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Jonestown: The Enduring Questions
By Henry Warner Bowden

RECENT EVENTS in Guyana have riveted our attention once again on the troubling phenomenon of religious sects and the role they play in American religious life. The tremendous loss of life at Jonestown and the docile way in which more than nine hundred people allowed themselves to be sacrificed raise all the old nagging questions about exclusivist projects, their religious ideology, leadership, and followers. Who joins a sectarian community? Why do they find it more appealing than traditional denominations? What sort of group dynamic binds them together? Where did this one go wrong? What can be done about similar groups still among us? Can we learn anything from the Jonestown tragedy that will strengthen our Christian perspective and insure better prospects for our children and churches?

I

Most of our thoughts about the People's Temple itself have to be tentative at this juncture because we do not know much of what really went on inside that group. We cannot presume to judge the private motives which led many of those persons to participate in the cult's macabre finale. But we can understand their futile gesture within a larger context of sectarian activity in American history. Some contemporary observers mistakenly assume that cults are of only recent origin, or that sects are a peculiar symptom of the social unrest spawned in the 1960s. Actually, every period of Christendom has had to contend with radical minorities who offered strikingly different alternatives in their day to the religious and cultural values supported by the majority. At times it is difficult to know how to classify these dissident groups. In their formative years many were denounced as heretics or self-indulgent nonconformists; later generations have often seen them as uncompromising separatists who formulated the basis for new ecclesiastical systems. Modern students disagree strongly as to whether sects and cults are the same or if either differs much from nascent churches that grow from religious dissent. Most groups collapse within the space of a few decades; others have developed into denominations whose strength and widespread support would astonish their early

Henry Warner Bowden is Professor of Religion at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and has written extensively in the field of American church history. He is the author of The Dictionary of American Religious Biography (1977) and Church History in an Age of Science (1971) and has edited Robert Baird's nineteenth-century history of Religion in America (1970). He is also serving as an advisory editor for Greenwood Press for a new series of denominational histories.

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critics as well as their founders. It may be instructive, then, to seek perspective on the People's Temple by considering some earlier examples of sectarian activity. Such knowledge can only partially illumine what will perhaps always remain an enigma: the denouement of an altruistic community gone sadly awry.

To those who support majority religious opinion in a cultural synthesis, every sectarian experiment seems dangerous and wasteful. They do not sympathize with the needs expressed by dissenting minorities, and they often point to a sect's destructive consequences as proof that there is no hope in radical alternatives to mainstream religion. Those who follow nonconformist religious patterns seem hopelessly misled into activity which ruins individual lives and provides no foundation for the group's survival. Judged by orthodox standards at any given time, sects have almost always seemed bent on destruction because they espoused an erroneous faith or sacrificed practical caution in pursuit of one-sided conceptions of religious truth. For instance, what comfortable Londoner would have thought the Pilgrims had much of a future in 1621? Aside from the fact that they scorned the judicious compromises of Anglican polity, almost half of them (46 of 102) had perished during the rigors of their first winter in Massachusetts. Who could then predict that their congregational church government and tenacious Calvinist piety would not only survive but set the tone for popular features of American character?

Other examples also show how difficult it is to assess a group's future or to judge any individual's religious commitment within dissenting minorities. In 1620 a young Pilgrim woman, wife to William Bradford, had forsaken the comforts of home to seek a new beginning at Plymouth. Having successfully made the perilous sea crossing, she fell overboard and drowned while the Mayflower calmly rode at anchor off Cape Cod. Was her life a waste? Did her needless death point to the folly of sectarian dissent? In 1662 William Penn, son of a famous naval hero, was expelled from Oxford for abandoning Anglicanism and exhibiting an unfashionable proclivity for radical Puritanism. Before he emerged as a leader of Quakerism and harbinger of religious toleration in the New World, did his aberrant zeal disgrace his prominent family and prompt onlookers to reflect on the dangers of spiritual fanaticism? In the 1730s Conrad Beissel attracted a following known as Seventh-Day Dunkers at Ephrata, Pennsylvania. Basing their common life on shared property, celibacy, and mysticism, his group flourished for a time but hardly survived the founder's death. Was the group expressive of primitive Christianity, or did it serve as an object lesson in the ultimate futility of unchecked religious eccentricities?

In 1803 a recently-widowed New York matron, mother of five and once a prominent socialite, left the Episcopal church to join a group which had long suffered rejection in most American states. Snubbed by her former friends and reduced to penury, she organized a small religious community to enhance spiritual development within its small

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circle of members and to provide general education for youth in her chosen but despised confessional group. Was her life a waste? Did the fact that several of her children died during the community's early days point to the eventual ruin of her faulty religious choice, a general commentary on the dangers of sectarian life isolated from major social conventions? New York's haute monde undoubtedly lamented the tragic end of Elizabeth Seton, but on September 14, 1975, the Catholic Church proclaimed her a saint, a paragon of doctrinal rectitude and selfless behavior. In 1832 a young farmer from Vermont forsook standard denominational affiliations to follow a new prophet who disclosed, he was convinced, fresh insight into the will of God. He quickly became a trusted lieutenant of the latter-day prophet and helped guide the sect's communitarian experiments as its members sought to anticipate the final establishment of Zion. To most American observers, Brigham Young seemed to have been duped into supporting all the excesses of the Mormon church. Among the Saints themselves, he embodied all the virtues of steadfast loyalty to their church's revelations and firm leadership against violent suppression of their faith.

The twentieth century has also had its share of religious sects which make it difficult to arrange them within a single set of judgmental standards. In the 1920s a black man of obscure origins established the Peace Mission Movement in New York. This group featuring food and fellowship soon made its presence know in Harlem as a forceful new religious sect. Many adherents also seemed drawn to this group because it promoted racial equality and denounced all forms of prejudice. Were supporters of such laudable principles to be pitied because they also believed that their leader, Father Divine, was God incarnate? In the 1930s thousands of middle class Americans filled auditoriums in every major city to learn how they could rise above the crass materialism of secular society. Were their intentions any less respectable because their purported salvation came from mysteries transmitted through astral figures who had ascended physical limitation to live in a realm of pure light? Was their hope for superior truth any less sincere after George Ballard, their supposedly incorruptible intermediary, died in 1939 and his wife Edna was convicted for mail fraud the following year?

In the 1940s thousands of urban blacks abandoned Christianity and joined the Nation of Islam, a group which belied its title by forming still another of America's sectarian minorities. By 1950 a gifted young man, whose checkered career included pimping, drug addiction, and petty theft, gained a new lease on life by becoming a Black Muslim. Was he wrong to turn his back on evangelical Christianity which characterized the faith of the majority of black Americans? In his view such a faith and its attendant social values had landed him in jail; the self-respect and virtues which he found only in Islam made life worth living once again for Malcolm X. In subsequent years, this thoughtful black militant agitated for civil justice and used his sectarian affiliation as the

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basis for caustic denunciation of racism in our country. Eventually he found himself at odds with the group's institutional leadership and on February 21, 1965 fell victim to bullets from an unknown assassin. It is likely that the sect which gave him new life eventually destroyed him too. But ironically, since the passing of Elijah Mohammad, Black Muslim leaders have expanded their vision of human brotherhood to include the ideal of their unruly fellow traveler who moved too rapidly ahead of accepted opinion within the group.

II

If we find it difficult to make final judgments about these earlier sects in their respective settings, what would we have said of the People's Temple just a few years ago? Was it wrong for people to join because they found meaning and orientation for their personal lives in preaching from a church affiliated with the Disciples of Christ? Was it ignoble or weak of them to be sustained by the new sense of community and fellowship generated within that body of believers? Can we fault them for believing in charismatic gifts, in spiritual or physical healing, and in trying to form an ecclesiola in ecclesia where race, income, education, and other social distinctions formed no artificial barriers? These and other laudable principles were certainly attractive characteristics which made the People's Temple an understandably congenial religious environment. None of these characteristics is wrong in itself, and who among us could have predicted the group's destruction on the strength of these practices alone? But there was more, and those additional elements gradually turned an apparently utopian religious community into a surrealistic world where demonic elements produced a grisly parody of the group's earlier appeal. When did the change take place? Why didn't many adherents notice the shift and leave before the end? Much about Jonestown remains a mystery, and we are left with more questions than answers-as has usually been the case with outsiders who try to analyze the inner dynamics of a sect without firsthand information.

Knowing what we do about the dangers latent in the People's Temple, what should be our attitude toward other religious sectaries? Between 1650 and 1960 the American continent has been the scene where at least six hundred different sectarian communities have acted out their various experiments. They have exhibited the widest possible range of attitudes regarding personal property, sexual relations, governmental theories, all to achieve various goals by communal effort. Most have been short-lived, but the day for such efforts has not ended. What can we make of today's satanists and astrologers, of Scientology, or of those who leave homes and jobs to wait in the desert for a space ship to rescue them from this doomed planet? How can we make room in our culture and religious worldview for the millions of people who see benefit in Transcendental Meditation, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or other institutions such as the Divine Light Mission

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founded by Asiatic gurus? What should be our attitude regarding the Circle of Friends and others who claim some Christian basis for their teachings, including the Unification Church of Korea's Reverend Moon and the Children of God, together with uncounted examples of extended religious families?

III

After having taken this cursory look at American church history, we should recognize that sectarian groups have always existed alongside mainstream religious affirmations. This perspective does not tell us all we need to know about the plethora of modern day cults, but it prevents any frantic worry that our generation alone has had to withstand tensions produced by widely differing alternatives in faith and lifestyle.

Taking a cue from sociological analysis, we can also see that these sects-cults-nascent-denominations have served as safety valves amid the pressures felt within American culture. In various settings many people have found their inherited orthodoxy meaningless and stifling. Instead of abandoning the quest for religious affirmation altogether, they have banded together with like-minded souls whose convictions resembled their own and whose needs seemed to find similar fulfillment within a sectarian context. Sects have provided an outlet for those indisposed to conform to dominant religious patterns, and beyond that they have existed as critical voices which point to the insensitive complacency of mainline churches. Quite often the emphases and programs of such "third party" groups are later incorporated into larger denominations, or they grow into effective churches themselves over the course of several generations. Those of us in traditional church settings would be foolish indeed to condemn all sects out of hand or turn a deaf ear to the spiritual yearnings expressed by those who support them. Many of them contain seeds of future religious formulations in belief and behavior. We must remain open to the human needs seeking some degree of recognition in sects, and it would be wise to modify our present churches to accommodate such needs insofar as this is consistent with our attempt to embody effective Christian witnessing.

IV

Psychology can shed additional light on the understanding which history and sociology brings to sectarianism in American religion. It has long been a truism, but a misleading one, that sects have constituted a "religion for the alienated." Most observers have described sectarians as uneducated, poor, and jobless--denizens of society's lower reaches with whom respectable churches rarely bother. There is a modicum of truth in this portrait of sectarians as down-and-outers, but at the same time large numbers of upper middle class college graduates join such groups too. The real common denominator for various members within a sect seems to be spiritual or psychological alienation, not social or economic deprivation. They share a genuine thirst for religious

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affirmation, for new truth outside normal channels which can establish their identity, galvanize their behavior, and give them meaningful objectives to strive for. Their quarrel with traditional religious patterns seems to have occurred long before their association with a new group or before they assumed leadership of their own. Those who follow new teachings are often motivated by a drive to affirm truths congruent with new experiences; they do not act from simple adolescent desires to rebel against authority. Founders of most sects seem genuinely to believe that their conception of reality is superior to the compromises and distortions found in traditional churches. Few appear to have been utter charlatans who manipulated followers for reasons of personal gratification or financial gain. Loyalty within sectarian patterns has endured far too many social disadvantages for any reductionistic interpretation to apply satisfactorily.

But some sects have been founded by slippery manipulators of human psychology, and obedient adherents have been ruined by trusting the smooth words of fradulent personalities. For one reason or another, some people are compelled to seek religious affirmation in sects, and there, perhaps more than in standard church settings, the pressure to conform to the "new gospel" is overpowering. Some of this group conformity is dictated by communally shared desperation which led members to join in the first place. Another element has to do with the size and a small group's need for uniformity in thought and action to form a basis for survival. Sectarianism often carries with it the concomitant of being "different," and this encourages an image of self-righteousness, of being ridiculed and persecuted for the truth's sake. Those who belong to the group congratulate themselves for being outcasts, and ostracism by dominant religious forces simply enhances their conviction of being right which redoubles their determination to conform within the sect's own definition of orthodoxy.

Such pressures are understandable, but they can lead to blind, uncritical acceptance of anything the sect's leaders preach as saving doctrine. Once adherents cross the first threshold in such a pattern of docility, later obstacles to unthinking unanimity are more easily overcome. In modern parlance this entrapment is known as "thought reform" or "mind control," and instances of its power are not confined to our own day. The danger of intense religious zeal is that it can demand surrender of one's critical faculties, unique personality structure, and independent volition. Too often the end result of sectarian allegiance is a kind of psychological lobotomy, as the example of Jonestown has made pathetically clear by the gruesome conformity of its participants. Physical death is simply the most graphic of the types of suicide possible within isolated, high-pressure sectarian communities.

V

The People's Temple has now succumbed to its destructive penchant for unthinking conformity, driven to extremes by the paranoid psychosis

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of its monomaniacal leader. But what can be done about similar groups still around us? Should federal, state, or municipal laws be passed to prevent other sects from pursuing ridiculous eccentricities? Ought we to create sanctions against new faiths? Do parents have the right to "rescue" their children from sects by kidnapping? Is "de-programming" acceptable to bring them to their senses, or is this brainwashing technique another form of mind control, this time practiced by the majority? Is there nothing we can do to prevent bizarre and erratic conduct, spiritual tryanny, and loss of life?

Our tradition of religious freedom in this country is clearly against restricting sectarian allegiance through force, though it offers little consolation to families or individuals directly involved in questions about sects. Past experience has shown that on balance it has been a good thing for government to place no obstacles in the way of free exercise of religion. Such a principle allows many people to act on devotional attitudes which we may find personally reprehensible, but it makes all religious views open to change though discussion, not coercion. This makes it possible to deal with sectarians through reasoned argument instead of law, a category subject to the compromises and vested interests of politics. If we cannot persuade members of another group that they err on some particular point, we have no right to force them to change. We cannot require others to think and act as we do, no matter how convinced we may be that their values and views are woefully inadequate. Regardless of how "wrong" they are, it would violate a larger principle to force others to abandon freely chosen beliefs. There is one exception; we can protect the rights of minors whose parents or guardians do them bodily harm because of some group's ideology. As in the case of requiring blood transfusions for children of Jehovah's Witnesses (whose views preclude them) if their lives depend on that remedy, we can require sects to respect the rights of underage adherents. Other than that, laws cannot prevent the multitudinous inanities committed in the name of religion.

VI

In the last analysis, what should be our considered response toward sects? It is obvious that some portion of the public is always going to find them attractive, and we are bound by valuable historical precedent to place only limited restraints on them. What theological perspective will afford both an open-ended expectancy of the possible good in sects and still give us critical perspective with a firm hold on first principles? Perhaps a wise beginning would be to adopt a humble attitude regarding the many different ways in which God speaks to humankind. Dialogues with heaven are more varied than my own. Though I may prefer wording in the King James version of the Bible and find that my worship is best channeled by fixed liturgical forms, it would be presumptuous to assume that my patterns must serve for everyone. While I might feel no attraction to charismatic perfectionism,

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communal property, extended families, yoga, faith healing, apocalyptic prophecy, or androgynous symbolism, I must recognize that others are genuinely moved in spiritual ways by such categories. They find direction for daily conduct and ultimate purpose for their lives by understanding God differently from my own way, but I must not reject those avenues too quickly as unacceptable to God in the many forms of worship. To condemn the religious lifestyle of others easily lends itself to judging the source of that spiritual life and possibly to placing human standards above God's autonomy. It is better to honor God through restraint than to restrict the opportunities utilized by others who try to respond adequately to a God beyond our power to control.

But honoring that same unlimited God requires us to keep a critical eye on all human aspects of religion, whether in sects or mainline churches. We should test all groups by their fruits, by their practical actions and our cumulative understanding of righteousness since the days of Moses. If souls seem uplifted and fulfilled in a sectarian community, if divine worship of whatever form seems genuine, and if personal ethics produce lives of sound moral character, then it may well be that God's Spirit is truly established at the core of that group's collective consciousness. This pragmatic test is not very satisfying when we come to questions of doctrinal statements, but in our cultural heritage there is little churches can do to define truth for non-members. Concerning practical action, however, the prophet Micah reminds us that a minimal requirement of God's people is that they do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord. A theological perspective on sects should insist that they live up to that minimal standard. Clearly, any group that murders children makes a mockery of such guidelines and stands condemned as an ungodly force that betrays its pretensions to the contrary.

Worship of the one true God should also make us wary of idolatry as well as keep us vigilant about abuses in sectarian ethics. Under the best of conditions, people are tempted to compensate for their inadequacies by projecting religious ideals onto another person or some human construct. Jesus met this human failing in his own temptations (Matthew 4) with the stern admonition: "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve." If this reminder is not enough to warn us that substitutes can interpose themselves between God and yearning flocks, history is full of illustrative examples, the latest of which is Jonestown. Human adulation has often made too much of an institution, a creed, a leader, and even the Bible; this tendency to apotheosize creates more golden calves, obstacles between ourselves and the one God we are to serve. To permit an intermediary to stand between believers and God for any reason is a travesty of our Judaeo-Christian heritage, no matter how exalted, compelling, awesome or powerful that secondary image might be. How much more tragic is Jonestown-this current instance of idolatry, in which a man faked healing services, bilked his followers of their income, shouted

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down all criticism, and urged his people to "die with dignity" to make his own passing more impressive.

If Jonestown teaches us anything, it is that we must cleave unsparingly to the worship of God alone and beware of false gods which stand in the way. Well intended filio-pietistic promptings might tempt us to raise lesser entities above their legitimate place in the natural order. But thoughts of belonging to a community of saints should not blind us to the fact that human nature always retains its potential for distortion and misguided self-seeking. Religious jargon and altruistic visions are no safeguard against this recidivous tendency which remains part of all earthly constructs this side of Eden. Belief in ultimate salvation must not lull us into thinking that spiritual perfectionism is an accomplished reality because carnal desires are always part of human action, even mixed with the most elegant ideals pursued by religious communities. Knowing the limits of partially redeemed human nature should prevent our trusting it too much. Even more importantly, our loyalty to God must keep us from equating lesser objects with God's glory, be they persons or programs. Idolizing human patterns is not only unwise, it is blasphemy. There is only one God, and we must never deviate from acknowledging the exclusive loyalty which is due to God alone. Whether we seek communion with the divine in sects or cathedrals, we must cling to monotheism with an uncompromising austerity that acknowledges only one God as the single, unfailing source of eternal life.