Indiana beginnings
In 1951, Jones became a member of the Communist Party USA, and began attending meetings and rallies in Indianapolis.[11] Jones became flustered with harassment he received during the McCarthy Hearings,[11] particularly regarding meetings between Jones and his mother with Paul Robeson.[12] He also became frustrated with what he perceived to be ostracism of open communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.[13] This frustration, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself "how can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church."[11][12]
Jones' interest in religion began during his childhood, primarily because he found making friends difficult, though initially he vacillated on his church of choice.[3] Jones was surprised when a Methodist superintendent helped Jones to get a start in the church even though he knew Jones to be a communist and Jones did not meet him through the American Communist Party.[13] In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation.[11] Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at the Seventh Day Baptist Church.[11] He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that, with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals.[11]
Jones then began his own church, which changed names until it became the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel.[11] Jones sold pet monkeys door-to-door to raise funds for his church.[14]
Jones moved away from the American Communist Party and Maoists when ACP members and Mao Zedong became critical of some of former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's policies.[13]
Integrationist
In 1960, Indianapolis Democratic Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones as a director of the Human Rights Commission.[15] Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs.[15] When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, Jones resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and climaxed with "Let my people go!"[16]
During this time, Jones also helped to integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital.[11] After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting African Americans and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight.[17] Jones set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to serve African American customers.[17] Jones wrote to American Nazi leaders and then leaked their responses to the media.[18] When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, Jones refused to be moved and began to make the beds, and empty the bed pans, of black patients.[19] Political pressures resulting from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards.[19]
Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views.[11] White owned businesses and locals were critical of him.[17] A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile and a dead cat was thrown at Jones' house after a threatening phone call.[18] Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them.[18]
"Rainbow family"
Jim and Marceline Jones adopted several children of at least partial non-Caucasian ancestry; he referred to the clan as his "rainbow family,"[20] and stated: "Integration is a more personal thing with me now. It's a question of my son's future."[21] That comported with Jones' portrayal of the Temple overall as a "rainbow family."
The couple adopted three children of Korean-American ancestry: Lew, Suzanne and Stephanie. Jones had been encouraging Temple members to adopt orphans from war ravaged Korea.[22] Jones had long been critical of the United States' opposition to communist leader Kim Il-Sung's 1950 invasion of South Korea, calling it the "war of liberation" and stating that "the south is a living example of all that socialism in the north has overcome."[23] In 1954, he and his wife also adopted Agnes Jones, who was partly of Native American descent.[21][24] Agnes was 11 at the time of her adoption.[25] Suzanne Jones was adopted at the age of six in 1959.[25] In June 1959, the couple had their only biological child, Stephan Gandhi Jones.[24]
Two years later, in 1961, the Joneses became the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child, James Warren Jones, Jr.[26] Marceline was once spat upon while she carried Jim Jr. [18]
The couple also adopted another son, who was white, named Tim.[24] Tim Jones, whose birth mother was a member of the Peoples Temple, was originally named Timothy Glen Tupper.[21]
Asylum
After a 1961 Temple speech about nuclear apocalypse,[19] and a January 1962 Esquire Magazine article listing Belo Horizonte, Brazil, as a safe place in a nuclear war, Jones traveled with his family to the Brazilian city with the idea of setting up a new Temple location.[27]
On his way to Brazil, Jones made his first trip into Guyana.[28] After arriving in Belo Horizonte, the Joneses rented a modest three bedroom home.[29] Jones studied the local economy and receptiveness of racial minorities to his message, though language remained a barrier.[30] Jones was careful to not portray himself as a communist in foreign territory, and spoke of an apostolic communal lifestyle rather than of Castro or Marx.[31]
After becoming frustrated with the lack of resources in the locale, in mid-1963, the Joneses moved to Rio de Janeiro.[32] There, they worked with the poor in Rio's slums.[32] Jones also explored local Brazilian religion. [33]
Jones was plagued by guilt for leaving behind the Indiana civil rights struggle and possibly losing what he had struggled to build there.[32] When Jones' associate preachers in Indiana told him that the Temple was about to collapse without him, Jones returned.[34]
California Eden
After Jones' return to Indiana from Brazil, in 1965, Jones claimed that the world would be engulfed in a nuclear war on July 15, 1967, that would then create a new socialist Eden on earth, and that the Temple must move to Northern California for safety.[11][35] Accordingly, the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California.[11]
While Jones always spoke of the social gospel's virtues, before the late 1960s Jones chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism.[11] By the late 1960s, Jones began at least partially openly revealing in Temple sermons his "Apostolic Socialism" concept.[11] Specifically, "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment -- socialism."[36] Jones often mixed those concepts, such as preaching that "If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin."[37]
By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as "fly away religion," rejecting the Bible as being white men’s' justification to subordinate women and subjugate people of color and stating that it spoke of a "Sky God" who was no God at all.[11] Jones authored a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth," criticizing the Bible.[38] Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, Mahatma Gandhi, Buddha, Vladimir Lenin, and Father Divine. In the documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, former Temple member Hue Fortson, Jr. quoted Jones as saying, "What you need to believe in is what you can see...If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father...If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God."[39]
By the Spring of 1976, Jones began openly admitting even to outsiders that he was an atheist.[40] Despite the Temple's fear that the IRS was investigating its religious tax exemption, by 1977 Marceline Jones admitted to the New York Times that, as early as age 18 when he watched his then idol Mao Zedong overthrow the Chinese government, Jim Jones realized that the way to achieve social change through Marxism in the United States was to mobilize people through religion.[35] She stated that "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion," and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling "I've got to destroy this paper idol!" [35] In one sermon, Jones said that, "You're gonna help yourself, or you'll get no help! There's only one hope of glory; that's within you! Nobody's gonna come out of the sky! There's no heaven up there! We'll have to make heaven down here!"[41]
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