What is the Difference Between a Cult and a Religion? — Part Three
Photo by Luca Baggio
There aren’t many people who have not heard of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple and his horrifying execution of over 900 followers that came in the guise of a mass suicide. How could that have happened? How could anyone have that kind of power over such a large mass of people to make outsiders think they volunteered to drink the cyanide concoction? It was not voluntary. On November 18th, 1978, the people were forced at the point of a shotgun to drink the Kool-Aid. The question then becomes: how could anyone who supposedly loved his flock do that to them?
Jim Jones, from Crete, Indiana, was a magnetic, yet somewhat unbalanced person who had a vision. In his youth, he was always holding church services or funerals for dead animals at his home. Many knew that some of those animals had been found dead, but others he had killed himself.
When he got older and was married with one child, he and his wife adopted several different ethnicities of children, urging others to do the same. He called them his ‘rainbow family.’
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With his ambition to become a church leader, he first became a student pastor. But because he thought the church should be integrated and the church’s leaders were against integration at that time, Jones left to start a church of his own.
In the process of garnering enough money to build up his own congregation, he would hold well-staged ‘healing rituals’ to attract followers. Those believers, who contributed generously to his coffers, helped him gain enough money to organize the integrated Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1956.
He was a charismatic man with a socialistic vision who demanded loyalty within his flock. He talked about how capitalism caused an unhealthy balance in the world and preached about sacrifice and activism. One of his goals was to help the poor. Not bad ambitions for a preacher. But when an investigation into his made-up healing rituals began, Jones knew he’d be caught in his charade and decided to move on.
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He and nearly 65 families moved to California where it seemed that an integrated church was much more accepted. His congregation grew. The Peoples Temple was praised by local politicians for its efforts in helping the elderly, the mentally ill, the drug addicts and for fostering children. Jones was trusted and believed to have a clear vision of what was needed to change in the U.S. which made the Peoples Temple an amazing success.
At least it looked to be such from the outside. Jones, in reality, was more complex and unbalanced than anyone suspected. Inside closed doors, the Temple was transforming into a cult.
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Jones had the members pledge not only their devotion, their money, and all their material goods to him and, in some cases, members had to sign over custody of their children.
He had become power-hungry and began describing himself as the true Jesus and later even claimed that he was God. He was believed.
He’d been on a regimen of drugs but began taking larger amounts of amphetamines and barbiturates to help him work harder and longer. However, the drugs began to cause a deterioration in his health, mood swings, and paranoia. He began to believe the government was after him and decided to move the Peoples Temple to Guyana, South America.
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When he got to Guyana and procured a piece of land that seemed uninhabitable, Jones lied to his people but convinced many to join him because the settlement was a ‘utopian commune’ and all was beautiful. Yet, upon arrival, the followers saw immediately that the place was anything but utopian. They had been conned, but what could they do?
Photo by Luan Cabral
The atrocious conditions meant that each person had to put in long hours and work hard to overcome them. They had to make the area habitable by building make-shift structures in which to sleep, planting gardens for food to eat, and they had to overcome their disappointments and realizations that this was not the utopia promised them. But they were stuck in an untenable situation because Jones was not the man they had revered. They were too far away from home and were under Jones’s control with no way of getting out. Complaining secretly in letters to their families back home was their only recourse.
Part of Jones’ control over them, likely to keep the group from becoming too disgruntled with him, was by giving them drugs of Quaaludes, Valium, morphine, Demerol, and Thorazine he had stockpiled. The followers were always in a ‘zone-like’ state to be kept from complaining; to be kept from thinking.
When word of the group’s horrible living conditions did reach some relatives they began to put pressure on the government into taking action. It was Representative Leo Ryan of California who stepped in.
He and his staff flew to Guyana to see for themselves what the living conditions were like at the settlement of his countrymen called Jonestown. He was met with a paranoid, drug-addled leader who thought Ryan was out to get him. Jones had some of his followers launch an attack on the group that left Ryan and four others dead.
Even in his drug-addled mind, Jones realized he was screwed and prompted the forced-by-gunpoint drinking of the cyanide-laced ‘Kool-Aid.’ The people of the compound, who had believed in him, followed him, and worked hard for him were to be thanked with an untimely death by his order.
Jones had made certain all were dead before he was killed himself by a shotgun wound to the head. The question that will never be answered was: did he take his own life or did someone help him?
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The incident was so horrendous and shocking that the news traveled worldwide. The expression: ‘drinking the Kool-Aid’, meaning: ‘believing in a flawed and potentially dangerous idea’ — was the legacy Jones left behind.
No shit! I say to myself. How could people be so gullible? I really want to know.
But then, that question flared up even more emphatically when I read David Koresh’s story.
What the fuck?! How could anyone be so enthralled by a leader who wanted to take them into the bowels of hell to burn, including the children? I didn’t get it! And I started to piece together the life of David Koresh. This is a summarized version of a very long story:
This young unkempt-looking guy comes along who claims he is the new Messiah and he is believed. Okay. I can see that happening, since it has happened so many times before and will likely continue to happen. Like lemmings, there are followers. A psychologist could explain the need to follow a leader and could explain the desire to please that leader. After all, most of us are conditioned to honor and obey our parents, our teachers, our president, and our spouse. But when it comes to agreeing to stay in a house with a crazy person who’d command everyone to burn together along with their innocent children? No way! How can that be explained in an understandable way?
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Koresh’s real name was Vernon Howell. When he was 25, he took a trip to Europe and other places that included Israel to recruit followers. While in Israel, he had an epiphany that he was the modern-day King Cyrus. King Cyrus was the one who had allowed the Jews to return to Israel, so he changed his name to Koresh…Koresh is Hebrew for Cyrus and means ‘a lot of fire’. He felt his new name gave him credence and boosted his powers of persuasion.
Photo by Alicia Quan
He had been conditioned early in his life with an apocalyptic mentality after being brought up in the Seven-day Adventist church, whose faith is wrapped around expectant prophets who preached the end-of-the-world. The Branch Davidians were an offshoot of that faith, founded by Victor Houteff who established his headquarters in Waco, Texas in 1935. After his death, his widow, Florence Houteff, predicted that God’s Kingdom would come on April 22, 1959. Followers from around the country who’d heard the widow’s prediction sold all their possessions, quit their jobs, and moved to Waco to await the moment.
However, that day became known to the Branch Davidians as the Great Disappointment. But what they wouldn’t have known at that time was 1959 was the same year Vernon Howell was born. It wouldn’t be until years later that Vernon Howell got wind of the Seven-day Adventists offshoot church, the Branch Davidians, in Waco, Texas, who believed the end was soon to come and he went to Waco to join it.
He wanted to be involved but was not taken seriously. That is until he had sex with the 67-year-old leader, Lois Roden, and got her pregnant. She miscarried but by that time he was on his way to having the followers believe in him and his preachings when the woman finally passed away. By that time, he had connected the dots of the non-event of Houteff’s 1959 prediction, with his birthdate 33 years later, and made it known that the coincident was destiny. Since he was the same age as Jesus Christ when he died, Koresh began to persuade the people of the Branch Davidians into thinking he was the reincarnation of Christ and was the true Messiah.
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Although Koresh was a pathological liar and con man who loved sex as much as he did the Bible, he couldn’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, but he knew his Bible verses. He would read the book frontwards and back, having memorized many pages to spew out when he needed to impress his followers.
Because of his obsession with sex and power, after conning his way into leadership of the Branch Davidians, he made all the men leave their wives so that he could have them solely for himself. He told the men it was God’s will that they remain celibate, which included no masturbation — an extreme hardship for them — but it was a form of control for Koresh.
He would not tolerate any relationship that seemed more important to a person than he was. The children were taught that he was their father and he was also their God. But the children, even as young as eight months, were traumatized by Koresh’s disciplinary techniques, which included going to a whipping room so that their screams couldn’t be heard by others. They were trained at a young age in paramilitary actions instead of normal childhood upbringings and were made to realize that sex at eleven and twelve was normal and desirable because it was part of ‘God’s plan’. The girls looked forward to being picked as one of his brides.
Koresh’s first wife was only fourteen years old but then slept with her sister who was twelve. He had sex with many of the other women, also, and sired as many as 16 children. Only four of them survived the holocaust.
Koresh told his people that the reason for his Second Coming was to prepare the flock for Armageddon. He had convinced them, without question, that they were the chosen ones and he was the one and only way to heaven. He told them that soon the world would end and all nonbelievers would be shut out of the Glorious Kingdom where the Branch Davidians would go. They believed him. To prepare for the end, they began to amass an arsenal, the likes of which stunned the ATF.
Photo by Samuel Penn
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found out about the arsenal and sent agents to check it out. There is controversy about who began firing first, but there was a barrage of bullets on that first day, with four agents killed.
That was the beginning of an even more horrifying end.
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Continue reading by clicking here for part four.
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If you missed it, read part one here.