Normal Heights author examines what happened at Jonestown three decades ago — to the People’s Temple and her own family

By Glenda Winders

Most people remember hearing about the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana on the news and dismissing it as “crazy.” For anyone born later, it’s a historical reference so obscure that when they thoughtlessly use the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” they don’t even realize the painful connections.

But the event remains forever vivid in the mind of Rebecca Moore. Her two sisters — Annie, 24, and Carolyn, 33 — both died in the mass suicide, and so did her 4-year-old nephew, the child of a love affair between Carolyn and the charismatic Peoples Temple leader, Jim Jones.

Moore, who was 27 at the time, has spent the last three decades researching and writing about the event. The Normal Heights resident will discuss her latest book, “Understanding Jonestown and the Peoples Temple,” on Nov. 18, the 31st anniversary of the event, at 6:30 p.m. in the auditorium of the San Diego Public Library downtown.

The book traces the rise of Jones from the inception of Peoples Temple in Indianapolis as a Pentecostal church, to his ministries in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and finally to the Utopian social experiment that was Jonestown. It explains the events surrounding the suicides and the ongoing struggles of the survivors in an objective manner, but Moore’s close relationship to the subject mitigates the grim story and renders it immensely readable.

“There is no way I can avoid the personal connection,” Moore said in an interview. “My way of dealing with the subject is to think of these people as my sisters at certain moments but also to look at Peoples Temple as a phenomenon of religion so I can kind of keep them separate.”

This ties in with Moore’s role as chair of the Religious Studies Department at San Diego State University, where she teaches classes in new religions and co-edits Nova Religio: the Journal of New and Emergent Religions. Her husband, Fielding McGehee III, works with her in maintaining the Web site that is devoted to collecting data and keeping the memory of the Jonestown victims alive, www.jonestown.sdsu.edu.

Moore might very well have ended up a victim herself. In 1974 she visited her sisters when the group was still based in Redwood Valley, and they urged her to join them. She never heard Jones’ legendary preaching, but she did have a meeting with him while she was there. Still, she wasn’t tempted to take part.

“Maybe I’m not a joiner, or maybe I just didn’t care for him,” she said. “Also I noticed that while they talked a lot about racial equality, the leadership group was pretty white.”

She says the fact that she lived in Washington, D.C., at the time was also a factor in her decision not to get involved, and may ultimately have saved her life.

Later, when the Peoples Temple moved to Guyana, their focus changed from religion to social activism.

“They thought they were building a new society,” Moore said. “They were trying to live out their ideals — anti-colonial movements, peace and justice issues, racial equality, labor issues — in a real and concrete manner. But people said when Jim Jones moved there permanently in 1977 the whole atmosphere changed. Things began to get repressive.”

Eventually what had started out as a positive communal living arrangement began to seem more like a concentration camp. Disenchanted members ran away, and relatives banded together to take legal action, get media attention and lobby government officials to help them get their family members back. In fact, California Rep. Leo Ryan had been there investigating the allegations when he was gunned down at the airport the same day the Temple members took the poison.

Yet with popular opinion turning against him, Jones was able to persuade more than 900 people to join him in a mass suicide.

“Some believed he was God or divine,” Moore said, “but even the most skeptical and most critical people thought he had paranormal abilities.”

Another factor was that Jones had sold the members on what Moore calls “the rhetoric of martyrdom,” and the idea of revolutionary suicide that he had appropriated from Black Panther leader Huey Newton. In her research Moore found at least six times when the group practiced taking poison.

“During those rehearsals people would stand up and say, ‘I’m willing to die for socialism,’ ‘I’m willing to die to protest capitalism,’ and — more disturbing — ‘I’m willing to kill my children to save them from torture'” — a fate Jones had convinced parents awaited their children if the compound were invaded.

“I think by rehearsing the ritual of suicide, by the time the real thing came along, it wasn’t as big a step as we might think,” Moore said.

And, as the Guyana police chief told Moore and her husband when they visited the vacant camp in 1979, Jones was smart: He persuaded parents to kill their children before taking their own lives, thus taking away their motivation to live.

Moore says her obsession with this story began in the days immediately following the suicides, when her family was trying to figure out what had really happened. In the course of her research, she also studied how Jones garnered so much support.

“We can’t really understand it apart from the times in which it arose,” she said. “We were coming out of the 1960s and ’70s and essentially the breakup of the civil rights movement. Here was a group that was attempting to fight the good fight, live out the Christian social gospel and make a difference.”

She said most of the people who survived — who were away from the camp that day or who had escaped — continue to be social activists and typically work in jobs such as public school teachers, librarians and Peace Corps volunteers. But they are stigmatized, often losing their jobs when employers learn about their pasts.

Another issue is that they and their families have never been able to grieve.

“The deaths were so horrifying and the idea of murder and suicide was so repulsive that relatives were denied the legitimacy of grief, and between survivors and relatives there was pretty much a code of silence,” she said. “Many African-Americans felt ashamed because their relatives had followed a white man and been fooled yet again. Others felt guilty that perhaps they didn’t do enough.”

Moore is dedicated to humanizing the people who died in Jonestown — and those who survived.

“They were very ordinary people, just like us, with an extraordinary commitment to living out their ideals,” she said. “If we only define them by their deaths, we are missing the point. We must look at their lives in order to understand what they were about.”

Glenda Winders was editor of Copley News Service and now works as a freelance writer and editor.