

In January a mob of angry Americans breached the United States Capitol for the first time in two centuries. This pornography didn’t advance understanding Jonestown as a religious event, but instead supported a narrative in which the People’s Temple wasn’t really religious, it was “a cult” led by “a fraud” or “a madman” and therefore dismissible. Smith took exception to scholars’ attempts to sidestep Jones as a legitimately religious figure, which ceded the narrative to the popular press who almost entirely focused on the “pornography of Jonestown.” By “pornography” I take Smith to mean not only the media’s fixation upon Jones’s sexuality, but also the broader sensationalism: the rising body count, the American corpses decaying in the Guyana heat. Smith admonished scholars for refusing to analyze or meaningfully discuss the Jonestown massacre, an event in which over 900 people died at the insistence of Rev. We know the pornography of Jonestown we do not know its mythology, its ideology, its soteriology, its sociology-we do not know almost everything we would need to know in order to venture a secure argument.”

Indeed, at present this is factually impossible, for we lack the majority of the necessary data. There is certainly nothing that will aid understanding. There is neither anything new or perceptive in this all-but-standard list. There were several options: began sincere and went mad he began a fraud and went mad he was always a fraud he was always mad-or, sometimes impossibly, a combination of all of these…. It was the language of fraud and insanity that dominated the accounts. Then, as more ‘background’ information became available, space was taken over by lurid details…. “The press, by and large, featured the pornography of Jonestown-the initial focus on the daily revisions of the body count, the details on the condition of the corpses.
