America Has a Messiah Complex

For the past four decades, it seems, we've all been drinking the Kool-Aid when it comes to cults. In the wake of the spectacular human tragedy of Jonestown (from which the oft-quoted idiom about Kool-Aid comes), we've defaulted to seeing cults as homicidal and suicidal. Jim Jones's Peoples Temple sits at the apex of this pyramid of doom, of course—but before he became a paranoid drug addict who led his followers to deprivation and mass death in Guyana, Jones was an outspoken advocate for racial integration, a fervent communist, and voracious reader who worked indefatigably for Civil Rights in his racist home state Indiana. Is it at all possible to examine those aims as well as the destruction he later wrought? How can we make sense of the utopian dream that lies just beyond the field of bodies?