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Mass Suicides and Mass Homicides: Collective Violence and the Demise of New Religious Movements. Cusack, Carole M., and James R. Lewis. "Mass Suicides and Mass Homicides: Collective Violence and the Demise of New Religious Movements." The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate. By Michael Stausberg, Stuart A. Wright and Carole M. Cusack. London,: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. 175–190. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350162945.ch-010>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 17:05 UTC. Copyright © Michael Stausberg, Stuart A. Wright, Carole M. Cusack, and contributors 2020. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 10 Mass Suicides and Mass Homicides: Collective Violence and the Demise of New Religious Movements Carole M. Cusack and James R. Lewis With regard to processes of change which are indicative of decline, loss of membership or social and political influence, weakening or fragmentation, and final demise or extinction, in the study of new religious movements (NRMs) no agreed vocabulary has emerged to map the particular trajectories of specific groups or to craft a model that has application across either the “class” of NRMs as a whole, or of certain sub-classes (UFO religions, ephemeral “spiritual” clusters, or neo-Hindu guru focused groups, for example). The language used to describe such negative developments among all religions may be strong and definite (e.g., death, end, eradication) or more modest, as in the use of “demise” as a broad catch-all that can encompass everything from decisive, datable ends to attenuated trends and indicators that bode ill, but where no endgame has been reached (de Jong 2018). The difficulty in identifying unambiguous ends was noted by Bryan R. Wilson more than three decades ago; he linked the failure of new religions to endogenous issues (while acknowledging exogenous pressures might also contribute), and proposed ideology, leadership, organization, constituency, and institutionalization to be the crucial factors (Wilson 1987). The recognition that new religions do not come into existence ex nihilo, but rather were embedded in the culture(s) of the charismatic founder and the early convert community, and that NRMs drew upon existing religious and spiritual concepts and trends (Ashcraft 2018), renders beginnings and endings fluid and mixed, with ambiguity about all but the simplest types of origins and endings being the norm not the exception. The 176 The Demise of Religion clearest case for “endings” in new religions appeared to be in acts of violence, including mass suicide and mass murder (Richardson 2001), upheavals sufficient to make it impossible for the group to continue. This chapter will examine four NRMs—Peoples Temple (1978); the Order of the Solar Temple (1994); Heaven’s Gate (1997); and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (2000)—which met unambiguous ends in mass murder, mass suicide, or a combination of both. Jonestown, Guyana: A Charismatic Leader, an Isolated Community, and the Birth of the “Violent Cult” Stereotype Scholars of NRMs have traditionally opposed the popular journalistic image of the “violent cult.” The popular view of a “cult” generally includes these clichéd elements: a charismatic male leader of questionable sanity who has total control over his followers, a control that includes predatory sexual behavior, monetary dominance, and provocation to deviance and crime; a group of unstable and socially marginal disciples who are disaffected and irrational; the isolation of members from family, friends, and mainstream society; and a doctrinal vision of the end times or the need for the current order to be destroyed, which pushes the group toward extreme violence (Laycock 2013). A survey of media coverage of “violent cults” demonstrates that the archetype for almost all popular accounts of NRMs and violence is the murder-suicides in 1978 at Jonestown in Guyana. This incident, in which 918 people died, effectively ended Peoples Temple, a Christian church founded by Reverend James Warren (Jim) Jones (1931–1978) and his wife Marceline Baldwin Jones (1927–1978) in Indianapolis in 1953 (Moore 2018). In its early years Peoples Temple was focused on civil rights, racial integration, and Jones’s charismatic preaching and faith healing. In 1965 Jim Jones moved the church to California, where counter-cultural values were more socially acceptable. It is important to understand that Jones and Peoples Temple were not seriously regarded as problematic or dangerous right up to the time of the murder-suicides. The young Jones had “left a Methodist pastorate when his congregation resisted the inclusion of blacks in their midst” (Hargrove 1989: 30). In the mid-1970s membership was between 5,000 and Mass Suicides and Mass Homicides 177 7,000 people, and “in 1975, Jones received positive endorsements from San Francisco’s mayor for humanitarian work. In 1977, he received the Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award” (McCloud 2007: 221). It is true that there were detractors: Hugh B. Urban notes that: the San Francisco Examiner published a series of articles attacking Jones’s messianic pretensions and the authoritarian structure of the movement; and in 1977, New West magazine published an exposé suggesting that Peoples Temple should be investigated for financial misdealings, coercive practices, and questionable involvement in San Francisco politics. (Urban 2015: 253) The events of 1978 reversed this positive image forever. A group of family members of some of Jones’s followers, Concerned Relatives, had requested an enquiry into the church, and a United States Congressman, Leo Ryan, flew to Guyana to visit Jonestown, the commune that Peoples Temple had built. He and four companions were shot dead as they prepared to fly back to America; Ryan’s visit caused some members to try to escape with him, which prompted the murders at the air-strip, and that functioned as the proximate cause for the mass deaths at Jonestown (Hall 1989), although Jones’s failing health and increasing paranoia were long-term factors of importance (Lewis 2005: 310). Eileen Barker has argued that the Peoples Temple mass death at Jonestown, Guyana on November 18, 1978, in which 909 died, all but two from poisoning (the aforementioned five murders and four further suicides complete the total of 918 deaths), triggered a “cult panic”: In November 1978 nearly the whole of the Western world had the ‘cult’ problem brought starkly and vividly to its attention. US Congressman Leo Ryan was shot dead at a jungle airport following an investigative visit to Jonestown, a community in Guyana built by members of the People’s Temple. A religious group founded in 1953, the People’s Temple was led by an ordained minister of the Disciples of Christ, the Reverend Jim Jones. A few hours after the murder of Ryan and 4 of his companions, Jones and over 900 of his followers were dead. First, the babies had cyanide squirted down their throats by syringe, and then the older children, followed by the adults lined up to drink from cups of Kool-Aid laced with cyanide—it was a suicide 178 The Demise of Religion ritual that the community had rehearsed on several previous occasions. It was not certain, however, that all Jones’ followers had been entirely willing to make this final gesture … Nearly 300 of the victims had not reached their seventeenth birthday; a further 200 were over 65. (Barker 1986: 329–30) Perhaps the most important thing about Jonestown is that the mass death event was both an instance of both religiously motivated suicide and mass murder. Over the years Jones had developed a rhetoric of martyrdom termed “revolutionary suicide,” which he asserted was “preferable to being taken prisoner, becoming a slave, or returning to the United States” (Moore 2014: 84). In 1978, discussions of revolutionary suicide intensified, and Peoples Temple members went through frequent “White Night” drills and “rehearse(d) a ritual in which they drank what they were told was poison and waited to die” (Moore 2018: 6). That the final drill on November 18 was not an entirely voluntary suicide on the part of all is indicated by Barker, who drew attention to the fact that almost one-third of the group were under seventeen years of age and were thus (particularly in the case of babies and young children) incapable of giving informed consent (Barker 1986). It is a fact that parents gave poison (Flavor Aid laced with cyanide) to their children before drinking it themselves. Two hundred members of Peoples Temple were over sixty-five years old; Rebecca Moore, whose sisters Carolyn Layton and Annie Moore were involved in the planning of the event and died at Jonestown, considers it “likely that many senior citizens were also murdered” (Moore 2018: 7). The events of Jonestown were originally reported as suicides and were immensely shocking. Jones was a Christian minister, so his drug addiction, sexual promiscuity, and the violent fate of his followers were scandalous, and media interest was intense (Krause 1978). As Jason S. Dikes notes that “until the September 11 2001 attacks, Jonestown represented the largest single mass death event of civilians in U.S. history” (Dikes 2019: 95). It is possible that the Jonestown event may not have resulted in the demise of Peoples Temple, given the remaining 4,000–6,000 members who were in America not Guyana. However, the loss of the charismatic leader, Jones, and of much of the church’s leadership (including Jones’s wife Marceline and lover and second-in- command, Carolyn Layton), was a grievous institutional blow. Furthermore, the negative publicity, which fueled the anticult movement and created a Mass Suicides and Mass Homicides 179 climate of anxiety and increased monitoring of “fringe” groups, proved fatal to Jones’s church.
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