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Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Religion in North America)
Salvation and Suicide An Interpretation of Jim Jones the Peoples Temple and Jonestown - Religion in North America Author:David Chidester Jonestown. The word connotes tragedy and elicits responses of horror and dismay. The mass murder-suicide of over 900 persons on 18 November 1978 marked the end of one of the most controversial of modern religious movements and the beginning of America's struggle to understand it. A variety of strategies to explain Jonestown emerged in the wa... more »ke of the event. They were largely one-sided, aimed at distancing ourselves from Jonestown and negating the humanity of the Jonestown dead.
David Chidester now offers an important corrective to these earlier explanations. In the first full-length treatment of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown from a history of religions perspective, Chidester takes the Peoples Temple seriously for what it was, a religious movement. Incorporating primary source material from State Department files and FBI tapes of Jim Jones's sermons, Chidester carefully reconstructs the discourse of the Peoples Temple leader. Jones's words constituted the received message of those who lived - and died - for the movement. What was this message? What was the world-view shared by Jim Jones and his followers?
As Chidester clearly shows us, their world-view was distinctively religious and human - and not so strange to us as we might choose to believe.« less