Times\u00a0have changed. I began teaching about Jonestown in university-level sociology of\u00a0religion courses soon after the murders and mass suicide. In the beginning, all\u00a0the students knew some basic things about what had happened in November 1978,\u00a0and many students could say exactly where they were and what they were doing\u00a0when they first heard about it.<\/p>\n
In\u00a01989, when I moved to UC Davis, I found that a small but surprising number of\u00a0students came from families who had known a member of Peoples Temple. Others,\u00a0when we discussed Jonestown in class, came back to report that their parents\u00a0had memories of the events of 1977 and 1978, or recalled seeing Peoples Forum<\/i>, or had even attended a\u00a0<\/span>Peoples Temple service.<\/span><\/p>\n More\u00a0than three decades later, an increasing number of students have never heard\u00a0about Jonestown, and those who have heard of it rarely have any kind of direct\u00a0knowledge about it. Beyond the superficial zeitgeist<\/i> references to \u201cdrinking the Kool-Aid,\u201d those few with any knowledge at all seem\u00a0to have obtained it almost entirely from the mass-media documentaries or\u00a0docudramas.<\/p>\n However,\u00a0almost every time I offer a course on religion, a few students want to do their\u00a0term papers on Peoples Temple. The difficulty is that, although some students\u00a0<\/span>may consult Wikipedia or other websites, such students typically come to their\u00a0<\/span>topic as something of a narrative set-piece that traces the story of Peoples\u00a0<\/span>Temple not as history, but as myth. Perhaps some of them have found the term\u00a0<\/span>paper entitled \u201cThe Jonestown Massacre\u201d for sale for $60 on the internet, or\u00a0<\/span>the one comparing Jonestown and Masada, or a free paper on Jonestown as a\u00a0<\/span>\u201ccult.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n When\u00a0students want to write about Jonestown, I encourage them to do so, but I insist\u00a0that if they already know the answers to the questions that they are posing,\u00a0they write about a different topic. The biggest challenge for them is coming to\u00a0see that Jonestown is not a \u201cnatural\u201d pre-given \u201cthing,\u201d but a complex array of\u00a0many events that can be considered from a variety of points of view, addressing\u00a0<\/span>a wide range of questions.<\/span><\/p>\n Thus,\u00a0for students, writing about Jonestown is a wonderful opportunity to learn about\u00a0conducting research, weighing evidence, considering alternative explanations,\u00a0and coming to the humility of adulthood, in which we (hopefully) reach the\u00a0understanding that we can\u2019t know everything, even about something that has been\u00a0subjected to intense scrutiny, and that our conclusions are at best provisional\u00a0and open to further consideration.<\/span><\/p>\n Of\u00a0course, most students do not take up the project of writing about Jonestown, so\u00a0the larger question concerns teaching about the subject. Students today often\u00a0seek to turn any sociological analysis into a moral narrative, and thus,\u00a0<\/span>whether they have heard of Jim Jones or not, when they begin to learn about the\u00a0tragic events, they are often predisposed toward adopting a narrative viewpoint\u00a0that casts Jones as villain.<\/span><\/p>\n Of\u00a0course, there is a lot of evidence to support this view. However, it is not the\u00a0<\/span>whole story, and the major challenge I have faced is getting them to hold back\u00a0<\/span>from instant analysis and to avoid presuppositions. One sure way to do this is\u00a0<\/span>to provide them with resources \u2013 both original archival materials such as those\u00a0<\/span>available on this website \u2013 and scholarly and popular accounts of Temple\u00a0<\/span>history.<\/span><\/p>\n In\u00a0the late 1980s, <\/span>Tom Zaniello, <\/span>an English\u00a0<\/span>writing teacher, <\/span>published a set of documents in his book Explorations in Reading and Writing <\/i>(New York: Random House, 1987).\u00a0Zaniello\u2019s book is out of print, I suspect, but his book suggests a great project:\u00a0give students a series of materials, and ask them to write a brief reading\u00a0<\/span>report. I have modified the suggestion slightly: I have students read materials\u00a0<\/span>and then discuss them.<\/span><\/p>\n What I have found, for the most part, is that once\u00a0students move away from free floating narratives to the study of actions and\u00a0events, they can switch gears and become far more analytic, asking questions\u00a0such as how many people willingly drank the poison, or whether Don Sly\u2019s attack\u00a0on Leo Ryan was staged, or whether the Concerned Relatives were concerned that\u00a0<\/span>their visit might precipitate violence.<\/span><\/p>\n Teaching about Peoples Temple and Jonestown is not\u00a0easy, because it brings out the strongest tendencies to revert to\u00a0<\/span>preconceptions or simplistic mythological narratives. But precisely for those\u00a0<\/span>reasons, it is a subject that offers students great potential for moving to the\u00a0<\/span>next level of analytic reasoning in relation to the complex and morally uneven\u00a0<\/span>events of social life.<\/span><\/p>\n (For further reading, see Thomas Robbins and John R. Hall, \u201cNew religious\u00a0movements and violence,\u201d pp. 245-70 in David Bromley, ed., <\/i>Teaching New\u00a0Religious Movements (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).<\/p>\n (John R. Hall, author of <\/i>Gone from the Promised\u00a0Land, teaches in the Department of\u00a0Sociology at University of California – Davis. His complete collection of writings for <\/i>the jonestown report may be found here<\/a>. His e-mail is jrhall@ucdavis.edu<\/a>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Times\u00a0have changed. I began teaching about Jonestown in university-level sociology of\u00a0religion courses soon after the murders and mass suicide. In the beginning, all\u00a0the students knew some basic things about what had happened in November 1978,\u00a0and many students could say exactly where they were and what they were doing\u00a0when they first heard about it. In\u00a01989, when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":30345,"menu_order":8,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-30262","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30262","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\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30262"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57841,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30262\/revisions\/57841"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}