217. A Story Of Spiritual Manipulation - Jim Jones and Peoples Temple - Part 1

The jungle is too quiet. Not silent, but quiet. The kind of quiet where you can feel the heaviness in the air. Like the trees themselves are holding their breath. Guyana is a place where life buzzes, hums, and crawls. But on the morning of November 19th, 1978, the air felt unnatural. A helicopter chopper slowly over the tops of the trees, below a clearing appeared, the place the world would come to know as Jonestown. At first, the rescue team thought their bright colors dotted the compound were clothes drying, or maybe even tents. But as they descended, the shapes became clearer. Bodies everywhere. Mothers draped over children. Families piled on families. Rows and rows of them. More than 900 people that day. The plot pilot radioed back two words that would echo throughout history. No survivors. Except there were survivors. Not many, but enough to tell the world the truth. And the truth wasn't just about a poison. It was about a man with a microphone. It wasn't just about a cult. But it was about what we call manipulation. So powerful, so layered, so relentless, that hundreds of intelligent, compassionate, sincere people were convinced to surrender everything, even their lives. This is the story of Jim Jones, the People's Temple, and the long road that led one of the darkest moments in modern history. For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace. Cigars and victory justified, released. Welcome to the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. I ain't saved by dress codes, not by what I eat. I'm covered in the righteousness, washed from head to feet. No tally of tradition, no man-made code. Blood bought my freedom, now I ride that road. They clutch pearls when they see smoke rings rise. But my praise still ascends past the legalist cries. Christ plus nothing, that's the real math. So miss me with your fence laws and your extra path. He sat with sinners, I'm sitting with saints. Sipping grace from the bottle, no room for fakes. I light one for liberty. Toast to the king. Every ash a sermon. Death has lost its sting. For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace. Cigars and victory justified, released. For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace. Cigars and victory justified, released. Let grace begin. For freedom, you set me free. Not for change, not for guilt, not for Pharisee. Grace lit the flame, now I'm puffing peace. Cigars and victory justified, released. And Brett Martin. Well, Brett, welcome back to the show with us. We are so excited to be here and jumping into today's new series that we're going to be going through. Kicked it off last week with Jim Neuheiser's book, Do I Need Boundaries? And how to look through that from a biblical worldview. But today we're going to be looking at Jim Jones and his story. Brett, how are you doing? How is life in Mississippi? Life is fine. We're still down here fighting the pollen, fighting the allergies. But man, people are coming to church and people are getting right with God and things are going good in ministry. The family's doing well. My oldest son's about to graduate high school. And so we're looking into applying to colleges for him, trying to find as many scholarships as we can. He's about ready to take his ACT. And I've told him, you know, you better score, you know, because higher scores, the less money I got to pay. So I'm trying to put the pressure on him. But other than that, life is going well. Man, that's awesome. Yeah, man. A senior in high school, man, who would have thought, Brett, you'd be that old? But man, you are almost Grandpa Brett. And man, it's getting there. I'm excited about what we're going to be talking about today. But man, I'm excited. Emily had sent me a Snapchat the other day and I said, hey, can you believe we're less than two months away from being in Orlando together? This is going to be crazy. Like we just got back from Israel. Now we're getting to see each other in Orlando. We're going to be going to Nicaragua. We've got a lot going on. I can't wait for that trip. I can't wait for the fellowship. We're going to be out there a couple of days early, sort of use a tack on a little family vacation, go down to Universal and SeaWorld. And it's going to be great. Hopefully, if you're in that area, let us know. We'd love for you to come and join us. And we'd love for you to be a part of the For Freedom meetup down there. I think we're going to do like a North Carolina day, a Mississippi day, Georgia Baptist day where we can get together with Q and some of those guys. That was one of my favorite nights when Q came over. Man, that was a great time. Yeah, man, that was awesome. And so, yeah, it was a great time. And then I've had another guy, a couple of guys, they came from the North Carolina Baptist that said, hey, we're doing that again? We're getting together? And I said, yeah, let's do it, man. So they're going to come to hang out the house. And my wife's excited because the house we've rented this year has a pool. And so the kids are going to be able to swim and hang out. We're going to hang out there together. So I'm very much looking forward to that. Wearing out the kids in the pool is always a great idea. Absolutely. Well, Brett, today we're doing something that we have never done before here on the podcast. We have never taken a deep dive into some devastating events. We've talked about people. We've talked about the independent fundamental Baptist movement and the manipulation, the spiritual manipulation that comes from that. But today we're sort of stepping outside the independent fundamental Baptist movement. And we're going to take a chilling case study of manipulation, probably the most devastating situation that we have ever seen and probably the world has ever seen at the look at the rise and the fall of Jim Jones and what that looks like and who he looks like. Some of this information I'm taking from a Hulu documentary that came out. There's a podcast called Martyr Made. He does like seven episodes and it's like 20 something hours long where he does a massive deep dive. We're not going to do that. We're going to take a sort of a 50,000 foot view over four episodes, five episodes. I can't remember exactly how many we've got. And we're going to do an episode drawing out of what it looks like, the rise and the fall, how Jim Jones came to power, what it looked like and how we can begin to sort of help ourselves through that. And I know that I have seen several documentaries over the years on this. And James, some of the images will just chill your spine, will just, you know, just make you feel sick to your stomach of some of the things and the atrocities that went down over this and the control that this guy had. So let me say up front that this isn't just history. This is a warning because the things Jim Jones did to control, deceive and manipulate people, those same tactics show up in families, in relationships, in churches and in leadership today. And I see this as the extreme where what we've been talking about in the past, where the extreme can lead somebody. Yeah. It's good to know those things and to see those things because this episode is going to be a little longer. So buckle in and be ready for it. It's heavy. It matters. We're not going to go into necessarily the details of, so if you've got kids listening, you know, don't, don't fear. We're not going to go over anything that's going to be like disturbing for them. But we want to sort of go through the, the ideas that happen and understand how manipulation can lead people from Indianapolis to California to South Africa or South America, Guyana, into Jonestown and really begin to get to the point where we recognize it wherever it tries to hide. And so Brett, let's start at the beginning, the ear early days of Jim Jones. Before Jonestown, before the people's temple, before the jungle and the poison, Jim Jones was just a boy in rural Indiana. Born in 1931, Jim grew up lonely, isolated and fascinated with death. Neighbors recalled seeing young Jim hold funerals for small animals, sometimes animals he had killed himself. But there was something else. He was obsessed with religion, not Christianity, but the power of religion. He watched traveling preachers and mimic their styles, the cadence, the intensity, the emotional sway. He realized something dangerous at a young age. If you can influence someone's emotions, you can influence their decisions. That idea never left him. As a teen, he blended Marxist ideology, Pentecostal fervor, and social justice rhetoric into a powerful group. That made him look like a savior to the hurting and gave him control over the vulnerable. Yeah, Brett, that is so key to understand that Jim Jones didn't start as a monster. Oftentimes, we see the end of people's life. And we try to look back and we try to figure out how that began with them. But really, he started out just as someone who learned early on how to captivate people. There was a video that came out by Preacher Boys this past week, and I was showing our kids Tony Hudson clip. And I mean, they're laughing. They're like, Dad, who is this guy? What is he doing? I mean, if you think about it, we're mimetic creatures. We mimic people. You begin to do things and say things because of how you are listening and what people are saying around you. Well, absolutely. And that's how manipulation often begins. It doesn't start with abuse. It starts with charisma. It starts with someone who sees what people need or what they think they need and offers it in change for influence. And like you said about mimicking like this, I used to do that when I was growing up. We had this evangelist that would come to our church every year for missions conference. And I got to where I could just do a dead on impression of him. And he got so ingrained in me that sometimes I'll start preaching and also I'll break into that in that invitation without even realizing it. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the things that I found out when I studied about Jim Jones is Jim knew how to read the room. And more importantly, he knew how to read a person. He could begin to sort of mirror your emotions back to you. If you were hurting, he would begin to physically, you could see him hurting for you. Maybe we'll begin to shed a tear and begin to get hurt by what's going on. And this is the thing that allowed him to take this small congregation that he took, as we're going to look at, and grow it to 900,000 people is because he made people feel noticed. He made them see, be seen, but he also valued who they were. Now it was for the wrong reasons. He was valuing them to benefit his own ministry. And we'll see that at the end of the series that we look at. But all of what he was doing was to make people who never felt needed or never felt noticed, he noticed them. And you know, you can weaponize that you can weaponize belonging. And Jones did exactly that. In 1950, Jim Jones formed what would become the People's Temple in Indianapolis. And on the surface, man, it looked incredible. It looked like something that was the cutting edge to everything. Jones would get up and he would preach civil rights during segregation. He ran soup kitchens and provided food for people. Man, he even adopted children and adopted a little black boy and named him Jim Jones Jr. Just so that he could look at his church and he could say, look, I am integrating my church and most churches wouldn't do this, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to lead the way. People flocked to him because he just didn't preach compassion and he demonstrated it. He showed the world everywhere around him that he was doing something that no one else was doing. But behind the scenes, something dark was beginning to form. Jones staged healings. He faked cancer healings. He faked disabilities. He faked prophetic words. And all of a sudden he began to demand loyalty, not to God, not to scripture, but to himself. He built a culture of confession. Members were encouraged to admit sins publicly. That gave him ammunition. He could now take a private weakness that people were having and leverage that in public. And he slowly shifted his people from dependence on God to dependence on Jim. And this wasn't a church. This was a funnel of bringing more and more control into one's man responsibility. So, Brett, how did this manipulation begin? The pattern is like this. Jim started with love bombing. You've heard that before. You've heard this idea of love bombing in the last couple of years. And basically this is what it means. He made people feel like they had finally found a family. And you know, he created this us versus them mentality. Like we're the good ones. The world is against us and I'm protecting you from them. And man, if there's anything that I can relate to and that cult mentality, it's that right there, because that's exactly the kind of thing I grew up with. Yeah. You know, if you begin to really look at manipulation, this is a classic form of manipulation. The moment a leader begins to isolate you emotionally, even before they isolate you physically, they can begin to control you because we, we, we emote, we're emotional creatures. We emote feelings. We, we are driven by our emotions. And so if they can begin to isolate you before they even begin physically doing that from your family, man, if they can begin to spiritually and emotionally isolate you, now they have gotten this control over you that you never even thought that you would ever give someone. And, and look how subtle it was at first, you know, it didn't, didn't start with threats. It came with, like we talked about earlier, it came with this sense of belonging. That's how he lulled people into it. Yeah. I want to read a quote. Um, again, there were some survivors from the 19, uh, uh, I'm sorry, the 1978 attack when, uh, when the suicide happened, there were some people that got away. There were some people that were away during that time. Jim Jones's oldest son is still alive and he, he does some things. Uh, but one of the survivors, Haitian thrash later said this, he said that Jim Jones, he had so much power over people that they were like programmed, like with dope. Uh, he, he willing to say this wasn't hypnosis, but it was emotional conditioning. Can you imagine people being so surrendered to this man that it looked like? And the feeling from the outside was that they were like drugged to follow this guy in every word and every meaning. Uh, and if you go and you listen to some of the audio and some of his teaching and the way he taught people and the things he said, man, you can see and hear and sense this blind loyalty that you have to listen to me because he set himself up as God. He, he had a throne that he set up on the stage that he would sit on to mimic God in their life. Now by the 1960s, Jim Jones convinced his followers that God had revealed a coming nuclear apocalypse. His solution moved to church to California, the safest place. This move accomplished one thing, isolation. Once in California, Jones gained political influence. He filled buses with supporters at protests. Politicians loved him. Newspapers praised him, but his inner circle saw the shift. He began began requiring signed confessions. He punished dissident with public humiliation. People were beaten, separated from families, shamed and controlled. Slowly, methodically, Jones was tightening his grip. Yeah, Brett, this is where the shift begins to happen. When, when he goes from Indianapolis to California, um, he, he, he buys this complex. He begins to move the church there and the mask begins to slip. You said something in your reading just a minute ago of that narration that, um, that he would do. And I wanted to pull back to it because you said that he required signed confessions. Jim, we even went further and he would have people sign blank documents. He would say, here's a piece of paper. And it's going to say, I sincerely agree to this, Brett Martin, and you're going to sign your name to it. And he would say, if you ever betray me, I'm going to write whatever I want in this document. And you're going to have your name signed to it. And he would, he wouldn't make people do that, uh, to have control over them. So he would bring them in and say, if you want to go against me, remember, I can have control of your kids and you can sign your, and he did this. He, he took control over a wife's son, uh, that, that was his, he claimed was his, um, by taking this document and writing on it that she had signed that he had, she had signed over the legal documents and rights to that child to him. Uh, and so man, the, the shift and the thoughts behind this is insane. The way people would just blindly turn everything over. Wow. That's crazy. You know, and manipulators always reveal themselves in stages though. You've got first you win the heart, then they win your loyalty and then they demand your obedience, such as you just mentioned. Yeah. And you know, once you're in that deeply emotional state, the blinders begin to get on and you, you no longer see the manipulation. The manipulation is gone. Uh, you interpret it as love. You interpret it as a commitment and almost as a purpose. Uh, one of the things that, uh, one of the, uh, I'm going to read a survivor quote in just a minute, but my mind went to, um, uh, a predator. I'm not going to mention his name. You probably could, uh, figure this out, but, but for sake of not mentioning his name, I'm not going to, but he had an inappropriate relationship with a teenager. And when this was going on, he was at a very large church. And when this was going on, he manipulated this teenage girl and he had told her, uh, this is based on the survivor record that the angels that ministered to Jesus, we never know their name. And he told this young girl that we don't know their name. And so no one ever needs to know your name. You're ministering to me the way the angels were ministering to Jesus in the garden. And he used his power to manipulate this young girl by using and twisting scripture. And this is what Jim does. This is what Jim does to all of it. He takes little things. He twists it to show that they have power and control. One of the survivors, Laura Johnston Cole said this, we didn't join a cult. We joined a movement. Jim became a cult link leader long before we realized we were ever in a cult and we were just there. We were following it. And that's what manipulation is. You don't realize you're trapped until the door locks behind you and there's no way out. And what, what that does, Brett, is it brings us to the second chapter, the next chapter, which is California. California is not where it ended. California was really the preparation for what South Africa, South America, Guyana was going to look like. Because when people started asking questions, when reporters started digging, when families started resisting, Jones needed something more. He needed more. Yeah. And what he needed, Brett, was he needed something that most and all manipulators love, which is total control. And total control is what he had to get to. He had to say, how can I control every aspect of every area of their life so that they not only just believe in me, but they depend on me for everything. And this is where he found the jungle. Guyana, Jonestown, a paradise promised, a prison delivered. Yeah. And that's what we're going to pick up next time. We're going to jump into what this looks like in Jonestown because this is where the story gets crazy. This is where they began. I mean, fast tracking everything. That was the first part of his history in a short form. I wanted to bring that to you. But when we get to this point, man, now we begin to walk through what this power looks like and how this power changed Jim Jones forever. And so we hope you stick with us throughout this series. Again, we want you to sort of identify what manipulation looks like in your life, but taking this case study, by taking this idea that Jim Jones started with and begin to recognize those things in your life. Brett, any final thoughts before we close it out for today? I'm just, I'm excited to walk through this. We've talked about, we've grown this idea for a long time. I think it's necessary. Given our subject matter, it shows the extreme end of where manipulation can lead to. And I'm looking forward to going through this with you. Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it as well. I can't wait. It's going to be great. And hopefully you'll stick with us for the next, I think, three more sessions as we walk through manipulation with Jim Jones. So until next time, to God be the glory. Great things he has done. Found my new name. Found that good grace. Found that healing. And the tears fell down my face when I found my beginning that has no ending. Found that second chance. Found my best friend. Found my forgiveness. Found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing our podcast on whichever podcast platform you use. Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom Podcast. . . Thank you.

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