Latest / 4-Freedom Podcast / 217. A Story Of Spiritual Manipulation - Jim Jones and Peoples Temple - Part 1

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217. A Story Of Spiritual Manipulation - Jim Jones and Peoples Temple - Part 1 · 4-Freedom Podcast

0:06
The jungle is too quiet, not silent, but quiet.
0:11
The kind of quiet where you can feel the heaviness in the air,
0:14
like the trees themselves are holding their breath.
0:17
Guyana is a place where life buzzes, hums and crawls.
0:22
But on the morning of November 19th, 1978, the air felt
0:28
unnatural. The helicopter chopper.
0:31
Slowly, over the tops of the trees below, a clearing
0:34
appeared, the place the world would come to know as Jonestown.
0:39
At first, the rescue team thought their bright colors
0:42
dotted the compound were clothes drying or maybe even tense.
0:47
But as they descended, the shapes became clearer.
0:49
Bodies everywhere. Mothers draped over children.
0:54
Families piled on families. Rows and rows of them.
0:59
More than 900 people that day. The plot pilot radioed back 2
1:05
words that would echo throughout history.
1:09
No survivors. Except there were survivors.
1:13
Not many, but enough to tell the world the truth.
1:16
And the truth wasn't just about a poison.
1:18
It was about a man with a microphone.
1:21
It wasn't just about a cult, but it was about what we call
1:25
manipulation. So powerful, so layered, so
1:28
relentless that hundreds of intelligent, compassionate,
1:33
sincere people were convinced to surrender everything, even their
1:38
lives. This is the story of Jim Jones,
1:41
the People's Temple, and the long road that led one of the
1:45
darkest moments in modern history.
1:55
For freedom you set me free, not for change.
1:58
Not for guilt. Not for Pharisee.
2:00
Grace lit the flame. Now I'm puffing peace, cigars
2:03
and victory. Justified.
2:05
Released. Welcome to the For Freedom
2:09
podcast. This podcast exists to bring the
2:12
freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with
2:15
everyday issues. I ain't.
2:17
Saved by dress codes, not by what I eat.
2:20
I'm covered in the righteousness.
2:21
Washed from head to feet. No tally of tradition, No man
2:24
made code. Blood bought my freedom.
2:26
Now I ride that road. They clutch pearls when they see
2:29
smoke rings rise. But my prey still ascends past
2:32
the legalist cries. Christ plus nothing.
2:34
That's the real math. So miss me with your fence laws
2:37
and your extra path. He sat with sinners, I'm sitting
2:40
with Saints. Slipping grace from the bottle,
2:43
No room for face. I like one for liberty.
2:45
Toast to the king. Every ash of sermon.
2:48
Death has lost its sting. For freedom, He set me free.
2:52
Not for change, not for guilt. Not for Pharisee.
2:55
Grace lit the flame, now puffing peace, cigars and victory.
2:58
Justified released for freedom, he set.
3:02
Me free, not for change, not for guilt, not for.
3:04
Pharisee Grace. Lit the flame now puffing peace
3:08
cigars and victory justified released.
3:11
Let Grace begin now. Here are.
3:20
Your hosts, James Seyfried and Brett Martin.
3:23
Brett, welcome back to the show with us.
3:26
We are so excited to be here and jumping into today's new series
3:32
that we're going to be going through kicked it off last week
3:34
with Jim Neuheiser's book Do I Need Boundaries?
3:38
And how to look through that from a biblical world view.
3:41
But today we're going to be looking at Jim Jones and his
3:44
story. Brett, how are you doing?
3:46
How is life in Mississippi? Life is life is fine.
3:50
We're still down here fighting the pollen, fighting the
3:53
allergies, but man, people are coming to church and people are
3:57
getting right with God and things are going good in
3:59
ministry. The family's doing well.
4:01
My oldest son's about to graduate high school and so we
4:06
we're looking into applying to colleges for him, trying to find
4:10
as many scholarships as we can. He's about ready to get take his
4:15
ACT. And I've told him, you know, you
4:17
better score, you know, 'cause higher scores, the less money I
4:20
got to pay. So I'm trying to put the
4:22
pressure on him. But other than that, life is
4:25
life is going well. Man, that's awesome.
4:27
Yeah. Man, a senior in high school,
4:29
man, who would have thought Brett, you'd be that old?
4:32
But man, you are almost Grandpa Brettt.
4:35
And man, it's it's getting there excited about what we're going
4:40
to talk about today. But man, I'm excited.
4:42
I'm, I was Emily had had sent me a Snapchat the other day and I
4:46
said, hey, Can you believe we're less than two months away from
4:49
being in Orlando together? This is going to be crazy.
4:51
Like we just got back from Israel.
4:53
Now we're getting to see each other in Orlando.
4:55
We're going to be going to Nicaragua.
4:58
We got a lot going on. I can't wait for that trip.
5:01
I can't wait for the fellowship. We're going to be out there a
5:03
couple of days early, sort of use a tack on a little family
5:07
vacation, go down to Universal and SeaWorld, and it's gonna be
5:13
great. Hopefully, if you're in that
5:16
area, let us know. We'd love for you to come and
5:18
join us, and we'd love for you to be a part of the Four Freedom
5:22
Meet up down there. I think we're going to do like a
5:24
North Carolina day, a Mississippi day, Georgia Baptist
5:29
Day, where we can get together with Q and some of those guys.
5:33
That was one of my favorite nights when Q came.
5:35
Over. Man, that was a great time.
5:37
Yeah, man, that was awesome. And so, yeah, it's a great time.
5:41
And then I've had another guy, a couple of guys, they came from
5:43
the North Carolina Baptist that said, hey, we doing that again?
5:46
We getting together and I said, yeah, let's do it, man.
5:49
So they're going to come hang out the house and my wife's
5:52
excited because the house we rented this year has a pool and
5:55
so the kids are going to be able to swim and hang out.
5:57
We're going to hang out there together.
5:59
So I'm, I'm very much looking forward to that.
6:02
Wearing out the kids of the pool is always a great idea.
6:05
Absolutely. Well, Brett, today we're doing
6:08
something that we have never done before here on the podcast.
6:12
We have never taking a deep dive into some devastating events.
6:16
We've talked about people, we've talked about the Independent
6:19
Fundamental Baptist movement and the manipulation, the spiritual
6:23
manipulation that comes from that.
6:25
But today we're sort of stepping outside the independent
6:28
Fundamental Baptist movement and we're going to take a chilling
6:31
case study of manipulation. Probably the most devastating
6:36
situation that we have ever seen and probably the world has ever
6:40
seen at the look at the rise and the fall of Jim Jones and what
6:45
that looks like and who he looks like.
6:48
Some of this information I'm taking from a Hulu doctor
6:51
documentary that came out. There's a podcast called Martyr
6:55
Maid Long. He does like 7 episodes and it's
7:00
like 20 something hours long where he does a massive deep
7:03
dive. We're not going to do that.
7:05
We're going to take a, a sort of a 50,000 foot view over 4
7:10
episodes, 5 episodes, I can't remember exactly how many we've
7:13
got. And we're going to do a an
7:15
episode drawing out of what it looks like, the rise and the
7:19
fall, how Jim jumps can of power would it look like, and how we
7:23
can begin to sort of help ourselves through that.
7:26
And I know that I have seen several documentaries over the
7:31
years on this. And James, some of the images
7:36
will just chill your spine, will just, you know, just make you
7:40
feel sick to your stomach of some of the things and the
7:43
atrocities that went down over this and the control that this
7:47
guy had. So let me say up front that this
7:51
isn't just history. This is a warning because the
7:56
things Jim Jones did to control, deceive and manipulate people,
8:01
those same tactics show up in families, in relationships, in
8:06
churches, and in leadership today.
8:09
And and now I see this as the extreme where what we've been
8:14
talking about in the past where the extreme can lead somebody.
8:18
Yeah, it's good to know those things and to see those things
8:22
because this episode's going to be a little longer.
8:24
So buckle in and be ready for it.
8:26
It's heavy. It matters.
8:27
We're not going to go into necessarily the details of.
8:31
So if you've got kids listening, you know, don't, don't fear.
8:34
We're not going to go over anything that's going to be like
8:36
disturbing to for them, but we want to sort of go through the
8:40
the ideas that happen and understand how manipulation can
8:44
lead people from Indianapolis to California to South Africa or
8:50
South America, Guyana into Jonestown and really begin to
8:55
get to the point where we recognize it wherever it tries
9:00
to hide. And so, Brett, let's start at
9:01
the beginning, the early days of Jim Jones.
9:18
Before Jonestown, before the people's temple, before the
9:23
jungle and the poison, Jim Jones was just a boy in rural Indiana.
9:29
Born in 1931, Jim grew up lonely, isolated and fascinated
9:35
with death. Neighbors recalled seeing young
9:38
Jim hold funerals for small animals, sometimes animals he'd
9:42
killed himself. But there was something else.
9:46
He was obsessed with religion. Not Christianity, but the power
9:52
of religion. He watched traveling preachers
9:55
and mimic their styles, the cadence, the intensity, the
10:00
emotional sway. He realized something dangerous
10:03
at a young age. If you can influence someone's
10:07
emotions, you can influence their decisions.
10:11
And that idea never left him. As a teen, he blended Marxist
10:16
ideology. Pentecostal.
10:18
Fervor and social. Justice rhetoric into a powerful
10:22
brew and that made him look like a savior to the hurting and gave
10:27
him control over the vulnerable. Yeah, Brett, that is that is so
10:49
key to understand that, that that that Jim Jones didn't start
10:53
as a monster. You know, often times we see the
10:55
end of people's life and we try to look back.
10:58
We try to figure out how that began with them.
11:01
But really, he started out just as someone who learned early on
11:05
how to captivate people that there was a video that came out
11:10
by preacher boys this past week and I was showing our kids Tony
11:14
Hudson clip And I mean, they're laughing.
11:17
They're like that. Who who is this guy?
11:18
What is he doing? But I mean, if you think about
11:22
it, that's how we we're we're medic creatures.
11:24
We mimic people. You you begin to do things and
11:28
say things because of how you are listening to what people are
11:32
saying around you. Well, absolutely.
11:35
And you know, and that's how manipulation often begins.
11:38
It doesn't start with abuse. It starts with charisma.
11:41
It starts with someone who sees what people need or what they
11:45
think they need and offers it in change for influence.
11:49
And like you said about mimicking like this, I used to
11:54
do that when I was growing up. We had this evangelist that
11:57
would come to to our to our church every year for missions
12:01
conference. And I got to where I could just
12:03
do a dead on impression of him and he got so ingrained in me
12:07
that sometimes I'll start preaching and also I'll break
12:11
into that in that imitation without even realizing it.
12:14
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one of the things
12:17
that I found out when I studied about Jim Jones is Jim knew how
12:21
to read the room and more importantly, he knew how to read
12:24
a person. He could begin to sort of mirror
12:27
your emotions back to you. If you were hurting, he would
12:30
begin to physically, you could see him hurting for you.
12:34
Maybe we'll begin to shed a tear and begin to get hurt by what's
12:38
going on. And he this is the thing that
12:40
that allowed him to take this small congregation that he took
12:43
is we're going to look at and grow it to 900,000 people is
12:47
because he made people feel noticed.
12:49
He made them see be seen, but he also valued who they were.
12:55
Now it was for the wrong reasons.
12:57
He was valuing them to to benefit his own ministry.
13:01
And we'll see that at the end of the series that we look at.
13:05
But all of what he was doing was to make people who never felt
13:09
needed or never felt noticed, he noticed them.
13:14
And, you know, you can weaponize that.
13:16
You can weaponize belonging. And Jones did exactly that.
13:29
In 1950, Jim Jones formed what would become the People's Temple
13:32
in Indianapolis. And on the surface, man, it
13:36
looked incredible. It looked like something that
13:40
was the cutting edge to everything.
13:42
Jones would get up and he would preach civil rights during
13:45
segregation. He ran soup kitchens and
13:49
provided food for people. Man, he even adopted children
13:52
and adopted a little black boy and named him Jim Jones Junior
13:57
just so that he could look at his church and he could say,
14:00
look, I am integrating my church and most churches wouldn't do
14:05
this, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to lead the way.
14:08
People flocked to him because he just didn't preach compassion.
14:12
And he demonstrated it. He showed the world everywhere
14:15
around him that he was doing something that no one else was
14:18
doing. But behind the scenes, something
14:21
dark was beginning to form. Jones staged healings.
14:26
He faked cancer healings. He faked disabilities.
14:30
He faked prophetic words. And all of a sudden, he began to
14:34
demand loyalty, not to God, not to Scripture, but to himself.
14:40
He'd been a culture of confession.
14:42
Members were encouraged to admit sins publicly.
14:47
That gave him ammunition. He he can now take a private
14:51
weakness that people were having and leveraged that in public.
14:56
And he slowly shifted the people from dependence on God to
15:00
dependence on Jim. And this wasn't a church.
15:03
This was a funnel of bringing more and more control in the
15:09
one's man responsibility. So Brett, how did this
15:22
manipulation begin? The the pattern is like this,
15:24
Jim started with love bombing. You've heard that before.
15:28
You've heard this idea of love bombing in the last couple of
15:31
years. And basically this is what it
15:33
means. He made people feel like they
15:35
had finally found a family. And you know, he created this US
15:42
versus them mentality, like we're the good ones, the world
15:47
is against us, and I'm protecting you from them.
15:51
And man, if there's anything that I can relate to and that
15:54
cult mentality, it's that right there, because that's exactly
15:58
the kind of thing I grew up with.
16:00
Yeah, You know, if you begin to really look at manipulation,
16:04
this is a classic form of manipulation.
16:07
The, the moment a leader begins to isolate you emotionally, even
16:13
before they isolate you physically, they can begin to
16:15
control you because we, we emote, we're emotional
16:19
creatures, we emote feelings. We, we are driven by our
16:23
emotions. And so if they can begin to
16:25
isolate you before they even begin physically doing that from
16:28
your family, man, if they can begin to spiritually and
16:31
emotionally isolate you now they have gotten this control over
16:36
you that you never even thought that you would ever give
16:38
someone. And, and look how subtle it was
16:41
at first. You know, it didn't didn't start
16:43
with threats. It came with, like we talked
16:46
about earlier, it came with this sense of belonging.
16:49
That's how he lulled people into it.
16:53
Yeah, I want to read a quote again.
16:56
There were some survivors from the 19.
17:00
I'm sorry, the 1978 attack, when, when, when the suicide
17:04
happened, there were some people that got away and there were
17:07
some people that were away during that time.
17:09
Jim Jones's oldest son is still alive and he he does some
17:12
things. But one of the survivors,
17:14
Haitian Thrash, later said this. He said that Jim Jones, he had
17:20
so much power over people that they were like programmed like
17:25
with dope. He, he went on to say this
17:28
wasn't hypnosis, but it was emotional conditioning.
17:32
Can you imagine people being so surrendered to this man that it
17:37
looked like, and the feeling from the outside was that they
17:41
were like drugged to follow this guy in every word and every
17:44
meaning. And if you go and you listen to
17:47
some of the audio and some of his teaching and the way he
17:50
taught people and the things he said, man, you can see and hear
17:54
and sense this blind loyalty that you have to listen to me.
17:59
Because he set himself up as God.
18:02
He, he hadn't thrown that. He set up on the stage that he
18:05
would sit on to mimic God in their life.
18:20
Now, by the 1960s, Jim Jones convinced his followers that God
18:24
had revealed a coming nuclear apocalypse.
18:28
His solution? Moved to church, to California,
18:32
the safest place. This move accomplished one thing
18:37
isolation. Once in California, Jones gained
18:40
political influence. He filled buses with supporters
18:44
at protests. Politicians loved him.
18:47
Newspapers praised him. But his inner circle saw the
18:50
shift began requiring signed confessions.
18:55
He punished dissident with public humiliation.
18:58
People were beaten, separated from families, shamed and
19:03
controlled. Slowly, methodically, Joan was
19:07
tightening his grip. Yeah, but this is where the the
19:17
shift begins to happen when when he goes from Indianapolis to
19:21
California, he he he buys this complex, he begins to move the
19:26
church there and the mask begins to slip.
19:29
You said something in the reading just a minute ago of
19:33
that narration that that he would do.
19:37
And I wanted to pull back to it because you said that he
19:40
required signed confessions. Jim Weaver went further.
19:44
And he would have people sign blank documents.
19:48
He would say, here's a piece of paper.
19:51
And it's going to say, I sincerely agree to this, Brett
19:55
Martin, and you're going to sign your name to it.
19:58
And he would say, if you ever betrayed me, I'm going to write
20:02
whatever I wanted this document, and you're going to have your
20:04
name signed to it. And he would, he would make
20:07
people do that to have control over them.
20:10
So he would bring them in and say, if you want to go against
20:12
me, remember I can have control of your kids and you can sign
20:15
your. And he did this.
20:17
He, he took control over a wife's son that that was his, he
20:22
claimed was his by taking this document and writing on it that
20:27
she had signed that it he had, she had signed over the legal
20:30
documents and rights to that child to him.
20:33
And so man, the the shift and the thoughts behind this is
20:37
insane. The way people would just
20:40
blindly turn everything over. Wow, that's crazy.
20:44
You know, and manipulators always reveal themselves in
20:47
stages though you've got first you win the heart, then they win
20:51
your loyalty, and then they demand your obedience such as
20:55
you just mentioned. Yeah.
20:58
And you know, once you're in that deeply emotional state, the
21:02
blinders begin to get on and you you no longer see the
21:06
manipulation. The manipulation is gone.
21:09
You interpreted as love. You interpreted as a commitment
21:13
and and almost as a purpose. One of the things that one of
21:18
the I'm I'm going to read a survivor quote in just a minute,
21:21
but my mind went to a predator. I'm not going to mention his
21:26
name. You probably could figure this
21:28
out, but but forsake have not mentioned his name.
21:30
I'm not going to, but he had an inappropriate relationship with
21:34
a teenager. And when this was going on, he
21:38
was at a very large church. And when this was going on, he
21:41
manipulated this teenage girl and he had told her this is
21:46
based on the survivor record, that the angels that ministered
21:51
to Jesus, we never know their name.
21:54
And he told this young girl that we don't know their name.
21:58
And so no one ever needs to know your name.
22:01
You're ministering to me the way the angels were ministering to
22:06
Jesus in the garden. And he used his power to
22:09
manipulate this young girl by using and twisting scripture.
22:13
And, and this is what Jim does. This is what Jim does to all of
22:16
it. He takes little things.
22:18
He twists it to show that they have power and control.
22:22
One of the survivors, Laura Johnston Cole, said this.
22:26
We didn't join a cult. We joined a movement.
22:30
Jim became a cult leader long before we realized we were ever
22:35
in a cult. And we were just there.
22:37
We were following it. And that's what manipulation is.
22:40
You don't realize you're trapped until the door locks behind you
22:45
and there's no way out. And what what that does, Brett,
22:49
is it brings us to the second chapter, the next chapter, which
22:52
is California. California is not where it
22:54
ended. California was really the
22:57
preparation for what South Africa, South America, Guyana
23:01
was going to look like. Because when people started
23:05
asking questions, when reporters started digging, when families
23:10
started resisting, Jones needed something more.
23:14
He he needed more. Yeah.
23:17
And what he needed, Brett, was he needed something that most
23:22
and all manipulators love, which is total control.
23:26
And total control is what he had to get to.
23:29
He had to say, how can I control every aspect of every area of
23:33
their life so that they not only just believe in me, but they
23:37
depend on me for everything. And this is where he found the
23:42
jungle. Guyana, Jonestown.
23:47
A paradise promised, A prison delivered.
23:50
Yeah, and that's what we're going to pick up next time.
23:52
We're going to jump into what this looks like in Jonestown,
23:56
because this is where the story gets crazy.
23:58
This is where they begin. I mean, fast tracking
24:02
everything. That was the first part of his
24:05
history. In a short form.
24:07
I wanted to bring that to you. But when we get to this point
24:10
and now we begin to walk through what this power looks like and
24:15
how this power changed Jim Jones forever.
24:19
And so we hope you stick with us throughout this series.
24:22
Again, we want you to sort of identify what manipulation looks
24:25
like in your life, but taking this case study by taking this
24:28
idea that Jim Jones started with and begin to recognize those
24:32
things in your life. Brett, any final thoughts before
24:35
we close it out for today? I'm just, I'm excited to walk
24:40
through this. We've talked about we've from
24:42
this idea for a long time. I think it's necessary with
24:47
given our subject matter, it shows the extreme end of where
24:50
manipulation can lead to. And I'm looking forward to going
24:55
through this with you. Yeah.
24:57
Absolutely looking forward to it as well.
24:59
I can't wait. It's going to be great and
25:02
hopefully you'll stick with us for the next, I think, three
25:04
more sessions as we walk through manipulation with Jim Jones.
25:10
So until next time, to God be the glory.
25:13
Great things he has done. Found my new name, Found that
25:18
good grace, found that healing. And the tears fell down my face
25:23
when I found my beginning. It has no ending.
25:26
I found that second chance. Found my best friend, Found my
25:28
forgiveness, found my happiness. I've been singing ever since I
25:31
found my. Feet on me.
25:46
Thanks for listening to the For Freedom podcast.
25:49
If you enjoyed our content, do us a favor by liking,
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subscribing, or sharing our podcast on whichever podcast
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platform. You use.
25:58
Be sure to join us next time for the For Freedom podcast.