Hearing the Voices of Jonestown: Putting a Human Face on an American Tragedy / Edition 1

by Mary Maaga, Catherine Wessinger

Overview

When over 900 followers of the Peoples Temple religious group committed suicide in 1978, they left a legacy of suspicion and fear. Most accounts of this mass suicide describe the members as brainwashed dupes and overlook the Christian and socialist ideals that originally inspired Peoples Temple members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown restores the individual voices that have been erased so that we can better understand what was created-and destroyed-at Jonestown, and why. Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archival research, and diaries and letters of those who died there, Maaga describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. The book analyzes the historical and sociological factors that, Maaga finds, contributed to the mass suicide, such as growing criticism from the larger community and the influx of an upper-class, educated leadership that eventually became more concerned with the symbolic effects of the organization than with the daily lives of its members. Hearing the Voices of Jonestown puts human faces on the events at Jonestown, confronting theoretical religious questions, such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815605157
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	05/01/1998
Series:	Religion and Politics
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.83(d)
Lexile:	1450L (what's this?)

About the Author

Mary McCormick Maaga received her PhD with distinction from Drew University where she was invited to study as the Shirley Sugarman Scholar in Religion and Society. She lectured at the University of Stirling, Scotland, in the fields of new religions, women and religion, and anthropology of religion. Dr. Maaga is an Elder in Full Connection in the United Methodist Church, currently serving a local Church in Tulare, California.

Interviews

Maaga's work offers a thoroughly fascinating look at the Jonestown tragedy.

Editorial Reviews

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

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Offers a revelatory perspective on what happened, and why, when over 900 followers of the People's Temple religious movement committed suicide in 1978. Piecing together information from interviews with former group members, archives, and diaries and letters of those who died there, the author describes the women leaders as educated political activists who were passionately committed to achieving social justice through communal life. She puts human faces on the events, confronting theoretical religious questions such as how worthy utopian ideals come to meet such tragic and misguided ends. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

Extremely provocative and certainly an indispensable source.

Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion

Maaga's work makes an important contribution to our understanding of the Peoples Temple community and the complex social dynamics that, in her reading, led inexorably toward mass suicide/murder.

American Historical Review