1970's Jonestown

We hail Jesus Christ as the messiah and savior, and we lump Jim Jones with the rest of the crazies. If you break everything down to the basics, Jesus and Jim Jones were the same person. They both managed to gain a large following, had people who feared them, and they both made the ultimate sacrifice. Somewhere along the lines something happened, a fork in the road that changed the results. Because if history had repeated itself, Jones too would be idolized and hailed as the savior of Jonestown. But instead history played out in a different way, while Jesus will be remembered for healing the sick and blessing the poor, Jim Jones will only be remembered for handing cups of cyanide-laced punch to his

Black religion was no longer regarded as exemplary or special. During a time of growing segregation and violence, some black leaders attempted to counter this perspective seen by whites by embracing the romantic racialist notions that “blacks possessed peculiar gifts.” These gifts being directly connected to the importance of black churches in a time of direct exclusion of blacks from other pieces of society.

Lastly, in the incident with Jonestown, showed the most extreme case of conformity and obedience. Jim Jones was a pastor at Peoples Temple, he was the leader of an interracial church. For its time, Jim Jones was pushing past race and ethnicity and introducing a new church that welcomed all people. Jones was the type of man that made people feel comfortable and at home; maybe that is why so many people followed him when he moved his temple across the county and then to Guyana. I think what made people interested in Jonestown was how the community seemed very close and simple, but who would have guessed that those 900 townspeople would all commit mass suicide just because one man said to. The question that remains is, why did so many people obey

This research will address the self-proclaimed prophet of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, a sect of Mormonism based in Utah, Warren Jeffs and his cult of fear. Warren Jeffs had control over ten thousands of followers for nearly a decade. Warren Jeffs coerced young girls into polygamous marriages with older men. Jeffs is estimated to have over 70 wives. The media was shunned, and he created a hidden community where polygamy was prized above anything else. In 2007, after there was a two year FBI manhunt, Jeffs was convicted as an accomplice to rape. Warren Jeff's rise to power effort led to his fallout. Even after his conviction his followers believed that he was innocent and held onto his beliefs and practices.

I sat down at my kitchen table with Michael Bruxvoort, a friend and fellow Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on October 25th, 2015. We laughed and talked about his journey through life and all the memories, obstacles and pleasures along the way. Among the many topics we spoke about, the ones that seemed most relevant to him and myself were: the family dynamics of religion within his household, his process of religion through secular spaces and lastly, his transition to Chapel Hill, NC and making it his home. Our conversation through Michael 's life shows how his faith has shaped him to be the man he is today. Through this paper, I will explain and analyze these topics in hopes of better understanding geographies of religion.

On the other hand, McIntosh commented in her interview that the neighboring master “have lots of land…and fixed up his slaves their own cabin” where missionaries came and preached. In another account, Nellie Jones of Savannah describes how “a gray-headed planter catechized us negro children …But I heard of the missionary instructing a large number of colored boys and girls at the big-planters farm”

Structural Functionalism can be used to explain the quote above by the citizens of Jonestown finding a way to function all together in this social institution. They came together to work as a family to create harmony and form a group as a collectivist society. Guidelines were created for their everyday life in guyana. Emotional comfort was found in the dysfunction of religion that Jim Jones created. People obeyed and did anything he said, Jones had the ultimate social control. Just like people in

Jones begins in chapter one by establishing the Divinity of the Holy Spirit, something she

Sojourner Truth is remembered as an ex-slave who changed her name from Isabella and gave her famous Ain’t I a Woman speech regarding abolition and women’s rights. But before her speech, Truth actively participated in a religious cult and faced a murder charge. Authors Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz provide a descriptive account of the religious cult in their book The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-century America. Their book follows the life of Robert Matthews and the events of his life leading up to the creation of his new religion in New York in the 1830s. Robert Matthews started to refer to himself as the prophet Matthias and recruited wealthy families to join his religion where they lived in isolation. American society in the 1830s encountered rapid change with the emergence of the market revolution and the Second Great Awakening. Impacts from the market revolution, the second great awakening, and personal factors led Matthias to create and influenced his own religion which other Americans eventually denounced.

The Making of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message. A. J. Smith Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2008.

When deciding what movie to do for this particular paper I faced a few issues. I knew what the requirements were, but I wanted something different and something I could have fun watching and writing as well. So, after looking around and pondering movies for weeks I finally decided on a perfect choice The 60's directed by Mark Piznarski?

In Langston Hughes 's autobiographical anecdote, “Salvation,” the author reflects on his childhood, and also examines the basis on which his religious views were founded. Hughes 's nonfiction piece, written in adulthood, allows him to look back on his past and reconsider what he learned about salvation, as well as organized religion and conformity, as a child. Because of this inquiry, he begins to question the ways in which adults pressure young people to conform to their views of religion, even without having the deep feeling of faith required. When people are young, they are often asked to conform to roles that they don’t really understand or think deeply about, and religious duty is thus carried on without a lot of free will. Langston Hughes divulges the hypocrisy and the fraudulent faith of the Church and its indoctrinated members through irony and his own indoctrination into his damning salvation. The church service pressures and bullies young Hughes into falsifying his salvation. This ceremony proves that the church values tradition over faith.

The first public challenge to Jones’ leadership of the Temple came in 1972 from the media, which then increased his paranoia that his followers would turn against him. Jones went to greater lengths after being challenged by the media to declare his control by constantly testing his followers. He would organize “white nights”, which required his followers to drink a red liquid which may have contained poison, then Jones would see how many of his followers wouldn’t hesitate to drink the red liquid. Jones was still paranoid and made the decision to move Peoples Temple to Guyana and start a community called Jonestown.

The memoir of Old Elizabeth presents a rare and important slave narrative in which the stories of African American women intersect with the experiences of African American people in roles of religious leadership. Elizabeth broke many of societies conventions at the time by preaching and holding religious meeting despite being woman. Her religious work was met with backlash from the church and from many other people who did not accept the idea of a woman leading religious services, yet she continued to practice until her health would no longer allow for it. This is unusual as it spends most of the narrative on the time after she was free rather than focusing on the time that she was enslaved the way that many slave narratives do.

Jesus' decision to physically cast out the moneylenders from the temple stands as one of the most interesting events of his life, because it represents what seems to be the only moment in the Gospel narratives where he becomes visibly angry to the point of physical action. While one could argue that Jesus is frequently (and justifiably) angry with the disciples from time to time, this is the only moment that Jesus' anger moves him to physical force. Although the event is recorded in all four of the Gospels, this study will focus specifically on its rendering in Matthew, because when considered in the context of Matthew's larger narrative, one can see how Jesus' decision to cleanse the temple does not represent an aberration in either his character or theological message, but rather the natural culmination of Jesus' life and works prior to that point, and demonstrates a kind of revolutionary, anti-authoritarian element of Jesus' message of salvation that is all too often overlooked by Christians and critics alike.