Question Home

Position:Home>Arts & Humanities> What happened to The People's Temple after the mass suicide in Guyana?


Question:

What happened to The People's Temple after the mass suicide in Guyana?

Were there still people that followed the teaching? Or did everyone get a rude awakening?


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I actually had the same questions around Christmas time last year, so I dug up a lot of obscure information, and I was surprised to find that the actual People's Temple survived the mass suicide.

There were 100-200 members of the church scattered around when the mass suicide took place in 1978. Most of them were back in the US, trying to wrap up Temple business. Jones had a habit of "calling" people, or inviting them to Jonestown, so people who hadn't been invited didn't go. Most of the people who were still in the US were involved in financial aspects and relations with the press, as well as more mundane things like selling off personal property.

The mass suicide was very hard on the people who were not there. Some of them took their lives almost immediately, as they felt that was the only way to join their friends and families who had died. Others tried desperately to uncover what they believed must have been a US government plot against the Temple. Jim Jones had been telling his followers for a long time that if something should go wrong, the CIA would come down and kill them all because they were a threat to the US. A lot of the members who were still alive completely believed that and tried to prove that Jones had nothing to do with the killing of Congressman Ryan and the other people who were killed on the airstrip, and that the people who died were actually coerced not by Jones, but by an unforgiving world which refused to recognize the grandeur of their organization. They made a lot of apologetic noise, defending Jones and all the weird stuff he did. And they stayed together, sort of. They kept their building in San Francisco, and continued their campaign to clear Jones' name.

A lot of former members sort of drifted away after a few years, and most either rejoined churches they had previously belonged to, or continued to live isolated lifestyles, trying to keep the Temple's "works" going. There was a lot of pressure from the press, and congressional hearings, and people whose family members had died, and everyone wanted answers. As people pushed for answers, more members left or killed themselves because they couldn't handle the pressure.

The main thing about the People's Temple was that Jones was really the driving force. It was sort of a personality cult, so after he died, the remaining members didn't know what to do. It took about five years for the remainder of the members to either scatter or die. To my surprise, there are still a few of them out there. Most of them have gone into hiding, or changed their names, but continue to try and clear Jones' name, because they truly believe he was the Messiah. Some of the surviving members still consider themselves members of The People's Temple, and still adhere to the things they were taught by Jones. They hold a memorial every year on 18 November, the date of the mass suicide.

There were two really interesting things I found when I was researching last winter. One is a transcript of a tape from the meeting where they killed themselves. It is interesting because you get a real idea of how Jones had brainwashed people and how he talked to them, etc. He really had a huge ego and a way of messing with people's heads. Here's a link to the transcript:

http://employees.oneonta.edu/downinll/ma...

The other one is the official memorial site. If you read it you find that "survivors" gather each year:

http://www.jones-town.org/index.html...

The whole tragedy is a strange story. My research left me with a lot of questions, and actually was very unsettling.