Peoples Temple

More than nine hundred people died at the Guyana settlement on 18 November 1978. The phrase that entered the language, and the idiom drinking the Kool-Aid that came out of it, both carry an assumption that the deaths were volitional. The evidence does not support that as a general description.

Rebecca Moore, whose family lost two daughters there and who has spent a career on the primary material, sets out the distinctions that the single word obscures. Roughly a third of the dead were children. Children cannot consent, and the poison was administered to them by adults; those deaths are homicides on any reading, and they alone account for a third of the total.

Among the adults, the recorded evidence indicates a range rather than a uniform act. Some appear to have taken the poison willingly, and the movement had rehearsed the event in earlier loyalty tests. Others were injected. The settlement was ringed by armed guards, and the audio recording made during the deaths captures dissent being voiced and overridden.

The killings at the Port Kaituma airstrip, in which Congressman Leo Ryan, three journalists, and a departing member were shot, were unambiguously murders and preceded the deaths at the settlement.

The formulation used by researchers who work on the material is murder-suicide, or more precisely a combination of murder, coerced suicide, and suicide. That is longer than the popular phrase and it is the one the record supports.

There is a second reason the shorthand is worth resisting. The idiom now means little more than credulous conformity, and it is applied to office politics and consumer choices. It has drifted a long way from an event in which most of the dead were children and the poison was, in a large number of cases, not chosen.

The deaths at Jonestown on 18 November 1978 killed more than nine hundred people and, with the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan and four others at the Port Kaituma airstrip, remained the largest deliberate loss of American civilian life until 2001. What happened afterwards shaped how every comparable group would be received.

The immediate effect was institutional. The anticult movement, a scattering of parents' groups through the 1970s, acquired a public warrant it had never had. Coercive deprogramming, the practice of removing an adult member by force for counselling, was defended in court and in the press on Jonestown's authority for most of the following decade. The Cult Awareness Network became the best known clearing house of that argument, and its end belongs to the story too: sued into bankruptcy in the mid 1990s, its name and files were bought at auction in 1996 by a buyer acting for parties connected to the Church of Scientology, so that callers seeking a warning reached the organisation they were being warned about.

The scholarly effect ran the other way. Sociologists of religion who examined the conversion research found no support for the brainwashing model the courts had been accepting, and the split that opened between the anticult movement and the academic study of new religions has never closed.

The archival effect is the most durable. The Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, directed by Rebecca Moore, who lost two sisters in Guyana, holds the surviving tapes, documents and survivor accounts and has published them rather than curating a verdict from them.