{"id":31412,"date":"2013-07-25T16:37:32","date_gmt":"2013-07-25T16:37:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alternativejonestown.com\/?page_id=31412"},"modified":"2014-02-17T22:55:08","modified_gmt":"2014-02-17T22:55:08","slug":"lattin","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=31412","title":{"rendered":"Children of Jonestown and the Children of God"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Jonestown was more than a story for those of us on the staff of the San Francisco Examiner<\/i>. It was personal. Two of our colleagues, reporter Tim Reiterman and photographer Greg Robinson, were among the band of journalists who accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan to South America and tried to leave Guyana with a small group of Peoples Temple defectors. Reiterman was wounded and Robinson murdered in the airstrip attack that ended Ryan\u2019s life and set the stage for the mass murder\/suicide back at the jungle compound.<\/p>\n

At the time, I was a 25-year-old general assignment reporter covering news and writing feature stories for the Examiner\u2019s <\/i>East Bay bureau. The \u201ccult wars\u201d of the 1970s were in full swing. The previous year, I\u2019d written some stories looking at how the Unification Church lured undergraduates at the University of California into the messianic vision of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Those stories did little to prepare me for the horror of Jonestown.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t just the personal grief and rage over the murder of a friend and colleague. It was the haunting image of idealistic mothers squirting poison down their baby\u2019s throats, then taking their own lives \u2013 all in the name of God and progressive politics.<\/p>\n

Three hundred and fourteen children died at Jonestown. Many of them had parents who were convinced that Jim Jones was the people\u2019s messiah, a left-wing prophet dedicated to protecting them from an oppressive and evil American government. Their parents may have been duped, or may have chosen their own fate, but the kids had no choice but to go along on that doomed pilgrimage to the South America jungle. Many of the Jonestown children and teenagers were young African-Americans who were poor, running out of second chances, and had nowhere else to go. One of the Examiner<\/i> stories I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the carnage was an investigation into how Temple insiders used county social service jobs to get troubled young people sent to Jonestown as an alternative to juvenile hall.<\/p>\n

My need to understand what motivates people to join new religious movements was one of the main reasons I volunteered a few years later to become the religion writer at the Examiner<\/i>. No one else wanted the job. More than two decades later, when I was working as the religion reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>, I still had this fascination with kids in cults. A series of articles on children born and raised in the Unification Church, the Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas and the Children of God led to a book titled Following of Bliss \u2013 How the Spiritual Ideals of Sixties Shape Our Lives Today<\/i>.\u00a0 In the book, I argue that the \u201cSixties,\u201d defined more as a state of mind than a frame of time, began with President Kennedy\u2019s inaugural address on January 20, 1961, and ended in Guyana on November 18, 1978.\u00a0 Kennedy\u2019s speech (\u201cAsk not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country\u201d) set the stage for the idealism, religious activism and social commitment that defined the best of the Sixties. The era finally ends with the implosion of Peoples Temple, a movement that mixed religious revival, leftist politics, the fight for social justice and the \u201cus verses them\u201d divisiveness of the Sixties counterculture. Its leader was a charismatic, paranoid, manipulative man who used politics, sex, religion and social idealism to control people and gain power.<\/p>\n

Jonestown, in my view, represents the death of the Sixties, but it did not end my fascination with children who grew up in religious cults. That obsession was rekindled with another murder\/suicide on January 8, 2005. That\u2019s when Ricky \u201cDavidito\u201d Rodriguez, a young man christened to be the prince and future prophet of the another revolutionary Christian movement, stabbed a leader of the sect, then took his own life. Like countless other children raised in the Children of God, Ricky was sexually abused by adult members following the \u201cfree love\u201d teachings of their charismatic prophet.\u00a0 My latest book, Jesus Freaks \u2013 A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge<\/i>, is the story of the events leading up to this murder\/suicide \u2013 a story of messianic delusion, political paranoia, sexual abuse, and blind faith.<\/p>\n

Looking back, it\u2019s easy to see the similarities in the prophetic careers of\u00a0 Jim Jones and David \u201cMoses\u201d Berg, the founder of the Children of God\/Family International. By that, I am not <\/i>saying that the Family International is \u201canother Jonestown.\u201d\u00a0 We can argue all day as to whether the followers of Jim Jones or David Berg are\u00a0 \u201cbrainwashed\u201d victims or sincere ideological converts. But one thing is clear as we approached the 30th anniversary of Jonestown, and that is this: the murdered children of Peoples Temple and the countless children sexually abused in the Children of God stand out as the real victims of the cult wars of the seventies, eighties and beyond.<\/p>\n

(Don Lattin can be contacted through his website at www.donlattin.com<\/a>. A paperback edition of <\/i>Jesus Freaks<\/a> was released by HarperCollins in September 2008.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonestown was more than a story for those of us on the staff of the San Francisco Examiner. It was personal. Two of our colleagues, reporter Tim Reiterman and photographer Greg Robinson, were among the band of journalists who accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan to South America and tried to leave Guyana with a small group […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"parent":31470,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-31412","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31412","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=31412"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56245,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31412\/revisions\/56245"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}