The Audience of Jonestown

The audience of Jim Jones’s final speech in Jonestown in 1978 is the members of his cult, the People Temple of the Disciples of Christ. Jones merged heartening ideals from Christianity, socialism, and communism and twisted them so as to convince pious Christians into blindly partaking into what first started as good hearted albeit strange practices. But before long, such practices harrowingly descended into such an implicit sinisterism that the cult’s members trusted the logic of committing mass “revolutionary suicide” for the sake of their own sanctity. Though one can say that the  fault in Jones’s audience was their blind belief in their religion and the religion Jones spun for them, they were unequivocally innocent men, women, and children who did not deserve the end that they were beguiled into. In the last moments before their death, the audience began to see clearly the menace in Jones’ words, protesting “[This is] No Way for us to die. We must die with some dignity,” only for Jones to sedate them with the words “Don’t be afraid to die…death is, sleep.. It is a friend.” Jones was simply a silver tongued sociopath.