Hearing the Voices of Jonestown

A L S O +T O D A Y

After the Fall
Reviewed by Peter Kurth
A deeply narcissistic memoir, from the former "Three's Company" star and ThighMaster queen, about her struggle with low self-esteem

T A B L E+T A L K

Readers who are in-between books swap recommendations in the Books area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Beach reading 1998
By Dwight Garner
(06/15/98)

Punch drunk
By Vivian Gornick
(05/27/98)

Cormac McCarthy: Shakespeare of the American West
By Vince Passaro
(05/20/98)

Communism on your coffee table!
By Barbara Ehrenreich
(04/30/98)

Hollywood swingers
By Ray Sawhill
(04/22/98)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Browse the
Books feature archive

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

B O O K C A S E

A new service
for book lovers

HEARING THE VOICES OF JONESTOWN | MARY MCCORMICK MAAGA | SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PRESS | 256 PAGES

BY SCOTT McLEMEE | Cults make great video. The TV newsmagazines have rediscovered this lately, and it's a good bet they won't forget it as we count down to the millennium. This spring, ABC's "PrimeTime Live" devoted a segment to a group called the Brethren -- an itinerant cult, adept at recruiting teenagers, whose male members resemble Hasidic Deadheads. (The group combines intense Bible study with regular dumpster-diving expeditions.) Another hard-hitting exposé concerned the followers of an Arizona New Age figure called Gabriel of Sedona -- a channel for space beings who reveal (in high-pitched voices) that the earth will soon be a paradise. The bummer is that certain catastrophic events are scheduled in the meantime. This good news-bad news message has attracted a number of disciples who've turned their possessions over to the group; they now live in a commune. A hidden camera recorded a session in which the space folk insisted on two basic points: 1.) Obey Gabriel! and 2.) Don't leave the compound!

Besides offering a lot of emotionally charged visuals -- charismatic leaders, glassy-eyed followers, weeping families desperate to renew contact with children who have disappeared into an alternative reality -- cults generate a special thrill in the viewing audience: an almost Gothic sensation of contact with the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know. What makes these people tick? Who knows what they're planning? What are they capable of?

It's been a little over a year since the Heaven's Gate crew gobbled down their toxic pudding cups -- and not quite 20 years (the anniversary is in November) since Jim Jones preached his final sermon in Guyana, assuring his congregation that the world would never forget their gesture of "revolutionary suicide." And those are the images that inevitably come to mind whenever the subject is cults: massed corpses, sprawled face down on the jungle floor or arranged neatly on beds in a mansion, dressed in uniforms.

But is this fair? The difference between a cult and an established religion is sometimes about one generation. In the mid-19th century, the Mormons evoked much the same horrified fascination as did the followers of Rev. Moon. And the comparison does fit, come to think of it. During the '70s, media coverage of the Moonies aroused tremendous public anxiety. Then they launched the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper that pretty much printed Reagan administration press releases under a reporter's byline. Suddenly you didn't hear very much about the sinister Unification Church anymore. Good business practices -- like buying Utah real estate when it was cheap, or giving the Republicans a newspaper of their own -- can bring a cult into the mainstream with alacrity.

For one group of scholars, the word "cult" itself has become a problem. They claim it's too charged with emotion to be useful, and have adopted the term "new religious movements," or NRMs, instead. According to NRM researchers, the emergence of nontraditional beliefs and living arrangements during the '60s and '70s provoked a strong societal backlash. This had its most concentrated expression in the rise of a self-described "anti-cult movement" (frequently abbreviated as ACM), which consisted mainly of people confused and upset by family members' involvement in new religious groups. The anti-cultists also included a certain number of academics, journalists and professional "deprogrammers."

The anti forces helped promote a certain view of new beliefs and organizations as "cultic" -- that is, intrinsically totalitarian, exploitative and destructive. This stereotype ignores the considerable variety among doctrines and organizations so labeled. Or so goes the argument of those who prefer the term new religious movement -- which carries no emotional overtones at all. It's comfortingly jargonlike and bland, and fits anything from Scientology to the Promise Keepers.

For those who are interested, there are NRM monographs on everything from the Rastafarians to the Branch Davidians, as well as on a wide variety of New Age currents. My favorite NRM book, by far, is a 1995 collection of essays called "The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds" (State University of New York Press). There are papers on the loosely organized "contactee" groups of the '50s, on the benign kitschiness of the Unarius Academy in San Diego -- and on the following of "the Two," which later became Heaven's Gate. Some of these organizations are creepy; others just seem odd. But the diversity among them suggests that NRM scholars are on to something. New religions, even those with an extraterrestrial component, aren't all the same.

Whatever advantages this kind of relabeling may have for academic research, its benefits are even greater for groups that otherwise might be labeled as cults. Particularly vehement in denouncing the term cult as "hate speech" is the Church of Scientology. After climbing the hierarchy and paying the church many tens of thousands of dollars, a believer is permitted to read certain handwritten documents by founder L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer and sometime amphetamine enthusiast, who provides instructions on how to rid one's body of "thetans" -- i.e., a species of intergalactic cooties sent to Earth billions of years ago by the evil cosmic overlord Xenu. Half the actors in Hollywood have spent at least a little time in this new religious movement, yet somehow it has not gained perfect respectability. (Imagine John Travolta in his trailer, after a long day in front of the camera, yelling "Get behind me, thetan!")

But perhaps the most striking expression of anti-anti-cult thinking is a new book called "Hearing the Voices of Jonestown," by Mary McCormick Maaga, who's currently a pastor of a United Methodist Church in New Jersey. If Jones' Peoples Temple wasn't a cult, then the term has no meaning. That's obvious. And Maaga would agree. That is, in fact, precisely her claim: The Peoples Temple wasn't a cult, and the word itself is an expression of bigotry.

The argument is compelling in its sheer chutzpah. The more than 900 people killed by poison and bullets in Guyana were not victims of a madman; their deaths were not pointless. "Peoples Temple was an attempt by its founder and participants to create an egalitarian society in which hierarchies based upon race, class, and gender would be erased," writes Maaga, invoking the holy trinity of multicultural academia. "The horrific end to the Peoples Temple grew out of a combination of both its success and failure in creating a community based upon Christian and socialist ideals."

Her book employs the critique of cult stereotypes developed by new religious movement scholars. Here's how the argument goes: In modern, secularized society, it is very nearly impossible to imagine that people could be passionately and consequentially involved in a religious belief system. We are expected to make our deepest commitment to some combination of work, love and recreation. Should these familiar and sanctioned things fail to engage us deeply enough, there is therapy -- and also a certain number of religious groups that have the sanction of tradition.

N E X T+P A G E+| Societal anxiety

ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF CROSBY