James Warren Jones was born in the midst of the Great Depression in a rural Indiana town. His father, an injured WWI veteran, was largely absent from his life. His mother, the Pentecostal Church, and the racial segregation of his community profoundly influenced Jones’ early life.
His mother was not inclined to participate in organized religion. Rather, Jones was introduced to the Pentecostal Church by a neighbor. The experience also appears to be the genesis of Jones’ utopian impulse. Jones would later recall, “In Pentecostal tradition, I saw that where the early believers stay together they sold all their possessions and had all things in common.”
Jones and the Theology of Social Justice
Jim Jones would take his impressions of Pentecostal worship with him to Richmond, Indiana, where Jones and his mother relocated following the divorce of his parents in 1945. There he would meet Marceline Baldwin, whom he married in the summer of 1949. Jones and his wife moved to Indianapolis where Jones attended classes at Butler University. Marceline paid the bills working as a nurse. Jones began his ministerial career as a student pastor in a Methodist church, influenced by, according to historian, David Chidester, “[t]he Methodist social creed of 1952, dedicated among other things to the civil rights of all racial groups…”
Jones’ skill for emotional oratory snowballed into a “respectable” reputation within the evangelical protestant community in Indianapolis. His reputation grew, in large part, due to his apparent ability as a healer. In 1954 Jim Jones began preaching at the Laurel Street Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Jones incorporated calls for social justice in his ministry, which was attractive to African American residents of segregated Indianapolis. While his sermons did wonders for church attendance, his superiors did not approve of the skin color possessed by much of the new membership.
Tobin Dickerson, contributor to the University of Virginia’s Religious Movements Homepage Project, describes the predicament of Jim Jones at the Laurel Street Tabernacle, “Faced with the choice of changing his message or leaving the church, Jones decided to form a new church with several members from the Tabernacle who appreciated his commitment to social justice for poor and working class people of all races.” Jones and his early followers called their sect the Wings of Deliverance, founded in April of 1954.
Jim Jones Founds the Peoples Temple, 1960
By the spring of the following year Jones and his followers became known as Peoples Temple; and later, Jones affiliated his flock with the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, and his congregation became known as the Peoples Temple Christian Church in 1960. They worked diligently to build a multiracial congregation, more or less, in the image of Jones’ own “rainbow family,” so named due to his adoption of multiracial children whom he and his wife raised along with their biological offspring. The Peoples Temple was forced to change locations twice because their membership outgrew their facilities. In 1965 Jim Jones relocated the Temple to California.
Sources:
David Chidester, Salvation and Suicide: Jim Jones, The Peoples Temple, and Jonestown, 2d ed., rev. Religion in North America, eds. Catherine L Albanese & Stephen J. Stein, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003)
Tobin Dickerson. “Peoples Temple” The Religious Movements Homepage Project at the University of Virginia. Spring 1998, ed. Rebecca Moore. 7 May 2005.
http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/Jonestwn.html.
