{"id":131689,"date":"2025-08-22T13:16:40","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T20:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=131689"},"modified":"2026-03-03T17:21:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T01:21:13","slug":"facing-jim-jones-jonestown-in-defense-of-my-hope-for-universal-reconciliation","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=131689","title":{"rendered":"Facing Jim Jones & Jonestown: In Defense of My Hope for Universal Reconciliation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why Jonestown Should Still Haunts Us<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jonestown haunts me. November 18, 1978. Over nine hundred souls lost in the Guyanese jungle under the command of Jim Jones. Let me be clear: Jim Jones was no prophet. He was no shepherd. He was a corrupter of God\u2019s work, a charlatan who masqueraded as a pastor while turning love into bondage, freedom into slavery, hope into despair. For most, Jonestown is shorthand for fanaticism. For most, it is reduced to a joke, \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid.\u201d But I refuse that flattening. I refuse to let theology look away. To do so would be to abandon God\u2019s presence in the valley of death.<\/p>\n

Seeking God in the Valley of Death<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have written. I have preached. I have descended into the ruins of Jonestown, not to excuse it, not to sensationalize it, but to seek God there. My writings<\/a>, numerous books, articles, and even an extended collection of the sermons of Jim Jones<\/a> to illustrate his development as both preacher and monster, are a search for God in the abyss\u2026a search for hope in the hopeless. Jonestown is not merely a grotesque failure of religion. It’s a place where sin and death is made raw. And yet, God\u2019s Spirit still hovers there, just as it did in the opening verses of Genesis…the beginning of time and space.<\/p>\n

In Jonestown Theology: Lenten Explorations in the Valley of Death (2017)<\/a>, <\/em>I descend into this darkness. I reject the simplistic, the facile, the comfortable moralizing. \u201cThese devotions should never be mistaken for an apologetic for Jim Jones or anything he stood for. This is a search for God.\u201d I frame Jonestown within Lent, placing it within Christological solidarity. The cross cannot be understood apart from sites of horror. Jones\u2019 violence, I write, \u201cwas consistently created until violence was complete.\u201d Sin\u2019s fullness revealed. Yet God was still present. Hope can never be annihilated.<\/p>\n

Jim Jones as False Shepherd and Anti-Christ<\/strong><\/p>\n

Love was twisted into a weapon by Jones. He said, \u201cwithout me, life has no meaning.\u201d Survivors testified, \u201cI was brainwashed into believing that I was worthless and that life had no meaning without him.\u201d This is perverse Christology. Jones replaced God with himself. He made himself the exclusive mediator of meaning. He enslaved the soul. The sacramental promise of belonging, which should liberate, became chains. Jonestown is a warning…the incarnation misappropriated is idolatry\u2026coerced love is demonic. When you miss this truth…you don’t know God at all.<\/p>\n

The death tape<\/a> reveals the corruption of Jones\u2019 heart. \u201cEven in the midst of death, Jones wants to kill more.\u201d Pastoral vocation inverted. Shepherding becomes domination. Kenosis becomes consumption. He was the anti-pastor. As I’ve said, Jones was \u201cthe Judas who thought he was Jesus, the Anti-Christ who baptized in Kool-Aid instead of water.\u201d Too harsh? No. Not harsh enough. Jones was monstrous. He was a tyrant. Yet, he remains a warning. Jonestown is not an anomaly, it’s temptation that still remains.<\/p>\n

Resurrection After Jonestown<\/strong><\/p>\n

But Jonestown is not only death\u2026it is also resurrection. In my The Resurrection of Jonestown (2019)<\/a><\/em>, I proclaim, \u201cOur siblings from Jonestown are not dead. They are still marching with us\u2026 in our struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, economic injustice.\u201d The Spirit still speaks the words of those who have been silenced. Like the martyrs beneath the altar in Revelation 6, the dead cry out for justice. I have said, \u201cThe blood of Jonestown is Eucharistic, it will not let us go.\u201d This is not rhetorical flourish. This is truth. Jonestown refuses to be a footnote. It demands remembrance…prophetic solidarity…deep struggle\u2026a continued fight for the reconciliation of all things.<\/p>\n

Wrestling with God in Horror<\/strong><\/p>\n

My trilogy<\/a> (perhaps my most recognized works on Jones and Jonestown), The Slaughter of God (2018)<\/a>, Systematic Theology\/Shit (2020)<\/a>, Five Visions of Jim Jones\/Jonestown (2020)<\/a>, pushes this confrontation. In The Slaughter of God, I name Jones both \u201cprolific oppressor\u201d and \u201cAnti-Christ.\u201d And I ask, \u201cIs God absent in horror, or present in the darkness?\u201d In Systematic Theology\/Shit, I wrestle mystically with God\u2019s hiddenness. \u201cThe people of Jonestown were children of God. Can we finally treat them as such?\u201d I question God\u2019s lack of engagement in stopping the tragedy. In Five Visions, I examine Jones through resurrection, healing, silence. Even he exists within God\u2019s eschaton (the eternal presence of hope)\u2026let there be no doubt\u2026his actions were monstrous, inhuman, demonic. But this trilogy refuses closure\u2026it declares Jonestown to be a mirror that refuses to look away.<\/p>\n

Dr. Rebecca Moore, writing in The University of Chicago Divinity School\u2019s publication Sightings<\/i><\/a>, observes: \u201c[Hood\u2019s writings] humanize all those present in Peoples Temple, including Jim Jones\u2026 while affirming that some sort of existential mystery continues to surround the Jonestown event.\u201d Where others analyze, I theologize. Where others avert their eyes, I sit. Turn your back on Jonestown and you\u2019ve turned your back on Golgotha too. To face it is to stare into the abyss and proclaim resurrection\u2026to demand hope amidst hopelessness.<\/p>\n

Humanization and Universal Reconciliation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jonestown unsettles. It must. It calls us all to self-examination. It calls us all to the humanization of even the most monstrous amongst us. Theology that cannot descend into hell is not theology. Jim Jones and Jonestown tests whether God can be sought in the valley of death\u2026whether there is a hope that transcends all hopelessness.<\/p>\n

I do not excuse Jones. I do not excuse any of the evil that happened in Jonestown. I simply seek God where God seems most absent. My words about Jones and Jonestown are of course an apocalyptic strategy that seeks to pull people closer to a belief that hope is always possible\u2026even for the monsters. If we give up hope for anyone…even the monsters…we\u2019ve given up on humanity itself. There\u2019s nothing more divine than holding on to hope when every voice is telling you to let it go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why Jonestown Should Still Haunts Us Jonestown haunts me. November 18, 1978. Over nine hundred souls lost in the Guyanese jungle under the command of Jim Jones. Let me be clear: Jim Jones was no prophet. He was no shepherd. He was a corrupter of God\u2019s work, a charlatan who masqueraded as a pastor while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":132189,"menu_order":38,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-131689","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/131689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=131689"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/131689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":135411,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/131689\/revisions\/135411"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/132189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=131689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}