Mass-Suicide as Racio-Religious Protest?
Background:
I was struggling to find other contexts from which to analyze Peoples Temple. Professor Dumbledore pointed me towards a sociological text called "Varieties of Black Religious Experience," edited by Baer and Singer. I found the text really helpful, so I'm trying to put it in dialogue with the essay we read in class about Peoples Temple.
My Analysis
Baer and Singer approach black religious movements as
dialectical responses to "white racism and economic exploitation"(xxi). Along the spectrum of potential "varieties
of protest and accommodation," they typologize four major types of black
religiosity: messianic-national, conversionist, mainstream, and thaumaturgical. Our readings for this week focused on the
latter two categories. In Chapter 3,
Baer and Singer begin by problemetizing the notion that we can approach the
mainstream denominations as a singular "black church." Rather, they
stress that we must recognize the multiplicity of black mainline churches;
"diversity abounds" (61). Then
they offer brief summaries of each church, focusing in particular on the ratio
of accommodation-to-protest traditionally fostered by each specific
denomination. Along the way, Baer and
Singer gawk at the role of "money raising" within many of these
churches (80). Finally, the authors
criticize the mainstream churches for diverging too infrequently from the
status quo in American political and social struggles. Although "certain black religious
leaders...have participated in the struggle against racism and other social
injustices," the mainstream churches have "remained for the most part
on the periphery of these struggles" (100 – 101). Even when mainstream churches supported the
civil rights movement, they did so without any overt acknowledgement of the
underlying role "of modern capitalism" in justifying "the
super-exploitation of nonwhites" (97).
They therefore echo the theses of the West and Marable readings from
last week, but Baer and Singer add a twist: contrary to what we might assume,
black members in white churches are actually more likely to "be more militant protesters" of the
relationship between racism and capitalism (110).
In Chapter 6, Baer and Singer apply the same criteria to thaumaturgical sects – a category dominated by black Spiritualism and New Thought groups. According to Baer and Singer, these thaumaturgical groups closely resemble mainline black Protestantism in terms of worship, doctrine, organization, and structure. They diverge sharply, however, on the issue of personal salvation – whereas mainstream churches have traditionally focused on eternal salvation, thaumaturgical sects emphasize "the manipulation of one's present condition through magico-religious practices" (210). Despite the fact that such groups are inherently dissatisfied with the status quo, Baer and Singer argue that thaumaturgical sects are more ambivalent than revolutionary. On the one hand, most thaumaturgists blame themselves for their lot in life, and their gospels of self-help "focus only on individualistic concerns" (212). On the other hand, the same groups "refuse to wait [for] redemption in the afterlife," and "reject conventional notions of...the Protestant ethic" (214).
In the Conclusion, Baer and Singer stress the role of religion as "traditionalizing" – that is, a force that innovates under the pretence, or "ruse," of maintaining cultural norms (275). Nevertheless, most black religious groups continue to trend towards "privatization and individualization," thus "serving as hegemonic agents" within the broader American mainstream (279). While fostering the "this-worldly" aspirations of their believers, most groups nevertheless "remain uncritical of the class structure and foreign policy of American society" (280 – 281). Within the black churches, race is frequently criticized, but its inherent relationship to capitalism remains unspoken and unchallenged. With a somewhat prophetic tone, Baer and Singer conclude that – although Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition offers hope for "the continued potential of black religion as a liberating force" – most black religious groups will remain "stalwart opponents" of counter-hegemonic, anti-capitalist struggles (284 – 285).
Read against this backdrop, Harris and Waterman's article suggests that Baer and Singer might have been looking in the wrong places for varieties of real black protest. Instead of the Rainbow Coalition, the real black heroes of the 1980s might be found among those who ultimately sacrificed their lives in Jonestown, Guyana. Harris and Waterman base their article in the question of "why African Americans would be attracted to Peoples Temple (a white movement) and why they would follow Jim Jones (a white leader)" (120). Their answer is simple: Jones offered "a vision of global class revolution...a cosmology that responded to the failures and successes of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements" (104). As evidence, the authors compare Jones' rhetoric, organizational principles, and tactics to those of Huey P. Newton, "the ideological engine of the Black Panthers" (109). Their similarities are striking, and their differences were few in number but crucial in outcome: Jones was "much less sophisticated... even deliberately so" (116 - 117); Jones "cultivated the cult-of-personality" that "Newton tried to eschew" (112); Jones unreservedly endorsed Soviet and Chinese communism (117); and – most importantly – whereas the Black Panthers had generally reached outward to other revolutionary group, Jones "turned inward, and tried to establish a new society from within" (118). Above all, Harris and Waterman stress that Peoples Temple was intertwined with the fate of secular movements for liberation protest; for those who died living out their "social experiment" in Jonestown, Guyana, "religion and revolution" went hand-in-hand (121).
Questions and
Concerns Moving Forward
I am
interested by this juxtaposition. In particular, is
there room for People's Temple within Baer and Singer's typology of black
religious movements? Should we – as I
think Harris and Waterman suggest – conceptualize Jonestown as a quintessential
example of black religious protest? In
other words, did the suicide in Guyana
epitomize black religion's potentiality for protest? This line
of questioning seems inevitable to me, but it is also troubling. After
all, Baer and Singer do not seen fully-satisfied with any of the black
religious movements that they categorize.
Within their four-fold typology, every black religious group falls short
of its potential as a center for mobilizing and actualizing black protest
against capitalism. Thus we can ask – is
sacrificial blood enough for them? Would
the suicide at Guyana
have fulfilled their criteria for black protest? Much to my own dismay, I think not.
There are several reasons why Peoples Temple was too tainted to fulfill Baer and Singer's vision for black potential. First, Jones was a white leader and Peoples Temple is generally remembered as either a white or an inter-racial religious movement. Secondly, most Americans thought of Jones' group as a "cult" – a pejorative evaluation that nevertheless reminds us of its fringe status, and thus limited potential for influence, within American culture. Thirdly, the focus of Jones' group was in many respects constrained to its own members and their personal wellbeing – it was OK if some people in the world still went hungry, so long as those in Jonestown always produced enough to go to bed full (117). Lastly, as Harris and Waterman point out, Jones' decisions were sometimes calculated with the goal of aligning his group's interests with the broader ambitions of American foreign policy (120) – a measure in which Jones tragically underestimated the mayhem that eventually ensued because of domestic hysteria surrounding his group's reputation.
