squad. I don't want to overplay that

but I'm not

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): going to underplay it either. I

mean, it took real

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): commitment to give your life to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the cause at a time when expressing support for communism had something like the social consequences of expressing support for Al-Qaeda

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): today

That's

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): probably understating it. If you get fired from your job for saying nice things about Al-Qaeda, you probably have a strong

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): discrimination lawsuit with pro bono representation from the ACLU. You're

talking about the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): 1950s, the McCarthy era, in the midst of the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): Cold War

These were

Speaker 31: committed individuals

You had to

Speaker 31: be. And

they became

Speaker 31: more committed the more involved they became with the communist movement

the

Speaker 31: movement gave meaning to people

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): who very often hadn't experienced it deeply especially communally and it often had just spectacular results on individual personalities people blossomed in ways they never had in their life their capabilities just Hyde tells about how workers who by

any

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): measure used by the rest of society were mediocre people or worse and they would come looking to join the party

And often

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): they would be told, this is how they would handle these kind of people, they would be told, look, the

first thing

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): you can do for the party, if you want to help, is

to get

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): better at your day job. Just

focus on that

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): for the next six months as we begin to educate you in Marxist doctrine. For

now, your

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): goal should simply be to be the best machinist at your factory, someone the other workers respect and are glad to work

with. And people

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): have to know that communists are not just talkers, but that we're among the best workers, that we're worthy of their respect. And

because this

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): potential recruit has been inspired by the environment that he sees in the party, by the ethic of sacrifice that he

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): observes among the other members, and especially the leaders, he follows these instructions

Some

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): don't. Some drop off. But a lot of them follow those instructions. And some months later, this mediocre specimen who

his whole

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): life has been a nobody and felt like a nobody and been seen as a nobody. Some months later, this guy has become a pillar of his community

Speaker 32: a leader at his factory, a person to whom others are looking for guidance

You know

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): his family sees the change in him, and he develops a sense of self-respect that he's lacked his whole life. Hyde gives a bunch of examples of this, including many from his own

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): experience. In one case, a morbidly obese worker, mediocre worker with a debilitating stutter. So you just have all

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): the boxes checked there. Comes

to him, he has a

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): lot of energy and commitment, but, you know

Speaker 33: this

guy is

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): not very promising

It took

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): time, but this pitiful creature, this shy, stuttering man, eventually became an important

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): leader in the movement, in the party. He became a respected leader of his trade union, an effective speaker who could move large

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): crowds. You

know, this

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): man whom Hyde said was, well, he said he was, quote, the most unpromising piece of human material that ever came my way, end quote

he had

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): become a leader of men when

he died

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): this man who who would have been lucky to have had his wife and children there listening to his eulogy by his grave when he died thousands of his fellow workers and trade unionists led a procession through the

streets

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): accompanying his body to the crematorium and his passing received a front page treatment in the daily worker newspaper

You

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): know, I'm not saying that communism is the only thing that can have this effect on people. Of course, Christianity once had this kind of power. It

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): still might

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): here and there, I assume. Islam certainly has the power to elicit the full devotion and dedication of at least some of its believers. But

mostly in the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): West today, we

tend to

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): view

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): complete dedication to anything. no matter what it is, with suspicion. Like it's a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): dangerous aberration with the potential to go off the rails in unpredictable and catastrophic ways

And that's

Speaker 36: true. We're suspicious for a reason. We've seen

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): this movie before

And yet

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): nevertheless, many of us, and maybe all of us, for moments or periods of our lives, long to be shown something worth serving, something worth, worth

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): giving our lives to and for

And for a great

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): many people in the first half of the 20th century, they found that in communism and in the world that it

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): promised. And Jim Jones was one of those people

We're going to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): discuss the early days

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): of Jim Jones' ministry in this episode, and we're going to see a guy who is driven like a bat out of hell to accomplish his goals. I mean, within almost... inhuman energy and determination. Biographies of Jones often point to his energy and dedication in these early days as signs of the mania that was eventually going to destroy him

but these

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): narratives don't really

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): understand a lot about the 20th century communist movement and the effect that it very commonly had on people

We don't know exactly how

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Jim Jones was initiated and groomed as a communist in his early years. We have his own words and a few clues But it's hard

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): to say exactly how his ideology developed early on

In the

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): biographies, there's a lot of speculation. I'm not going to talk much about his

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): childhood. I don't put a lot of stock in the kind of... There's a lot of post-talk, sort of backward-looking reasoning when

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): you read biographies of people who ended up going

sort of

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): off a cliff in one way or another. You have the... uh, after the second world war is over, somebody who knew Hitler as a child said, uh, you know, somebody tripped him on the playground one

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): day and he got up and said, one day you'll all pay for this. And then I knew, you know, I don't, I don't put a lot of stock into that kind of thinking

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Um, the permutations of, of Jim Jones ideology early on probably aren't very important

anyway. We

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): know that he grew up as an outsider

and, uh, and that

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): he identified with outsiders from a very early age. We do know that. In elementary school during the Second

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): World War, we hear stories about how when all the other boys would play at being allied soldiers chasing Japanese and Germans

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): around, Jim would usually play as the Soviet Union, and sometimes he would play as the Nazis of the Japanese. In

middle school and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): high school, he was supposedly fascinated

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): by Stalin, read books about him, but

he By

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the time he was leaving high

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): school in 1948, it's kind

of hard

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to say where he was politically

or how

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): important politics in general were to him

It was right at that time

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): that he met his future wife, Marceline, and, you know, she was from a conservative Christian family at a time when communists and socialist talk was, you know, something that

was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): not looked on very kindly, and she wasn't frightened away by his ideological hang-ups. He made occasional noises in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): favor of socialism, but at this point, right as he's getting out of high school, it seems to be kind of at a low

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): ebb. So Marceline met Jim in 1948 at Reed Memorial Hospital in Richmond, Indiana, where she was trained to be a nurse, and he was working as a

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): part-time orderly. Marceline was 20, and Jim was only 16, and he was still only in

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): his junior year of high school

Marceline was a conscientious and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): strong-willed girl who took life very seriously at an early age. She threw herself into whatever

she took on when she

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): was in high school, for example. She started a small Christian youth choir to sing for hospital patients or at old folks' homes

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): things like

that. And some

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): of the other singers remember that, you know, when they would goof off, I mean, they're high school kids at an unofficial, you know, this isn't something being

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): run by the school. She started it herself. When they would goof off, she would scold them and lecture them about how their singing was the only music some of these people were probably going to hear. So it was important that they take their practice very seriously as a Christian duty. So this is the kind of person she was even in high school. The

hospital's nurse

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): training program was full time. Marceline and the other girls lived in a three-story brick dormitory, two to a room, and answered to a house mother, who ensured that they were adhering to academic routine and Christian

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): morality. It was

a very

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): conservative, sort of small-town, eastern Indiana

They went to chapel

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): every morning. Attendance was mandatory, and the trainees were expected to be back in their dorms for lights out before 10.30

p.m. In their

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): own little ways, you know, subdued and kind of naive ways, some of the girls would find their moments of rebellion by sneaking down to a midtown hotel for an evening cocktail, but Marceline was not one of those girls. So

in 1948

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline's nursing class

is nearing

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): graduation, and she and her roommate

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): wanted to go somewhere far away on an adventure to help others and make their mark in the world

And both of

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): their families lived in Richmond, where they'd been going to nursing school. And it expected the girls to transition to nursing jobs there at the hospital at Reed Memorial. But with the world kind of opening up before them, they made the decision to go to Kentucky. You know

it

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): was 1948. A couple of young, single Christian women leaving the state on their own to go make their way in the world was pretty ambitious. And so their plans

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): were set

And

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline, you know, she wasn't the type to change her mind once she made it, but then she

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): met Jimmy Jones, and she wouldn't be the last person to change her life's plans after meeting him

And so, like I said, Jim was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): working part-time at the hospital. He was actually hitchhiking to Richmond after his high school classes ended up in Lynn, Indiana, a small town where he lived about a half hour to the north up the Ohio line

And Jim

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Jones seemed older than he was to most people who knew him at the time, not only because he physically matured early, but because he had a confidence and an overall seriousness, and just the way of carrying himself made him seem older. He was

tall for his

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): age, pretty well built, and he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): always had perfectly groomed jet black hair, set over a face that betrayed a heritage foreign

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): to the Anglo-German majority of his native Lynn. Yeah

You know

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): in a land of blue-eyed blondes, Jim's

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): features were almost Asiatic. He had dark, almond-shaped eyes set into a high cheekbone

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): face with a complexion that

could have

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): been Native American, maybe, could have been Mediterranean. It's kind

of a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): mystery where he got those features, to be honest. His mother and he would talk about Indian heritage, but I don't think anybody's ever actually been able to trace that out

When he

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): smiled, you look back at these old high school pictures and stuff where when he smiles, his

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): mouth just stretches across his face from ear to ear, this great big smile. And

at the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): hospital, he had earned a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): reputation among the doctors and nurses as a hard worker. And most importantly, he was loved, adored by the patients he cared for. Jeff

Gwynn, in his

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): biography of Jim

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): Jones, writes, quote

Patients

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): from all over the region enjoyed

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the best of care at Reed. Its staff was held to high standards. Reed paid well, but supervisors were sparing with praise and quick to weed out undesirables. Seventeen-year-old Jimmy was hired as a night orderly, the lowest employment rung

It was hard

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): work, often involving disagreeable tasks ranging from cleaning up vomit to helping move the newly deceased or handling disposal of amputated limbs

Working

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): through the night was hard enough, but for a boy trying to handle a full high school class schedule and homework, it was exceptionally onerous. Yet Jimmy thrived. He immediately demonstrated the ability to function on little sleep, or some days none at all. As

soon as his

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): final afternoon class was over, Jimmy rushed through homework and reported for duty at Reed. Once

at work

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): he cheerfully tackled all the toughest chores that other orderlies tried to avoid

Above

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): all, these included dealing with cantankerous patients or else seriously ill unfortunates who literally reeked of decay and despair. Jimmy Jones won them over with warm smiles, sweet-natured jokes, and always empathy. Patients of every background and their families felt that this young man understood. His memory was prodigious

Jimmy

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): remembered every sick person's name and the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): names of parents and spouses and children and cousins besides. Some patients required care of especially personal nature

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): having diapers changed or being given sponge baths. Jimmy made these potentially embarrassing moments almost fun with his lively chatter and positive

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): attitude. Reed management noticed. Orderlies routinely received critical performance reviews. There was nothing to criticize about Jimmy Jones

And many

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): decades

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): later, after the death and destruction in Guyana

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): John Moore, a pastor who had lost two of his daughters to the mass suicide, so had no love for Jim Jones or any illusions about what he was, this

is after the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): catastrophes taking place, he nevertheless said that Jones was more sensitive to the suffering of others than any man he'd ever met. That

was a sentiment repeated

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): by many people over the years, by people who followed

him

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): those who rejected him and those who merely came into contact with him by all accounts it was not an

act but if it had been it

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't have been more perfectly tailored to get marceline's attention she

first noticed him when

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): he was assigned the difficult task of repairing a body of a pregnant woman who had died of trichinosis for the

undertaker jim jones

Speaker 38: was the orderly on call

Speaker 39: and she saw him Visibly touched as he very gently and carefully handled the woman's body

Although he was

Speaker 40: only an orderly, he expressed concern for the woman's suffering family And

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): even took time to go out and comfort them

So after that, the

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): two began chatting in the halls and on breaks Then sharing lunch in the cafeteria And before long, Jim had just overwhelmed Marceline She never met anyone like this

It was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): 1948

The

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Cold War was just getting underway, and Jim seemed to know about all of it

He knew

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): about the war, about Hitler, Stalin

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): and Churchill. He knew their biographies. He would go on and on about how socialism and maybe even communism really weren't so bad, which kind of distressed her, but he knew how to manage it. Again, she's the Methodist daughter of a Republican city councilman

You

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): can imagine her concern when she hears something like that, but then Jim would surprise

her by

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): supporting his claims with biblical passages. He'd quote Jesus about giving away all that one

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): had to the poor and pointing out how the apostles were said to have pooled all their worldly possessions and given it out to each according to his need

He knew about some

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): revolution going on in China and the efforts of an Indian saint to

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): throw off British rule by means of non-violent resistance

And she'd

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): never heard anything like this from someone her own age. And in Jim, it didn't come across as just

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): a recitation of facts to impress her. He was really possessed and shaped by the things that he spoke about, animated by them. It didn't matter what it was

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): not just politics. It was his personality and his energy and enthusiasm pulled

her in. You know

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): whereas Marceline had been dreaming of a bold step over state lines to pursue her nursing career, Jim's

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): eyes were on the wider world. Things were changing, he said, and he intended to be more than just a mere

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): spectator in the process of that change. Marceline

was just

Speaker 32: swept away by all this

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): She started to believe that maybe he could be somebody great

And if he

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): was a little rough around the edges, those edges could be smoothed out by the careful touch of a woman maybe like

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): her

Marceline had

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): always had a gentle heart and that Christian care for the unfortunate

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): But before meeting Jim Jones, this was kind of an ethos that governed her approach to the people she met

It wasn't an

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): ideology or a political program

You

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): know, it had led her to become a nurse and to treat her patients with care, but Jim got her looking up from her daily work with the unfortunate to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the broader reasons for their condition, as he described them

When he got wound up, he

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): would start ranting

Speaker 29: against the shortcomings in the American capitalist system and about inequality and the failure and even the complicity

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): of the churches on this account

More than

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): anything else, Jim talked about racism and the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): mistreatment of black Americans

In the age

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): of social media, today, everyone's got an opinion on everything, but we've got to remember

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): this is a 16, 17-year-old kid in eastern Indiana in 1948 talking like this. By

the end of that year

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): 1948, their relationship was at a crossroads. Marceline was graduating from

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): nursing school and gym. despite working nights at the hospital

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): was set to graduate with honors early from Richmond High and then move on to Indiana University at Bloomington, which is about two hours away if you take the route west to Indianapolis and then south from there

Marceline wasn't

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): insensitive to the concerns of her family about Jim's age, but he very quickly even won them over

More privately

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline had worries about certain aspects

of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Jim's personality

While he

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): was energetic and ambitious, the qualities she admired in him, his rocket-fueled personality

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): could be overbearing. A kick to ride along with, but riding along was all there was room for. Most

of the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): time, Marceline was a willing rider, but

at the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): times when she tried to assert herself, Jim could be controlling and petulant if he didn't get his

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): way. Marceline excused this as a You know, as youthful immaturity that would even out with time. Marceline, according to people who knew her at the time and for years afterwards, always looked for and hoped for the best in people

You know, excusing

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): or overlooking their faults

And

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): once she had decided that Jim's age was not a deal breaker, that allowed her to kind of rationalize any troubling tendencies even more easily

In any case

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): nobody's perfect. Certainly not anyone she was likely to find in her limited world

Jim

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): shared her passion for helping the less fortunate, and overall, the good, especially the potential good in Jim, greatly outweighed the bad. And

so for the first and most

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): fateful time

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline would do what many, many others would do over the course of the next 30 years, closing their eyes to alarming things

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): about Jim Jones, instead choosing to focus on the good

She

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): would do this herself over and over through the years and often be the deciding voice convincing other people to do the same

thing. Until

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): finally

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): 30 years to the month after Jim graduated from Richmond High and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): she made the decision to marry him, she would make her final failed stand as he ushered his followers to their deaths

Now, while Jim was away at

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): college in Bloomington

His

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): interest in social and racial justice

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): led him to connect with the campus socialists. This

was a period when

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): socialists and communists were, again, very serious and disciplined people. They had to be

America

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): during the Cold War, just before the McCarthy hysteria kicked off, was an unfriendly environment for socialists

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): and communists, to say the least. So they had to be serious. They had to be disciplined. And it really tightened up their organizations and methods

Jim may

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): have sought them

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): out, but it's more likely that they spotted this 17-year-old kid asking questions in class that indicated he

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): might be open to their views. Maybe they felt them out before inviting them into their company. Again

it's a

Speaker 42: political environment most of us are unfamiliar with today. Jim

very quickly

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): got a lesson in how serious it was when he accepted an invitation to ride up to Chicago to see Paul Robeson speak

The

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): black actor and communist activist. The event was under surveillance by the federal government. Soon afterward, Jim's mother was pulled aside in front of her co-workers at her factory job and questioned about her son's activities

She didn't

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): know anything, but rather than intimidating Jim, the incident only began to radicalize him and push him closer to his new left-wing friends. Jim

wasn't the type to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): back down from confrontation, ever

Thank you. In the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): summer of

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): 1951, as headlines were announcing the racial violence and National Guard deployment in Cicero, Illinois, that we talked about in the last episode, the

young Jones

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): couple moved to Indianapolis

And Jim had

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): begun as a business major in Bloomington with an eye toward becoming a hospital administrator, but his interest

in

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): politics and social justice led him to left-wing campus activism, and eventually the hospital

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): administrator thing kind of fell to the wayside

And it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): had always been, the whole idea of being a hospital administrator had always been a compromise between his political commitments and the need to think practically about a career. But his contact with the campus socialists and developing events in the United States, things like Cicero, brought him back to

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): focus on economic and racial justice. And

so Jim decided to go to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): law school, and this meant transferring to the Indiana University campus in Indianapolis to get ready for it

The

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): early years of their marriage... together were difficult for Marceline, and she occasionally thought about divorcing him

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): For all her ambition, Marceline wanted a traditional family, but they were two years in and Jim had shown zero interest in that. His interest in politics was becoming an obsession, and as he spent more time with his socialist friends and reading about

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): events like Cicero

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline felt like Jim was becoming radicalized, obsessed

In

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Indianapolis, he began pushing right past the Socialists and seeking out explicit Communists. He began attending meetings and began preaching Communism at

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): home to Marceline and her nephew who had come to stay with the couple

for a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): while. Most alarming of all to Marceline, Jim seemed not merely to have lost his religious faith, but to have actually embraced the Communists' outright hostility to

Christianity. His

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): espousal of communism at the height of the Korean War in the McCarthy era was worrying enough, but his newfound aggressive atheism was devastating for Marceline. He

couldn't even

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): tolerate her faith as a

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): difference of opinion. He railed against her beliefs at home, telling her that there was no God and that the Bible was worse than a fraud. It was oppressive, racist propaganda. The churches were organs of racism and class oppression

He

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): became infuriated whenever she

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): prayed, even one time threatening to throw himself out of a window if she wouldn't stop, both to put his death on her conscience

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): and to prove to her that prayer was useless. He

could get

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): very petulant

Marceline had only seen

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): flashes of this side of Jim while they were dating, or

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): else heard about it secondhand. There was a time when Don Foreman, one of Jim's childhood friends, came to work at the Richmond Hospital where Jim and Marceline

had met

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they were very good friends by some accounts best friends from elementary school and Jim and Don Foreman had drifted apart as they got into high school as Don spent time on sports and

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): back roads, beer runs and Jim became kind of an increasingly isolated eccentric bookworm so

in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Richmond at the hospital Jim was away from everybody who knew him from Lynn, his early years, his hometown and so he was free to reinvent himself and start

over He

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): often made up stories, including one that particularly impressed Marceline about how he'd been a star high school basketball player, but quit the team after the coach used a racial slur. Stories like that and his, well, stories like

that and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): his

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): natural charm made him popular at the hospital. But now he had somebody who had known him his whole life, who reminded Jim of the early

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): growing pains and humiliations of adolescence and whose impression of him he couldn't control

Don barely

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): lasted a few weeks of the job. Jim made sure of that

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): He used the authority that he'd built up as a trusted orderly to terrorize him until he quit

One of the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): first times Marceline had brought Jim home for dinner to her family, he revealed a very strong self-consciousness about their class difference

Jim had

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): grown up very poor

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): with a working mother and a prematurely aged father made invalid by a gas attack in World

War I

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Beginning in

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): high school, Jim began taking care to groom himself very well, it was a switch he made for some reason. He would spend

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): hours polishing his shoes and pressing his clothes, making sure no hair on his head was ever out of place, it became, everybody knew that's Jim Jones, that's what he did

But he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): arrived for dinner that night with Marceline's family in his worst, oldest clothes, all disheveled, and was just behaving like a brute, just brutally throughout the entire meal

he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): assumed that they would be bourgeois snobs who were going to look down on him

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): anyway, and so he decided to preempt them. Another time, Marceline's mother commented that she didn't think it was Christian for races to intermarry. You

know, it sounds... It

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): didn't sound as bad then as it does to us now, obviously. But

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Jim, he ordered Marceline to the car, stormed out of the house, shouting that neither he nor Marceline would be

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): back. Marceline didn't see her parents for a long time after that, and even then

It

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): was only after mother apologized and recanted

Speaker 44: Marceline was

Speaker 45: often seen crying by her sisters and friends, but she rarely complained

When

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): she did, it was indirect, like when she warned her younger sister that when it was time for her to get

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): married, not to marry a domineering

man. But

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline, you know, she soldiered

on. and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): in any case, the couple had other stressors. I don't want to give the impression that this was their entire life, that it was just a complete mess from the first days. It wasn't. It was like this sometimes. Anyway, the couple had other stressors taking up their mental space. Money was tight. Jim was working several jobs at a time, and Marceline worked as a school nurse in a hospital

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): children's ward. They

still had Marceline's

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): 10-year-old nephew to look after and juggled their schedules to make it work

And

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): by all accounts, all available accounts, Jim

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): and Marceline actually cared very deeply for the boy. His name was Ronnie. Although there are several anecdotes of Jim

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): behaving immaturely toward the boy. I

think a lot of

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the biographies tend to blow these incidents out of proportion as foreshadowing

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): events to come. But I think they're more easily understood as mistakes you might expect when a 19-year-old, Jim is still only 19 years old here

is

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): suddenly trying to raise a boy only nine years younger than himself for example jim had a pet monkey that he would cause to chase ronnie around the house and corner him and the boy apparently found that quite traumatizing which i can understand but i i have trouble seeing that as a sign of evil

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): unless we're willing to fix that label on most big brothers

overall the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): couple did seem to do their best

They

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): had a very

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): tight budget and schedule, but they bought him a bike and lots of toys. They took him on outings when they could. One of those outings was to Niagara Falls, the source of

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): another anecdote. They were upriver from the falls, and Jim wanted Ronnie to let him dip Ronnie in

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): the river, kind of hold him and dip him in the river. Ronnie was terrified, and he refused. And Jim got annoyed and insisted, and finally he just picked the boy up

and

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): held him so his legs were in the water. Again, not cool, but I think it gets blown out of proportion in some of the biographies. It sounds to me like

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Jim was relating to the boy with the occasional light sadism of a big brother, which is not really surprising. Jim was an only child, so he didn't grow up with younger siblings, and he was 19

and I

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): don't think a lot of 19-year-olds would know what to do if they suddenly had to take care of a 10-year-old boy full-time

So

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): anyway, there are going to be other things like this, I think, where people read back. And I don't want to contradict necessarily authors who have put a lot of work and thought into it, but I'll offer my thoughts on some of them when I think they're going a little too far

Anyway, it

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): was on that same trip to Niagara Falls that Jim Jones was pulled onto the path that would eventually lead him to his death in the jungle

Yeah. Marceline

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): had never stopped praying, and Jim's temper tantrums just caused her to pray more ardently for

his soul

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): In early 1952, on the trip to Niagara Falls, God had mercy and softened Jim's heart. She had managed to prevail upon him to come with her to a Methodist church service, and at the church he saw posted a five-page document announcing the official Methodist positions and goals on a range of social issues

Among the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): church's priorities were supporting

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): policies that would relieve poverty, favoring a stronger social welfare and social security system, support for collective bargaining, free speech, prison reform, the right to a job for all

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Americans, and most importantly to Jim, racial equality. Very

soon after that day

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): almost immediately

to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline's amazement and utter delight, Jim announced that he was

going to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): become a preacher

And so as

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline spread the happy news

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): and began to dream about being a preacher's wife, something that everyone

who knew her

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): at the time thought was perfect for her, Jim was considering the possibilities, beginning to plot. He

would later maintain that

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): he had remained an atheist the whole way and that he was given the idea to use the church to bring people to communism

You

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): left-wing activists were under constant active surveillance and persecution by Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover at this time, but under the cover of religion, he would have powerful protection under the First Amendment. Communists

had to use the

Speaker 46: tools at hand and to speak to people at their level. "Midwestern white

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Christians were more likely to hear out one of their own speaking their own tongue than an atheist speaking in the indecipherable jargon of Marxist-Leninism. And didn't the Bible already provide the language to do most of his preparatory work for him?" Later in Jonestown, Jim would even claim to

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): have infiltrated the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): church in order to bring people to atheism. Soon after acquiring a congregation, he would begin by pointing out inconsistencies in the Bible

He

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): pointed out how segregated

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the churches were, and he played up the role that they played in propping up racism, misogyny, and inequality

His attacks

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): escalated until later, after he'd moved his congregation to California. He

had them

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): cheering as he cursed the idea of a sky god, and he stomped on the Bible and threw it across the room as his people

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): shouted for joy

And by the time his

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): people moved to Jonestown for their final acts, well

Speaker 47: Marxist-Leninism is a worldview embracing

Speaker 48: the realm of traditional philosophy, human history, political economy, and revolutionary change

And we

Speaker 48: must understand that in Jonestown

Speaker 49: the importance of developing this communist philosophy

Today the

Speaker 49: new and rising phenomena is in organizations of Marxist-Leninists

My name is

Speaker 51: John Harris and I'm a violent revolutionary and I killed three children

Speaker 52: Your

Speaker 53: name? Corrine Jackson. I would kill any government official that would stand in the way of our church progress. So

Speaker 56: that

Speaker 48: there can really be a strong communist movement as also there must be a strong socialist movement and a strong free trade union movement. if fascism and genocide and eventual nuclear war is to at all by any chance be hoped to be stopped and there's no chance not hardly a snowball's chance in hell particularly that nuclear war can be

Speaker 57: stopped what would you do for this cause oh

i would i

Speaker 58: would kill um murder or do anything you know

Speaker 59: who

Oh

Speaker 60: I can't mix it, Thornton, anybody else like him

Speaker 59: All right. As developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and many

Speaker 48: others, Marxist-Leninism has been a way of both understanding the world and changing it. We can say that only a Marxist-Leninist party can produce the basic principles

Speaker 61: long-term strategy and political program which might deserve to be called scientific theory

We have

Speaker 62: been praised in the Soviet Union and we are making overtures in the Soviet Union, we are meeting in the Soviet Union tonight, we have

Speaker 63: told the Soviet Union in fact their slightest wish is our command, that meant any of that whatever

if that were to be, that we were to fight. And so whatever

Speaker 64: the Soviet Union were to say tonight, I would

do. If

Speaker 64: they were to give an order, that's what I would do. I would do

Speaker 65: that. In USA particularly, the spontaneous movements of struggle among the masses as well as the practical, even the limited initiatives

Speaker 66: that communist groups can undertake at this time, likewise provide a school for the training and development of

a communist cadre. but all

Speaker 29: that still a ways off back here in indiana in 1952 jim was not going to attract a congregation by ranting marxist

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): leninist dialectical materialism even if he'd intended to or had the capability which is questionable

You

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): know, there's no doubt that he was a socialist flirting with communism at the time, and maybe he considered himself a communist at

Speaker 67: this point, you know, who knows, ask a politically active 19 or 20 year old how they define their ideology, and you're likely

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): to get a different answer

every

Speaker 68: few months, but he was probably engaging

in. In a

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): little revisionist history, years later, when he claimed to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): already be, in 1952, a full-on communist, consciously infiltrating the church to subvert it for the revolution. More likely, his beliefs were in flux, and his motivations were mixed

Marceline was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): deeply unhappy at the time, and their marriage had been on the rocks, but everything changed with his decision to join the ministry

as a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Methodist, no less, the denomination in which Marceline had been raised

And rather

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): than cynically hiding his atheism to hide his political activism under the cover of religion, I think it's much more likely that he simply had doubts, doubts which later solidified into rejection, but he put those doubts aside with the rationalization that what was important was the social message. In

any case, Jim's

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): doubts were a recent phenomenon, which is why his atheist turn came as such a shock to Marceline

I mentioned

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that Jim's father had been a First World War veteran with lungs badly scarred by a gas attack. When he returned from

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): the war, he

had trouble

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): drawing enough breath to hold a conversation, let alone a job, and so he settled into a life of pain and resigned self-pity. He

had neither the

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): energy nor the interest to raise his only son. Jim's mother was more energetic, but all of her energy went into working to support the family, a role that she had never planned for and changed. deeply resented

Jim was

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): often left alone as a child. Neighbors recalled years later finding him as a toddler wandering the roads of their small town naked. He

was as a

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): toddler wandering around naked with dried excrement caked on his backside. As

he got a little

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): older, he started to learn how to get attention from adults other than his parents

He would

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): tailor his... performance to whatever he thought would hold the attention of his audience

At four years

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): old, he learned that he could get laughs out of the young men at the auto shop by cursing at them. You know, they couldn't get enough of it. Little four-year-old

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): Jimmy Jones calling him low-down, no-good, goddamn sons of bitches, and whatever else he could think of that he learned from his mother as she sat with him at the dinner table, chain-smoking, complaining to him about the dirty

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): no-good bastard she worked for down at the factory

or cannery. The

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): reaction of adults to finding him running around naked Taught him another way of getting attention by transgression A lot of

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): stories about this survive Some of them are pretty funny Like the one that had four or five year old Jimmy Walking into a church In the middle of a service with no pants or underwear on Just hanging out Accompanied by an entourage of dogs and cats Marching up the aisle to the preacher And presenting him with a bouquet of flowers The dogs and cat Jim I

don't know. He

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): collected strays and pets from a very early age. You can imagine for a lonely kid, without a lot of friends, you can maybe see why that

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): would happen. But it was a practice that he would continue, even as an adult, not only with animals, but later when he began collecting and keeping stray people

And

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): people in Lynn recalled that after a while he would rarely go anywhere without being surrounded by his pets. And later

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): his mother remembered that she often worried that she wouldn't even be able to discipline him for fear that his animals might mount a defense. And

so Jim's childhood

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): eccentricities were on full display in a town of maybe 900 people. It's a tiny town, so it's not as if people looked out their

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): windows and saw some stranger boy wandering naked down the street. Everyone knew everyone else

They saw the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): Jones boy wandering naked down the street. You know, his mother, Lynetta, she's at work. His father, old Jim, is down at the Veterans Hall playing cards

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): And for

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): some reason

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): kind of odd to most people, Lynetta had a rule that the boy wasn't supposed to be in the house alone during the day

which left

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): him to his own devices outside pretty much all

the time. it was a

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): small town very small town and people knew each other's business in the style of the time the townspeople

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): didn't call the authorities but they tried to make up for the deficiencies of jim's upbringing themselves the housewives who saw him wandering around often took him in fed him cleaned him up and many of them tried to see to the neglected spiritual education

of the young boy Despite

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): being a town of only a few hundred, Lynn had no fewer than a dozen churches. And on Sundays, the economic life of the town just shut down as the men and women donned their Sunday clothes, gathered up the kids, and marched off to church. That

Jim's family had no

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): church, and apparently, as far as anybody could tell, no religion, that was very much an aberration in their town. And it was one that was noticed by everybody in the place

One

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): lady in particular took Jim in and kind of became something of a daytime surrogate mother, kept him off the streets, fed him, discoursing to him about the affairs of God and man while he ate, you know, sandwiches. And it was with her that he began attending church, an arrangement, you know, his mother didn't mind, figured it wouldn't hurt anything, and it gave her time alone on Sundays. And

so that's how religion

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): initially became a part of Jim's life, and he kind of took it from there

When he was a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): little bit older, he started going to different churches to see what they were like by himself

Sometimes he

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): would go to multiple churches on the same

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Sunday and people got used to seeing, you know, young Jimmy Jones popping in and out of their services. That

kind of makes him

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): sound like a

Speaker 32: tourist, but I don't mean to give that impression because I

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): don't think that's what was going on. I mean, this was a small, tightly knit rural town in the 30s and 40s

Its

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): people were Anglo and German and as conventional as a postcard. Jim

was an outsider. Even as a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): child, he felt that in his bones. He felt like an outsider. His

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): mother, who

like him

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): had dark hair that by much of the community was thought to speak of Indian blood, had never intended to become trapped in a small town as a hardworking

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): wife to a prematurely aging invalid veteran

you

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): know she had dreams of going into business she had four years of college you

know she'd also

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): dreamed of becoming a writer she was interested in you know not so much in christianity but in reincarnation and other spiritualist ideas you know not and certainly not the folk christianity of the simple

people in lynn but the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): depression changed a lot of people's plans and this is where she ended up

As she

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): complained to Jim each night about his good-for-nothing father and the injustice of her

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): lot, she impressed upon him that it was his responsibility to become a great man. Not

just for

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): himself, for both their sakes. She

had been

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): thwarted by circumstance, and so they'd ended up trapped in a place that they didn't really belong. Among people who weren't really their people

And it would be

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): up to Jim to make all her sacrifices worth it

And

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): so

In

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): many ways, Jim's early life was almost custom-designed to produce a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): pathological narcissist. That's what happened. He learned that he was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): absolutely special and unique and had that drummed into him every day, and

yet he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): was unable to get any attention or love at all from the two people from whom a child, especially one so special and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): unique, should

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): expect to receive it

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): narcissism only superficially resembles self-love we confuse it with with vanity and it's not that you scratch beneath the thin paint and narcissism always has much more to do with self-loathing self-loathing and

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): doubt is only the natural response of a child who cannot even get his parents attention no matter how confidently he seems to perform in his you know wild and unending attempts to capture the attention and love of others

So Jim was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): an outsider deep down

in a

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): place and a time where it was not such a common condition. You know, he was a sort of Huck Finn

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): only with all the pathos and emptiness implied by such a fate when

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): you strip it from its literary context and set it loose in the real world. In

the real

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): world, the Huck Finn story does not go so well for that boy

He knew that the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): other kids' parents went to

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): church. He knew the other boys' fathers took them fishing. He knew the other kids had homes that weren't dark and bare. And he knew that many other things were different about his family and that everyone else knew these

things too. Well

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): church was his window into the world that he was excluded from, into the lives of normal people, into the life of the community

He

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't get enough of it, and that was why he went to as many services as he could, trying to take it all in

Eventually, he made his

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): way to the Pentecostal church, which had been set up in town not too many years before. If

Jim felt like an

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): outsider in Lynn, so did most of the Pentecostals. The congregation was mostly made up of Southerners that had migrated up from Kentucky and Tennessee looking for work during the Depression

i don't

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): know if you've ever been to or seen a pentecostal service but i mean these people know to have a good time when they're in church uh

instead of

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): placidly singing out of a you know and i like traditional

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): services and and overall i tend to lean that way in general but i i get it instead of placidly singing songs out of a hymn book they sing at the top of their lungs they're waving their arms in the air and dancing in the aisles if the spirit moved them you

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): know some of I mean, just look that up on YouTube if you don't know what it is. You know

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): they're shouting to the preacher as he's giving his sermon. Amen and hallelujah as he bounds across the stage, booming

out

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): the word of God. I mean, it's a party. They know how to get down

You know

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): sometimes they stage faith healings or members seized by the Holy Ghost would stand up and make a prophecy. These rowdy Southerners and their

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): boisterous church were kind of viewed with varying levels of alarm and contempt by the conservative denominational Christians in Lynn. But Jim felt right at home

Now, over the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): years, Jim's interest in religion and ritual took sometimes odd forms

In his

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): younger years, he would have

Speaker 29: other children over to gather in the loft of the family barn

and they would listen as

Speaker 29: he would deliver lectures on religion and

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): sometimes other subjects

And he would

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): manage, this is what's remarkable, a bunch of little kids, little boys, and he would manage to hold their attention sometimes for hours

Yeah. with

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): all these rules and he would dress up and mock vestments and he would create strict rules and hierarchy for

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): the gatherings and how everything had to go little boys don't like sitting around with all these he he it became very popular sometimes he would gather roadkill or other dead animals and he would decorate

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): shoe boxes as their coffins and he would bring them and perform elaborate funeral rituals with the participation of his audience a little weird

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): There were periods when he would be seen going around town Wrapped in a white sheet Interrupting passersby and Lynn And imploring them to heed the word of God And to see to the fate

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): of their souls This is

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): like when he's in middle school

It must have

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): been quite a sight In a small town like Lynn For a little boy that everybody knew To be accosting adults

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): on the streets

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): To lecture them about

religion And Jim's harangues were

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): especially tarted At the card and billiards room Where his father

hung out It was a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): veteran's center where some of the old veterans would go to play cards and shoot pool. They didn't have alcohol in Lynn. It was a dry county. People had to go across state lines to get alcohol. But on a regular basis, Jim would march down to the hall in his makeshift robe out of a white sheet and stand

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): at the door and wave his Bible and denounce all the men inside. And one time he barged inside and stormed up to his father and shouted that he and everybody else was going to go to hell

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): if they stayed in that place

And

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): again, this is about when he's in middle school or so, early high school maybe. And

religion, as he

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): continued to grow up through middle school and into high school, became more important to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): his life. It became central, really, as his few elementary and middle school friends moved on from him in high school. Again, they got into sports and beer and girlfriends, and they couldn't really relate to Jim anymore. He became increasingly isolated. He

spent his time

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): at church and spent

his

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): off hours in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the library reading. When he was a teenager, maybe

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): 15 or 16, he had a fight with his father and he left the house. The story is that Jim brought home a friend, the friend was black, and Jim's father didn't want the boy in

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the house. And so Jim announced that if that was the case, then he was not gonna enter the house either, and he left. And he didn't see his father again for many

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): years after that

Out of the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): house, as a junior in

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): high school, Jim needed money

So he

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): took the job at the hospital in Richmond, where he would meet Marceline, hitchhiking the half hour there to work nights after class. It

was there in

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Richmond that Jim first saw the condition of African Americans manifested as a social issue. It

was something he'd

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): read about before, and he would read about individual issues. Well, Lynn didn't have enough blacks. His small town didn't have enough blacks for him to think of it beyond the context of occasional individuals

African Americans came

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): through Lynn every once in a while. And, you know, he identified with them as fellow outsiders, especially since when they went to church, it was the Pentecostal church that they would go to, the only one in town that would have them

When Jim witnessed

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): racism, it was the kind that he'd seen from his father. But Richmond had black neighborhoods

black

Speaker 69 (lower-pitched voice): neighborhoods that were of a visibly lower quality than other neighborhoods, even the nearby Italians on whom the Anglo-German Protestant Corps of the town also kept a

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): wary eye. I

don't want to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): overstate things. We're not talking about the Deep South here, but it was a place in time where blacks were expected to be deferential, and the word nigger was used

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): casually as a mere descriptive noun, so common that it didn't even intend offense. That's just what they called people

the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): protestants divided the north side catholics into good italians and bad italians and if you were one of the good italians you got along just

fine there

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): were rules and customs that we would definitely consider unacceptable

and ugly

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): today but often the ugliness of conventions isn't laid bare until someone tries to defy them and richmond was a place where people mostly followed the rules but

to an outsider

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): looking in Someone like

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Jim, who didn't identify with the regime of rules and customs, but

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): instead identified with the people excluded by that regime from respectability, he

saw it all very

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): clearly from the beginning

Almost as soon as he began making the trip

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): to work at the hospital in Richmond, he began plying another trade on the evenings when his

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): shift started late. From Tim Reiterman, author of the book Raven, probably the best overall biography of Jones ever

He

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): writes

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): quote

His

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): raven hair combed in place and his clothes straightened, Jim cut a mature and respectable figure

Despite his

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): smooth face and boyish features, he hardly looked like a sixteen-year-old from a farming hamlet. His manly stature made him difficult to ignore as he stopped virtually everyone who strolled or groped out of the bars. Get

out of the way, many

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): would snap, brushing past the nonstop talker. Some shoved, but he persisted

Some

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): resented his presence, but gradually hostility turned to tolerance

Once he had drawn

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): four or five adults with his brazen technique, Jim strode to the lamppost where he had placed a rolled-up blanket in his jacket

He unfurled the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): blanket on the ground before him. Inside was his Bible

Using it

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): as a prop

he raised

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): his voice and preached a mixture of Christianity and equality of all men under God

jim

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): had no reason to address racial issues when he preached in virtually all-white lynn but here in a town that was one-fifth black where the blacks were confined almost exclusively to the extreme northern and southern neighborhoods something needed to be said about race and

poverty as he

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): stood on that street corner waving the good book he stressed the need for brotherhood and tied the message to the written word

of god in less

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): than an hour he would collect a small crowd

Speaker 70: of twenty-five to thirty people

In

Speaker 70: his blanket were the coins he needed to keep his mission moving, end quote

This is a

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): 16-year-old kid, stopping a bunch of grown men groping out of bars to preach to them and being successful

at it

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): and giving a message that wasn't particularly easy to give at a time

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): like that and in that place, rural eastern Indiana in the 1940s

And so

Speaker 71: this was Jim's religion right up through the end of high school

And it

Speaker 71: was one way that Marceline

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): as well as their family, had been put at ease despite some of Jim's eccentricities

And so his

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): move toward

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): hostile atheism when he was in college had the

feel of

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the kind of intellectual

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and ideological swing to which students his age

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): tend to be prone

His

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): return to the fold when he decided to be a minister was interpreted by Marceline as the moderation that comes with

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): maturity. He'd gotten over that little stint

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): with atheism in college and she didn't question it. That

doesn't mean there was

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): nothing to Jim's claim that he saw the church as a vehicle for social activism

He

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): was probably exaggerating later on when he's talking about how he infiltrated the church and did this from the beginning with clear eyes. Probably exaggerating, but there's definitely something to it, as evidenced by

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): his activity upon making his decision in 1952. It wasn't just a job to him. He very quickly joined an Indianapolis Methodist church as an unpaid student pastor and just almost immediately began wearing out his welcome

This was

Speaker 72: a small, conservative, all-white church. Virtually all churches

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): were monoracial

Speaker 72: and it was very

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): comfortably set in his ways. It

was not

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): looking for change. But

if Jim was going to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): use the church as a jumping-off point for the revolution, those ways were going to have to be changed

And

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): when given the chance to preach, Jim would weave themes of racial and economic equality into his sermons. It was something that the congregation wasn't used to. They came to church on Sundays to hear about, you know, died and rose on the third day and basic gospel stuff

From his position as a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): mere student pastor, he was an unpaid volunteer who just came into this place, like a very young kid. He started reaching out to Catholics and Jews in Indianapolis

and, He

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): tried to kickstart an effort to build a community center with them. The

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): project never got off the ground, but it gives you an idea of, you know, he was not coming in just to sit in the back pew and kind of learn from the deacons here. When he wasn't working one of his many jobs, he was still working several jobs or volunteering at the Methodist Church

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): he attended other churches. He kept doing that, very often in black neighborhoods, and he would take Marceline along, who had never been exposed to the energetic worship of black gospel churches

and

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): she saw

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): Jim let loose in a way that she'd never seen before you know she just he

was singing

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): out loud and waving his arms and dancing with everybody else like he'd been doing this his

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): whole life which he had and she just was shocked by it

and when he would go

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): to these places

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): Jim would try to recruit blacks away from their home churches to come join his small Methodist church and this went over

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): about as well as you'd imagine his white

and A

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): working-class congregation was not looking for a large, sudden influx of new members to their little church, let alone a sudden, large influx of colored members

They may have been

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): against racial oppression and for equal

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): rights, at least in principle, but supporting social reform is different than wanting to be on the barricades

and jim

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): considered this just rank hypocrisy it just drove him crazy it enraged him and so he just pushed ahead trying anyway but

he ran into as much

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): resistance from his potential black recruits as he did from uh the people at his white church you know who is this you can just imagine you know you have uh you're a you're an african-american at a church you've been going to your whole life who is this

Speaker 73 (lower-pitched voice): 21-year-old white student preacher attending their services and trying to peel off members to drive across town to an all-white Methodist church

Even if they were

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): interested in trying something new, he couldn't promise that they'd be welcome. In

fact, he'd have

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): to admit that they definitely would not be welcome. But he tried to convince them to endure that discomfort and join him in his attempt to integrate the church. He was a larger principal at play, and he's trying to recruit people for that

And most

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): black Pentecostalists and Baptists were no more interested in turning their Sundays into social experiments than the white Methodists were. They wanted to go to church. They wanted to sing and dance and praise God with their friends and family the way they'd always done. If

this young Jim

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): Jones character was interested in civil rights and integration, great. If he scheduled a meeting or a reform march, maybe they'd show up, but schedule it on Monday

Okay. being

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): forced to sit at separate lunch

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): counters that feels like oppression but to blacks as well as whites at the time worshipping with people who knew and understood them that just

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): seemed natural

and so you

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): didn't have a lot of success the

1950s

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): were an interesting time it was a religiously in america it's something

that well it was a time of

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): religious revival

and And

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Jim's recruiting efforts took him further afield and brought him into contact with a phenomenon that had exploded across the South and Midwest, especially in the years after the Second World War. In

those years, for the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): first time in human history, the threat of global apocalypse, immediate and unexpected, had become truly real. Communities under pressure

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): like that tend to fear witches and demons and communists lurking in the shadows. And throughout the 1950s, U.S. church membership grew

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): at a rate that outpaced population growth. That's something that's hard to even imagine today

The

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): enthusiasm spilled out of the mainstream denominations and

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): overflowed the church buildings themselves into traveling tent revival meetings and meetings in barns

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): and revivals and warehouses and hangar bays requisitioned for the purpose. Thousands of religious

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): entrepreneurs toured the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): countryside and cities holding meetings nightly for weeks at a time and then they'd move on somewhere else

Celebrity preachers

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): like Billy

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Graham and Oral Roberts came out of this period

But

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): there were countless revivalists operating below that level, under the radar, bringing communities together for lively events that would often combine

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): religious entertainment, healing, and prayer. Local vendors often set up stalls, and local and traveling

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): musicians and performers would join the revivalists to put on concerts and other shows. The whole

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): thing kind of took on the character of a traveling religious

carnival. In

Speaker 74: rural areas, and even in many cities in the 1950s, it was the best show in town

Many people

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): came out of sincere belief, curiosity, or just for the show. It's kind of

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): difficult, I think, for a lot of us today to understand some of the dynamics that would have been involved in a religious event like this back then. Some

of you will be

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): familiar, but if you're not from this world, it can be very difficult to understand what's going on or what people get

out of it. I remember

Speaker 75: when I was a teenager, I lived

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): for a while in a tiny town up in Montana with my grandparents

and I

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): would attend the tiny towns, tiny little Bible church with my grandparents. The whole

town had maybe

Speaker 43 (lower-pitched voice): a few hundred people, and the preacher there at the church, there were a few, I think, actually, I can't really remember. He did his best, but I don't really remember anything

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): he ever might have said, and I certainly don't remember being moved by it

But every

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): once in a while, every few months or so, another preacher, a black man named Jim Baker, Pastor Jim Baker would come through. He

didn't have his own

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): church, but he was known by churches all over that part of the state, somehow. I don't know how. Word of mouth, I guess. And

at least two or

Speaker 38: three Sundays a month, he would make the drive out to some little church in the Big Sky State to preach the word. And

Pastor Jim

Speaker 38: Baker could preach

Speaker 76 (lower-pitched voice): the freaking

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): word

He

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): would get up there in his tan suit and dark red tie. Sometimes he'd open light, maybe with a joke or two. Other times he'd start slow and quiet and heavy, like thunder building on the horizon. But man, this dude had a rhythm. And before long, he's waving the Bible over his head and sweat soaking through his suit and flying off his brow as he bounds from one side of the stage to the other. And his big, giant

Speaker 77: voice is booming out about how

you

Speaker 77: know, God's son had given his life

Speaker 78: for us and had been tortured and humiliated for us and despite all our shortcomings and even though we were all like unfaithful wives caught

in the

Speaker 78: act and, you know, despite the unsightly filth of our sins, God's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): love remained within reach, freely offered if only we'd repent. I mean, this guy was a high-energy, natural performer. He could get down

And so the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): people at this tiny little church were

in

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): montana they knew weeks in advance that jim baker was going to be coming to town and when that sunday came the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): church was packed i mean people you never saw at church people you never expect to see at church would show up pews were full and people were

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): standing in the back and so after he was done delivering his sermon he'd lead the congregation in a few hymns and you know his booming voice is carrying everyone else to sing with volume and with abandon that They never displayed except when he was there

And the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): people would be pulled up to emotional highs and rare feelings of connections with their phase that had been missing from their workday lives. And even afterward, they were visibly elated and emotionally spent from it

And sometimes the

Speaker 79 (lower-pitched voice): effect on people would last for

days. People who

Speaker 79 (lower-pitched voice): never came

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): to church would be moved to say how they needed to start coming again. After church, families would hold potlucks on these Sundays, and the people at church would split up to each other's houses to go socialize. And it was always a mark of distinction and status in this little community to be the one who would host Pastor Jim Baker there after church potluck

And

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): when he was there, he would hold court and conversation with people about the sermon or about the state of the church or the state of America or the prospect of the end times, whatever. But

when I

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): think back on it now, it was just

really that

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): people just wanted to be close to him. It wasn't they wanted to talk about any of those particular things. People would huddle

up to be

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): around this guy. He really was a minor celebrity with all the social and ontological implications

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): that that term

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): carries

it's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): funny because this would have been what over 20 years ago and i don't know if i've thought about it since even if even as i've been preparing this podcast i haven't thought about it until now but now as i'm remembering the experience it comes back very powerfully

and pastor

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): jim baker he was just a regular guy he was just some dude he had a normal job i don't i don't remember what it was and He just made the rounds as a guest preacher a few Sundays a month. And the churches would give him half of whatever the collection played for making the drive out there. Something like that

But I want to say

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): again, with emphasis, that he really was like a minor celebrity

You think about if

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): you see a celebrity walking somewhere. A movie star or somebody like that. Or if the president comes to town. You see the president. It's obviously a much larger scale. But there's that. It's almost as if somebody has an aura about them. you know, people around them get, ...get nervous and has physiological effects on them. And there's higher and lower versions of that. And he was a minor celebrity among the people who knew him

And when he

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): was coming to town, there was real excitement and anticipation for it

You know, this

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): regular guy with a regular job could

do things

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): just by using his voice. Just with the words he chose and the way he spoke them. That not only moved his audience, but brought a community together in a way that would not have happened otherwise. Yeah

And this

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): social aspect of phenomena like

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): this cannot be ignored in favor of a narrow focus on the credulity of the individuals being overtaken by the certainty being projected by the

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): man or his ability to

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): just articulate doctrine or manipulate their emotions. This is a group experience as much as an individual one

Or else maybe you could say

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): that the individual experience, the effects of it were the result of participation in the group experience

That's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): what someone like Jim Baker was selling

Speaker 80 (lower-pitched voice): To put it more crudely than I really intend It wasn't just his sermon The experience began before he ever arrived And it

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): lasted after he left

He was like an

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): attractor Who would come to your town And pull everyone together And transform or transmute their energy And then release everyone back into their normal lives Slightly different than they were before If only for a while

joseph

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): campbell used to enjoy retelling a story told by the old german anthropologist leo frobenius

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): and so the story goes one day frobenius was at his desk hard at work and his

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): little daughter little girl was running around the office tugging at him for attention and just generally being a pain in the butt and making a ruckus and so he looks around his desk and finds three used up burned matchsticks

And he

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): gives them to the little girl and he tells her that this is Hansel and Gretel and the witch and why doesn't she go play with them in the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): other room, you know, very quietly if you please. So

these were

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): simpler times, you know, 100 years ago, Frobenius died in the 30s, so that was good enough for the little girl and off she went. Sometime later

She

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): comes running back to her father. Her eyes are full of tears and fear so that Frobenius, he was worried that something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe she had hurt herself or something. So she's weeping and terrified and clinging to her father and she says, the witch, she cries, the witch is in the other room and it's after her and she's weeping and holding on to him

And the

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): little girl wouldn't be pacified until her father had gone into the other room himself and retrieved the evil matchstick and right in front of her broke it in half and threw it in the trash and broke the spell

Now we can hear a story

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): like that and we say

well, you know

Speaker 79 (lower-pitched voice): it's a little kid with an overactive imagination playing her silly game, right? But

what I want to

Speaker 79 (lower-pitched voice): point out here is that the matchstick was not a witch when she received it from her father

She

Speaker 39: didn't cast it away in terror when he handed it to her

It was through

Speaker 39: the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): process of play, as she allowed herself to be submerged into the game, blurring the borders between

Speaker 79 (lower-pitched voice): imagination and reality, that suddenly

at a

Speaker 79 (lower-pitched voice): certain point, the matchstick became the witch. It was revealed as the

Speaker 81 (lower-pitched voice): witch. And

again, for

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): us, we say, well, yeah, but it wasn't a witch. It was a stick. But

what's

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): important

When

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): we're talking about witches. You know, what is important when we're talking about witches? Witches aren't real, period

You know

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): not in this sense. So what are we talking about when we talk about witches? We're

hearing this

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): Frobenius story a century after the fact, third hand. But here's a little girl who is full of real terror, crying to her father for protection. Psychologically, phenomenologically, the witch was as real as anything

And we

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): can say, objectively, the witch doesn't exist, but objectivity is an abstraction of experience averaged out, stood back from and observed

But moment by

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): moment, subjectivity is all we've got And

if there's a

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): witch making you panic and cry and look for help, then that witch is real as a fact of experience

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): emotional experiences are engraved deeply enough into our being that reason has a full-time job keeping watch to

take a more

Speaker 17 (lower-pitched voice): conventional religious

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): example the catholic church maintains as dogma that the consecrated bread and wine taken in communion are transfigured into the actual body

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and blood of christ and

what can that

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): even possibly mean to people like

us What

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): could it even possibly have meant to someone like Aquinas, who died almost a thousand years ago for that matter? Thomas Aquinas was capable of a profound understanding of Aristotle. So a simple logical operation, this bread and wine, I know the baker and the winemaker, they live across town, my nephew

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): plays t-ball with his

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): son, does not equal the flesh and blood of a body crucified long ago. He was perfectly capable of that logical operation. Well, this is the point of all the stained glass and the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): organs and the incense investments it's why the sacrament is conducted at the specific climactic moment in the service

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): that it is all of it designed to submerge a group of people into the spirit of the thing

all the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): way to the point where suddenly in their subjective psychological and emotional experience the bread and wine were transfigured for them just as the matchstick was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): for that little girl and

if she

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): can cry over that thing turning into a witch, they can feel the profound religious emotion of the bread and

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): wine turning into something. And we'll say, well, I've

been to

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): church. I'm

even a

Speaker 82: Catholic, and I've certainly never heard of anything like that. But of course we

haven't

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): God is dead for almost all of us, even our most religious people. We'll

go our

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): whole lives without meeting a single person who's

dead. with

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): the faith of an Aquinas, or probably even the faith of a Kierkegaard

But travel

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): back in time and tell one of these people that bread is merely

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): bread and wine is merely wine and neither can be anything else, and

they would

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): tell you, look, yeah, I get it, okay, I get what you're saying, but I was there. I

held them in my

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): mouth, as close to me as anything could be

What could

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): you possibly have to teach me about what was real that day

Okay. I can

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): already feel a lot of you guys pulling back on this one. Well, I'm thinking of something else now, so I'll try to put it another way. But

keep that

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): story about the witch in mind, because I think

if I

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): can put this together correctly and pull it off, it'll make sense what I'm trying to do. Just

bear with me

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): for a few minutes. We're

going to try to

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): find our way to how something like Jonestown happened

I

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): don't want to just give you a recitation of the known facts. There are other podcasts and books for that

And

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): that's going to mean maybe going down some roads that may end in cul-de-sacs, but we'll see where this one ends up

Religious participation

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): is a black box to a lot of people, modern people. It's just a mode of behavior where, unless you're

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): submerged in it, all people see is the outer trappings and the whole inner life of the individuals and the groups involved is often opaque and baffling

the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): memory i just had about pastor jim baker that was in the 1990s not the 1950s when religious belief and its role in communities was

much more solid much

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): more real you might say you know jim baker would drive the number of worshipers in the little chapel in montana from its regular 30 up to maybe 50 to 100

Back

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): during the post-war revival, we're talking about rural towns all over a county emptying out. It's hundreds, thousands

Speaker 29: of people gathered, sometimes all night long for weeks at a time. And

so, yeah

Speaker 29: anyway, I remember another time I was a bit younger than I was in Montana. Maybe I was 12 or 13

When I was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): young, I moved around a lot. I was changing schools all the time, usually a few times a year, and I was a kid, more or less, left to my own devices, and often by the influence of relatives, I would find my way into church youth groups, which in practice were only a marginally

more

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): wholesome environment than my public schools, but sometimes

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): it's the margins that matter with things like this, I suppose. It kept me off the streets, and often there

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): were adults or older kids who took an interest in me. provided some guidance when there might not have been anyone else around

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): to do it at the time

And so I

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): remember a time when I was 12 or 13 and our church group went

to

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): see the evangelist Billy Graham in Sacramento, California. It

was being

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): held in the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): arena where the Kings play basketball, only the arena was entirely full

And so there

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): are areas set up outside with huge

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): jumbotrons for the crowds outside. There must have been 10,000 of us outside

And So

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): you've got a full arena, maybe 10,000 more people outside. I remember being far enough away that the nearest Jumbotron wasn't very jumbo, and the giant sound system sounded far away. So you have some idea of how many people we're talking about

From so far

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): away, the

experience

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): was kind of, it had the muted effect of overhearing what you were assured and even kind of believe is a very profound

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): message, but from the next room

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): over, muffled through the walls. You

know, I was

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): distracted. Most of us kids were

We were

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): trying to be serious and solemn, but we were 12, and the screen and

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): speakers were far away, and the message didn't seem particularly different from what we were used to hearing on a weekly basis at church. And there was a girl in the group

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): I sort of had a crush on, and did she have a crush on me too? And, you know, you remember the deal. We were 12. And

so this goes

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): on for some time. Must have been a few hours

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): I suppose. And it was nearing the end, and they start to bring the message home, and the pace begins to slow a bit. Maybe

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the organ or the piano starts, you know, soft background peace, and everyone in the crowd starts to respond to that. It gets real quiet and still. And

soon, as the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): music and the solemn tone of the preacher and that collective experience of shared attention brings the crowd into something like emotional attunement, something starts to feel a little bit different, something in the air almost. And

when the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): moment's right, These people are professionals. They know when the moment's right. They do this thing where they ask people

if you've heard

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): this message tonight

and you've never

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): been a Christian, but you've been moved here tonight to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your Lord and Savior, please

come to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the front and approach the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): stage and pray with me

And thousands of

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): people start emptying out of their seats and making their way up the aisles

And then

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): they

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): say

There are

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): many of you out there who have been Christians, but who over the years have become distracted or discouraged by life. But no matter how long or how far we wander from God, he never abandons us. And like the loving father of the prodigal son, he waits with an open door for us to come home. How many of you will come home tonight

I ask you

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): to come forward as well and recommit your life to Christ

and

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): thousands more people start leaving their seats and pushing up into this giant throng near the stage. They're doing it inside, and we have our version outside as well. Where

we were

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): there are separate stages set up with some of the preachers, Billy Graham's surrogates, I guess you'd call them, as if the healing love of God come to earth through Christ would not suffer as it passed through the voice of Reverend Graham

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): down through the delegated authority of his lieutenants. Anyway, people in our group, in the church group that I was with, start to get up and go forward

First the adults

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): and some of the older youth leaders. Then some of the younger kids, kids my age. Some of the ones I've been goofing off with for the last few hours

And I

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): remember, I remember it well. I remember as more kids and adults started going forward, I began to feel the pull

As the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): preacher's voice picked up into a passionate prayer

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): and more of my friends and their parents and the church youth leaders got up to join this crowd of thousands and thousands, I started to feel like I was being left behind. I saw

kids I knew well

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): goofballs, who had ignored the entire sermon, cracking jokes right up to the end, get up and go. Kids

I knew had

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): not been moved by the message, but they were suddenly being animated by

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): some... unseen spirit blowing through the crowd and

i remember

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): consciously deciding that i would not go i

wanted to you

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): won't believe me but you know at times i i literally almost felt as if my body was being lifted to its feet by an external force it literally felt

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): that way and it took active resistance on my part to keep from getting

up It felt

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): like if I would have let my focus slip for a few seconds, I would

have

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): already been up and moving with the herd. But

I planted

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): myself on the ground, and I refused to move

because I

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't locate the motivation in myself, and wherever the pull was coming from, it felt foreign and coercive. I

can only understand all

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): this as a social phenomenon, tapping into some deep instinct

If it was just for

Speaker 83 (lower-pitched voice): the individuals, People could have stayed in their seats and been led in silent prayer to save their souls. But

there's

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): something about the affirmative public act of getting up in front of others who know you and the pressure the growing crowds begin to put on others to do the same and most importantly of joining all those other people in that shared state of heightened emotion

i know

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): that a whole lot of those people were drawn up to the stage purely by

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): social pressure and fear of missing out on whatever might be happening up there

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): a fear that grew every time another one of their group got up to their

feet sometimes i remember

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): especially among the younger people whole groups would be hesitating until one of the popular and stronger personalities

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): got up and then it was like the rest of the group had been given permission and they all got up and went together

Kids

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): from rougher homes often got up for their own reasons, maybe going forward at their own pace without checking to see if anyone was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): coming along or keeping up. The well-integrated middle-class kids with two parents who attended church with them every week and did things like sing in the choir, they tended to move in groups. The

children of

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): church deacons and the choir leaders, you watch these little kids taking their first cracks at leadership

You

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): know, trying to manage the microcosmic social status inherited from their parents and shouldering the responsibility of being the first one to get up, you know, to get up first in a way that brought the others along

Each individual was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): thinking about, you know, his or her own life and the state of their souls, maybe. But, you know, sure, but they were also navigating and reinforcing all these embedded social hierarchies. affirming the structure of their groups, their little miniature societies by their participation and silently negotiating their closeness and commitment to one another. I

was with a group

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): with one of the church leader's kids, a boy maybe a year or two older than me, whose family had been active in the church, in that church, for 20 years before he'd ever been born. And he did his duty and he got up to lead our group to the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): front where we were to receive our salvation

I

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): knew that in refusing to go

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): up, I wasn't only in dialogue with Reverend Graham and the good Lord, but that I was refusing to go up with

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the boy leading our group, refusing his leadership, and by implication, casting some measure of judgment upon my peers who were submitting to it

None of this was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): articulated or thought

Speaker 21 (lower-pitched voice): out. It was negotiated by exchanged looks and body language and vague emotions. I was putting... distance between myself and the rest of them

even

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): though it was the last thing i wanted to do at the time the

girl that i've

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): been crushing on whose friends had for the last few hours been in negotiation with my friends to arrange the next stage of our awkward adolescent courtship she got up to go with the rest and when they'd gone about 10 feet she glanced back at me and one of her friends turned to wave me on but i stayed

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): put and

i knew i

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): knew immediately intuitively on some level that that was over now too

And then the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): strangest thing

after the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): prayer, after maybe 20 minutes or so, when the crowds were shuffling back to their seats

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): something had clearly changed. Many

of the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): adults and children were transfigured. Their faces were glowing. Many

of them had tears

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): running down their cheeks, and others were full out weeping

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Instead of... anxiously eyeing one another as they negotiated their pubescent status hierarchy

My

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): friends were walking back, calm, docile, smiling at each other, or else wearing masks of introspection or deep emotion as the smiling ones walked beside them with words of comfort and

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): encouragement

Most of them had gone up

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): there for reasons profane and personal. I

know it

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): for a fact, but once they

were up there, the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): personal faded into the background as they surrendered to this social ritual

And they

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): came back bonded

They were

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the ones who had gone forward together and who had stood together in a state of emotion profoundly heightened by the orchestrators of the experience and made a public commitment to themselves and to each other and to God. And they returned to their seats bound to one another in a way that they had not

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): been just a few minutes before. And it was very real

both for them

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): from the inside and for me from the outside

you

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): know again i don't want to overplay it the effect doesn't last forever at a youth group meeting the following

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): wednesday

the

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): billy

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): graham event had been on a sunday night on wednesday the kids were still nicer to each other than usual um i guess you could say

the the

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): adolescent status hierarchy operated with more benevolence maybe put it in

a jordan

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): peterson way of

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): putting it um

But

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): then the next week, things had more or less reverted back to normal. You know

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): life intrudes and habit reasserts itself. And so these binding rituals have to be repeated regularly for reinforcement, which

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): is why religious calendars are cyclical. The

main purpose

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): of religious gathering is to be found in this binding

And the

Speaker 23 (lower-pitched voice): purpose of ritual and religious performance

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): is to bring people to a state where they might be

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): available to experiences they wouldn't normally be in a normal mode of consciousness, the mode of running errands and doing your taxes. The

goal is to bring

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): people from the place where matchsticks are just matchsticks to the place where one of them might become a witch

and to do it

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): together

It

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): entails a lowering of barriers and inhibitions, unnatural to our daily lives of money-getting and status-seeking

People are very

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): hyper-social animals, and a sense of union with one's community is sacred, if anything is

Individuals are bound together into

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): communities through the sharing and reliving of heightened

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): experiences, transcendence, victory through common struggle, commemorated through joyful celebration one hopes, joy

but

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): people can also be bound together just as tightly by trauma, by common hatreds and paranoia, at least for a

while. And

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): people who can become expert at pulling others up to the heightened state where these experiences are

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): possible tend to become revered figures. Traditional religions use things like sacred architecture and art, music and incense and narrative to

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): aid the

process, age which

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): Involve and often overwhelm all the senses, but with which the audience is

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): familiar, usually all the way from childhood, in which contain built-in triggers designed to allow them to relax and open up

It's doubtful that Jim Jones

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): could have had the same effect on people

and done

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): what he did as a secular motivational speaker

but the

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): man was an absolute virtuoso up on that stage. I mean, he knew his audience, he identified with them, he knew

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): what they needed and what they needed to hear

He was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): never going to last as a student pastor at the little Indianapolis Methodist Church. Within a year he was gone, scouting locations in Indy to start an interracial church of

his own. Starting

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): his own church was going to take money, and money was something that he and Marceline never had much of. They were both already working multiple jobs, but now Jim got even more creative

He found a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): way to import monkeys from South America and little monkeys and attached a cage to the back of his bicycle. And he rode around Indianapolis selling them as pets door to door. I

don't even

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): know how that remotely where

you probably have

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): a SWAT team gun you down for that today for health code violations. He spent his evenings

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): on the road hitting the revival circuit

going to these

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): tent revivals that I was talking

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): about, earning extra money and refining his craft

Jim

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): seemed to be able to operate on almost no sleep, even from high school, and that was a trait

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): that would carry him through almost

to the end of his

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): life. But while they were earning enough to pay their bills, barely, Jim and Marceline weren't on their way to being able to fund the establishment of a new

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): church, so Jim increased his

pace even

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): more, traveling far and wide to preach, and often leaving Marceline at home for extended periods when she wasn't

working. And maybe to

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): give Marceline some company, but also to allow her to work more hours, they brought in a pious, middle-aged woman

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): that they knew from the church, brought her into their home as a live-in housekeeper and cook. Their household grew again when they added an 18-year-old woman named Goldie who needed help, and Jim and Marceline helped guide her to a career in nursing. And then

they added

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): another person, a woman named Esther, a lonely

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): church-going woman, middle-aged white lady who remained loyal to the family until she died with them in Jonestown

And from this

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): point on, the Jones house would always be

Speaker 29: full

Sometime in

Speaker 29: 1954, after Marceline's nephew had left to go back to his mother, Jim and Marceline

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): acquired another foundling named Agnes

Again, I

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): don't like to make too much of childhood and early life anecdotes as being premonitions of the stuff

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): we're interested in later, but sometimes the patterns are a little too obvious to write off, and they at least deserve mention

As

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): a child, Jim was

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): collecting his menagerie of pets, and here at just 22 years old in 1954, he is bringing all these other people into his household, already three adults and two kids that he's brought in, although Marceline's nephew Ronnie had gone back to his mother

you know

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): as a kid people remembered how jim would never go anywhere without his pets following i mentioned that in one of his stranger episodes around middle school neighbors would remember seeing him walking along the two-lane highway on his way to church

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): dressed in that white sheet of his and surrounded by his dogs and cats which would wait for him outside the chapel until the service was over and he would

go off to

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): another church later on

uh When

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): he'd built up his church, he would never go anywhere without being surrounded by bodyguards and his admirers

Speaker 29: And

so about

Speaker 29: Agnes, one Sunday after Jim had preached a sermon, a girl of about nine, in raggedy

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): clothes with unkempt hair and dirty face, approached Jim with a bunch of flowers that she'd picked from the bushes. She hands them to him, and she looks up at him and says, I love you, with a really bad stutter

Jim

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): and Marceline immediately fell in love with the girl. understandably, and before long they'd convinced her neglectful mother to let them adopt her

Agnes had been

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): very poorly

Speaker 85: looked

Speaker 84 (lower-pitched voice): after, but

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): under the care of Jim and Marceline, her behavior started to improve, and with therapy she even overcame her stutter

Jim finally had a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): breakthrough

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): in 1954 when a member of the Methodist Church who was sympathetic to his politics introduced

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): him to Ron Haldeman

A

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Quaker, an open socialist, who, after hearing Jim's pitch, agreed to let him share his office space and secretary and do what he could to

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): help him get a church started

Now, Haldeman, for his

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): part, he had his doubts about what Jim was going to be able to accomplish in Indianapolis. The

state of Indiana

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): had been a hotbed

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): of the KKK during the organization's reappearance during the First World War generation before

even though the

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): second iteration of the kkk had begun in atlanta in nineteen fifteen within a few years it had spread and found its home mostly in the cities of the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): midwest and the west detroit at one time had over forty thousand members and chicago cleveland cities as far as portland had very strong presidencies

There were

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): very few blacks in any of these cities at the time, and the group focused its hostility and activism mostly on Jews and Catholics, that is, southern and eastern Europeans, as well as the Irish

At its peak in

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the 1920s, it was said that one in five eligible men in the state of Indiana was a member of the KKK, and the group was a political kingmaker

in the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): state. The organization declined rapidly after the mid-1920s, but many of the 50 to 70-year-olds So the kind of people who would be run in the city when Jim Jones began his church would have been members in their younger days

Unlike many other

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): northern cities, Indy already had a significant black population going back to before the Great Migration. It

had been a stop on

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the Underground Railroad, and many escaped slaves just stopped there for good. By

the early

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): 1950s, there were an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 African Americans living within Indianapolis city limits

Okay. In

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Indy, the means of keeping blacks in their places was typically less overt

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): than the hostility found in either the Deep South or the more violent northern cities like

Chicago or

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Detroit. For example, trade unions, which controlled hiring at many factories and other jobs, usually voted to exclude black workers

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): from membership. A city ordinance had made it so that houses could not be sold unless a majority of the neighborhood's current residents voted to approve

the sale. As a

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): result, although not officially excluded by law, black residents were confined to a few slum neighborhoods, their children restricted to underfunded schools, which, although not officially segregated, were nevertheless pretty much all black

The largest black high

Speaker 86: school in the city was prohibited from competing in sports against white city schools until the 1950s

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): when a federal law required a change

The

Speaker 26 (lower-pitched voice): school then immediately won

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): back-to-back state basketball championships, but rather than getting a parade through downtown, as white schools did after winning state, city officials organized a small affair on the roads surrounding their school. Like

many northern cities

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): and unlike the south, India had a low-key way of not addressing the concerns of its black residents. They

didn't use fire

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): hoses and German shepherds, and so they avoided the bad national press that would soon descend on the south

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Instead, they co-opted black community leaders, many of them ministers, into participating in discussions that just never seemed to go anywhere. I

got a passage

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): here from Jones biographer Jeff Quinn, quote

African-American

Speaker 29: ministers called the offices of the mayor, senior city staff, school board members, and other influential white leaders, requesting meetings to discuss their grievances. They were gratified at the quick, positive

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): response. Dozens of meetings were held. The white leaders listened intently and promised serious consideration of all they'd heard. Afterward, letters were exchanged. Sometimes committees were formed

Every time the black

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): ministers wanted additional meetings, they were promptly scheduled. If the African-American leaders were frustrated by lack of immediate action, they never demanded more than their white counterparts. Confrontation was simply not the Indiana way

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): But Jim Jones was not

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): looking for

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): access. He was looking for action

he started

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): his little storefront church with just a few defectors from the Methodist church he left and a few neighborhood blacks that he managed to pull in but within just a few weeks he announced to his office mate Ron Haldeman that his congregation had already grown to a few dozen new faces arriving every Sunday

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): Haldeman couldn't believe he didn't know what was going on he couldn't believe it so he had to see it for himself and he went down the next weekend and took a folding chair set up in community unity that's what Jim called his his

Speaker 41 (lower-pitched voice): church among

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): about twenty-five to thirty other people mostly elderly black women and jeff gwynne describes this

quote haldeman was

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): prepared for a typical hymn sermon collection plate service marceline

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): jones wrote the titles of several hymns on a chalkboard as she seemed about to lead the small congregation in song jim jones barreled into the room and instead of signalling for the singing to commence asked a general

Speaker 29: question

of all

Speaker 29: present what's bothering

you A hand

Speaker 29: toward the back went up

An old

Speaker 29: black woman stood and complained about the electrical company. There

was some

Speaker 29: problem with her service, and even though she constantly complained

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): nothing was done to fix it. But

the company

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): still sent monthly bills. When she demanded maintenance before she paid, the white people she dealt with threatened to cut off her power

There was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): murmurs

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): of assent

Almost everyone

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): present, certainly all the blacks, had endured something similar

but the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): woman told jones she felt she had

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): no choice other than to pay without getting the requested repairs her family which included grandchildren couldn't

live in

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the dark she was ready to give up and didn't

know what

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): else to do jones

did he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): ordered marceline to fetch a pen and paper let's write a letter he told the old woman Then, with Marceline serving as secretary, Jones dictated a message to the electric company, citing the lady's constant attempts to get her problems resolved and explaining that all she wanted was the service she paid for. He asked the rest of the congregation for suggestions. What else should

be in the

Speaker 29: letter? They recommended some embellishments and these were added. Then, Jones had the letter passed around and everyone

signed

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): it. Jones said that this show of unity proved that they were a real family in this

church. They worked

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): together to help

Speaker 29: each other. The next day, Jones promised he would personally deliver the letter to the electric company's main office. While

he was

Speaker 29: there, he would find out who was the right person to

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): discuss the matter with face-to-face, and he'd sit down with him or her and explain how a wonderful lady was being treated unfairly

Things had

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to be, would be, made right. Only

after making

Speaker 29: that vow did Jones allow Marceline to lead the singing of a hymn

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Then, Jones preached a lengthy sermon, heavy on the scripture and emphasizing tolerance and love. At

the next

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Sunday service, Jones asked the old woman to stand up

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): and tell everyone what had happened. She joyfully reported that her problem with the electric company was finally resolved

Somebody had

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): come out and things were repaired. She thanked everybody for their help, Pastor Jones most of all. Jones crowed, "'Together we stood up to the white people and won. When you come to this church, You get something now. end quote

Well, it's not hard

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): to imagine why a church like that would appeal to Jim's target audience

Often, despite

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): having a sermon prepared for the week, Jim would see some story of injustice in the local or national news, and instead he would just read the story to the people and involve them in a discussion about

Speaker 37 (lower-pitched voice): politics or race relations as he weaved in biblical references as they went

along. The

Speaker 35 (lower-pitched voice): word spread quickly, and very quickly. It's pretty Pretty soon Jim Jones congregation was outgrowing the little storefront

church. Ron

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Haldeman returned to see how things were going about two months in, and he couldn't believe his eyes when he saw over a hundred people packed into

the tiny

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): space. Jim wanted to buy his own church building, but the small offerings from his mostly poor congregation weren't even enough to cover the church's expenses. He was still subsidizing the church with his

outside

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): jobs. Raising money from the community was out of the question, because there was very little money in the community, and Jim refused to bring in any outsiders who might have challenged his control or the direction of the church

There was

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): one avenue open to him. The Revival Circuit was hitting its peak in the mid-1950s, and so Jim hit the road harder than ever

Whereas before he had hit the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Revival Circuit for small change and anonymous practice, now he

kind of

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): knew the tricks of the trade and he had the confidence to use them

Like any

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): religious movement that breaks through the levies of mainstream doctrines, the Pentecostal revivalists were experimental, and Jim witnessed religious innovations by the mid-1950s that were unfamiliar to him from his days at the Pentecostal church in Lynn. Using intuition and a quick eye and the ability

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): to work a crowd, sometimes spies and plants in the audience, the preachers would amaze their audiences by calling out people and telling their phone numbers or social security numbers. They would describe their chronic pain. and illnesses, calling out items in their

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): pockets or purses, somehow knowing about personal or financial problems or recently deceased loved ones who, of course, they were assured were smiling down from heaven. Jim

was a

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): skeptic, to say the least, and he saw through the trickery right away, but he was amazed at the effect on the crowds. Many

of the preachers

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): who got away with

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): this were rank amateurs, in Jim's estimation, and he was convinced he could put on a much better show and pull in the money that he needed for his new church

The

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): revivalists were drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds in the mid-1950s, making big money. The man who was considered the godfather of the post-war revival movement, William

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Branham, he regularly drew tens of thousands of people to his events, the largest religious crowds ever in many of the cities he visited. Jim

had been

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): hitting the back roads circuit for over a year, spending countless hours at healing services, watching, watching

You

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): know, watching with a student's attention, studying tone and body language, experimenting to see what worked and what didn't in venues where he was unlikely to be recognized

Until one day, he told

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Marceline that he was scheduled to deliver a sermon at a religious convention in Columbus, Indiana, and he wanted her to come along. She

had seen him

Speaker 88: clapping and dancing

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): at the Pentecostal services, but she

was still a

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): conservative Methodist at heart

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): and she wasn't read into his experiments at healing and clairvoyance yet

Tim

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): Reiterman describes what happens in

Speaker 89: his book Raven quote that

Speaker 90: night a

Speaker 91: fellow minister a

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): little old white-haired lady in a print dress and white socks introduced Reverend Jones to the congregation with this prophecy

I perceive

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): that you are a prophet that shall go around the world and tonight you will begin your ministry

Marceline

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): the skeptical nurse and a Methodist became uncomfortable thinking that Jim would surely fall flat on his

face Jones

Speaker 34 (lower-pitched voice): did not know what to do Thank

you

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): fitful and about to break out in hives he mounted

the pulpit

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): when he went to address the group his mouth would not open he closed his eyes probably wishing he could drop dead then it began all manner of thoughts flew through his mind he called out people as fast as his tongue would allow soon the people streamed toward him to be touched in the name of the

lord

Speaker 29: to marceline's utter amazement her husband's touch made these people fall down praising jesus

The

Speaker 29: gathering broke out in screaming and hollering. The noise, the energy of the crowd seemed

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to shake the building. Marceline stood there in awe, proud that the man she loved had been blessed with such a gift

Word traveled fast

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): among the faithful. So many people arrived for the second night's meeting in Columbus that the audience overflowed. Jim called out names and clamped his eyelids shut, belting out words, laying his hands on heads and bodies. The emotional level rose to a near frenzy as Jim poured out his seemingly endless incantation

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Later, he would confess to mixed emotions during the sessions. He was happy that the juices had finally flowed, but the intensity of healing drained him. He

thought that he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): could not stand to do it again, yet he could not stop. The feeling of power and control, the adulation, must have overwhelmed him

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): regardless of whether he actually believed that the Holy Spirit was working through him." Word did

travel fast among

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): the faithful, and Jim was soon a popular draw in his own right. often preaching in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): His own people were proud that their pastor was becoming a minor celebrity, and they were grateful that throughout all of it he never diverted his attention away from them as his first concern. They worried that he was going to run himself into the ground, but his energy seemed

bottomless

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): Jim's goals at Community Unity were to provide an example of an integrated church. to serve his poor and black parishioners, and to bring his congregation around eventually to socialism. But his growing profile on the healing circuit, the revival circuit

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): was starting to complicate things

Many people who

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): saw him perform miracles at revival meetings sought out the church of the great healer to attend themselves. These new arrivals, most of them white, had very little interest in his social or political goals. They were there for

the magic. He felt he

Speaker 20 (lower-pitched voice): had to mix healing

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): and other miracles into services at Community Unity now to keep them around, but he was ambivalent about the whole thing, and he usually tried to downplay their importance at his own church. He

would sometimes

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): chastise his people for coming

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): to church only to see a show of miracles or selfishly to be healed when what he wanted, what God and the world needed, were

people

Speaker 83 (lower-pitched voice): who were willing to sacrifice and serve others. Reflecting later, he said

He often

Speaker 83 (lower-pitched voice): expressed puzzlement and skepticism about his healing, wondering if the people who claimed to have been healed by him had really been sick, or if the

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): effects were psychosomatic and wore off some time later. Like

other healers, he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): had his bag of tricks, but he marveled at

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): how his fakery sometimes seemed to stimulate genuine healings in people who he didn't know, who weren't in on the gag. The

new people who were brought in

Speaker 83 (lower-pitched voice): from the healing circuit stretched Community Unity's little storefront to the limit

By

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): 1956, they had to upgrade, and Jim found a perfect opportunity. As neighborhoods and cities across the country were integrating after the war, the white populations were fleeing to the suburbs, and that was happening in Indianapolis as well. Jim

found a

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): synagogue abandoned in a neighborhood like that because there were no longer enough Jews in the area to support it

The building

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): held over 700 people, which was far more than Jim had at the time, but he was ambitious

At first, he

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): called it Wings of Deliverance, but since the word temple was carved in stone on the outside, he soon gave it the name that his movement would keep to the very end, People's Temple. He was

able to cut a deal

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): with the present owners so that the purchase was interest-free if he paid it off within a year. To

make that

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): happen, and to help fill the seats of his enlarged church, Jim needed to do something big

And so in

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): the summer of 1956, he organizes a massive religious convention in Indianapolis, bringing in the revered William Branham, the founder of the movement himself, to headline

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): the event. Now

Branham is kind

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): of a forgotten figure now, but he's an interesting figure in American religious history. In

his time

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): he was as revered in a good part of the country as superstars like Billy Graham and Oral Roberts

Out

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): of nowhere, this guy appears in 1946, claiming to have had an angelic vision. He

begins a

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): campaign, traveling to country churches

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): and small venues, claiming divine communication and performing miracles, and in almost

no time at all

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): he's attracting massive crowds. People came away with stories of healing and even a resurrection, and word spread so far and so fast that within two months of his start

He

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): holds a meeting in Jonesboro, Arkansas that attracts 25,000 people from 28 states within two

Speaker 29: months of his announcement of his first vision. While many of the preachers that sprang out of this time were flamboyant, they dressed

Speaker 84 (lower-pitched voice): flamboyantly, they were very energetic on stage, Brandon was quiet, calm. His preaching was described

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): by someone as halting and simple. He just told stories of angelic visitations and receiving messages from God, but he refused to discuss doctrinal issues

said his

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): mission was only to bring unity to the churches

Although Branham's

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): following was mostly white, his movement was interracial from the beginning, including the preachers

When he was

Speaker 16 (lower-pitched voice): touring southern states to satisfy local laws requiring segregation at public events, a long rope was meandered through the integrated crowd so as to technically separate white from black in accordance with the law, even though they were standing right next to each other

Speaker 4 (lower-pitched voice): Branham himself, from everything I've been able to find and read, seems to have been a true believer, or at the very least, not in it for the money. He wore cheap suits, he had an old car, not many possessions, he refused to take a large salary, took about $7,000 per year at the height of his popularity, while the people who gathered around him were skimming huge sums for themselves. His manager alone was taking

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): 80,000

a year. Branham

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): had no interest in the business side, so he just went place to place preaching and healing. What people were doing around him, he didn't pay a lot of attention

to. By

Speaker 19 (lower-pitched voice): 1953, his movement was becoming so popular among Pentecostals that he was drawing people and money away from the established churches, and the big Pentecostal denominations officially denounced him and his