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<\/a>In 2015, I spent two months in the US researching Peoples Temple. I visited Richmond, Indiana, where Jim Jones met his wife, Marceline, in the 1950s, and where her grave is located. I visited 7700 East Road in Redwood Valley, California, where the Peoples Temple church constructed in the late 1960s still stands. I sat in kitchens and coffee shops, talking to people who had lost friends and family in Jonestown, and who could have easily been lost themselves. Some of these conversations continued months later, over email or Skype. Not one of them used the word \u201ccult\u201d in earnest.<\/p>\n\u201cWe weren\u2019t a cult, we were a social movement,\u201d one survivor made a point of telling me. \u201cWe were revolutionaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier, the same man had told me about his wife and child dying in his arms. He had told me of his contempt for Jim Jones, the man who ordered their deaths, and who had fostered an atmosphere of such fear and desperation that these orders seemed almost justifiable. He had told me also of his contempt for the current state of US politics, Trump\u2019s racism, sexism and fear-mongering. As far as I could tell, he seemed like a reasonable person, albeit one who had lost a lot.<\/p>\n
Originally, the word \u201ccult\u201d simply meant \u201cto worship\u201d. Deriving from the same root as \u201cculture\u201d and \u201ccultivation\u201d, it described rituals and offerings intended to cultivate the favour of gods, saints and other holy figures. The term later took on negative connotations, and by the mid-20th century was mostly associated with charlatans and violent or otherwise bizarre fringe groups.<\/p>\n
Today, a cult might loosely be defined as any group exhibiting a combination of qualities including (but not limited to): a charismatic leader, mind-altering practices, sexual and economic control and exploitation of members, us-versus-them attitudes towards outsiders, and an ends-justify-the-means philosophy.<\/p>\n
By this definition, it\u2019s difficult to argue that Peoples Temple\u00a0wasn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>a cult. After all, they had a leader who was notoriously charismatic and who exerted a disproportionate level of control over his congregation. Members were often overworked and overtired, their finances and sex lives regulated by leadership. Relationships with outsiders were generally discouraged, and Jones was known to sexually abuse both male and female followers. Meanwhile, an ends-justify-the-means line of thinking was employed to justify everything from faked healings to the ultimate massacre of more than 900 individuals.<\/p>\nYet I can understand the impulse of Jonestown survivors, and others, to shy away from the \u201ccult\u201d label. It\u2019s reductive, at best; dehumanising, at worst. \u201cCult is an expression reserved for those religions of which we disapprove,\u201d states Rebecca Moore, a religious studies scholar who lost two sisters and a nephew in Jonestown. When headlines labelled the Jonestown dead \u201ccultists\u201d in the days immediately following the massacre, they relegated them to the sidelines of humanity.<\/p>\n
This made it easier for the public to distance themselves from the tragedy and its victims, dismissing them as weak, gullible, unsuited to life and unworthy of postmortem respect. Bodies weren\u2019t autopsied. Families were denied the timely return of their relatives\u2019 remains. A thousand \u201cdon\u2019t drink the Kool-Aid\u201d jokes were launched.<\/p>\n
Is the violence of the group\u2019s demise, and our eagerness to distance ourselves from it, ultimately to blame for the persistence of the \u201ccult\u201d label? Certainly, we seldom hear of cults that don\u2019t end catastrophically. Certainly, had Jonestown ended some other way \u2013 with Jim Jones dying of natural causes, for instance, and his followers leaving the group or carrying on without him \u2013 Peoples Temple would likely be remembered differently. As significant as the violence is, however, all kinds of violent deeds have been perpetrated in the name of religion, from wars to witch-burnings to child sex abuse cover-ups. Why isn\u2019t the C-word applied, in these cases?<\/p>\n
The association between \u201ccult\u201d and \u201ccool\u201d is a more recent phenomenon. We talk of cult films, cult bands, cult novels, the cult of fitness, Bitcoin and Justin Bieber. It seems that almost anything can be called a cult, provided it has a following \u2013 a trend that feels especially meta, given the contemporary craze for cult-related media. Popular true crime podcast My Favorite Murdereven went so far as to establish a \u201cFan Cult\u201d, offering members exclusive content and matching T-shirts at a cost of $39.99 per annum.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to know what to make of the cult craze. In some ways, it seems to be an extension of our enthusiasm for all things vintage \u2013 think \u201ccult\u201d, and you\u2019ll likely think of long hair, folk blouses, a groovy soundtrack \u2013 combined with our enduring craving for sex and violence in media. Yet the appeal of stories about people adopting alternative lifestyles, often involving communal living and a return to nature, might be further explained by the frustrations of late-stage capitalist society and growing anxieties about climate change.<\/p>\n
Whatever the explanation, I believe that the current popularity of cult stories presents an opportunity for these stories to be told differently \u2013 more sympathetically, with an emphasis on the humanity of followers rather than just the bloodshed and crazy-charismatic leaders. Because, ultimately, cult stories are human stories. They\u2019re stories of community, the search for meaning and a better life. In such stories, we can all find a bit of ourselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Editor\u2019s note: This article was originally published in The Guardian of London, on November 18, 2018.) All kinds of violent deeds have been perpetrated in the name of religion, from wars to witch-burnings to child sex abuse cover-ups. Why don\u2019t we use the word cult more widely? Cults are hot right now, or so it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":65374,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-84734","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84734","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=84734"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118241,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/84734\/revisions\/118241"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}