Facing Jim Jones & Jonestown: In Defense of Hopeful Writing

*This essay is a defense of my desire to wrestle with the horrors of Jim Jones and Jonestown…while still clinging to a hope for universal reconciliation…universal humanization.

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’s 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, “drinking the Kool-Aid.” But I refuse that flattening. I refuse to let theology look away. To do so would be to abandon God’s presence in the valley of death.

Seeking God in the Valley of Death

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, numerous books, articles, and even an extended collection of the sermons of Jim Jones to illustrate his development as both preacher and monster (many available for free on the Alternative Considerations of Jonestown & Peoples Temple website and the rest available on Amazon), are a search for God in the abyss…a 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’s Spirit still hovers there, just as it did in the opening verses of Genesis…the beginning of time and space.

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

Jim Jones as False Shepherd and Anti-Christ

Love was twisted into a weapon by Jones. He said, “without me, life has no meaning.” Survivors testified, “I was brainwashed into believing that I was worthless and that life had no meaning without him.” 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…coerced love is demonic. When you miss this truth…you don’t know God at all.

The death tape reveals the corruption of Jones’ heart. “Even in the midst of death, Jones wants to kill more.” Pastoral vocation inverted. Shepherding becomes domination. Kenosis becomes consumption. He was the anti-pastor. As I’ve said, Jones was “the Judas who thought he was Jesus, the Anti-Christ who baptized in Kool-Aid instead of water.” 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.

Resurrection After Jonestown

But Jonestown is not only death…it is also resurrection. In my The Resurrection of Jonestown (2019), I proclaim, “Our siblings from Jonestown are not dead. They are still marching with us… in our struggles against racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, economic injustice.” 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, “The blood of Jonestown is Eucharistic, it will not let us go.” This is not rhetorical flourish. This is truth. Jonestown refuses to be a footnote. It demands remembrance…prophetic solidarity…deep struggle…a continued fight for the reconciliation of all things.

Wrestling with God in Horror

My trilogy (perhaps my most recognized works on Jones and Jonestown), The Slaughter of God (2018), Systematic Theology/Shit (2020), Five Visions of Jim Jones/Jonestown (2020), pushes this confrontation. In The Slaughter of God, I name Jones both “prolific oppressor” and “Anti-Christ.” And I ask, “Is God absent in horror, or present in the darkness?” In Systematic Theology/Shit, I wrestle mystically with God’s hiddenness. “The people of Jonestown were children of God. Can we finally treat them as such?” I question God’s lack of engagement in stopping the tragedy. In Five Visions, I examine Jones through resurrection, healing, silence. Even he exists within God’s eschaton (the eternal presence of hope)…let there be no doubt…his actions were monstrous, inhuman, demonic. But this trilogy refuses closure…it declares Jonestown to be a mirror that refuses to look away.

Dr. Rebecca Moore, writing in The University of Chicago Divinity School’s publication Sightings, observes: “[Hood’s writings] humanize all those present in Peoples Temple, including Jim Jones… while affirming that some sort of existential mystery continues to surround the Jonestown event.” Where others analyze, I theologize. Where others avert their eyes, I sit. Turn your back on Jonestown and you’ve turned your back on Golgotha too. To face it is to stare into the abyss and proclaim resurrection…to demand hope amidst hopelessness.

Humanization and Universal Reconciliation

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…whether there is a hope that transcends all hopelessness.

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…even for the monsters. If we give up hope for anyone…even the monsters…we’ve given up on humanity itself. There’s nothing more divine than holding on to hope when every voice is telling you to let it go.