Annie Dawid
speaker
147 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Annie Dawid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One is he feels Indiana's inhospitable to their mixed congregation. But the other is that like many people in the early 60s, there's a great fear of a nuclear bomb. And Esquire magazine runs this story. piece saying, these are the 10 best places in the world where you'll be safest if the bomb drops.
So he chooses the Redwood Valley near Ukiah, California, Northern California, which is at the time pretty white itself and very rural. And so he says, okay, who's coming with me? And I think the numbers are about 110. people follow him, 40 families roughly. And they go in a caravan out to Northern California. And it's there that the church starts expanding. So that was 65.
And so if you think about the context of what's going on in America, we have the rise of the anti-war movement. We have a lot of white college kids who want to change the world. So initially, it's kind of that segment that starts growing in the church. And a lot of his Black followers grow up in the Black church. And so he can really speak to them with his style of preaching.
But to the college educated, that style of preaching is not anything they're used to. So he's developing, and I'm not saying it was insincere, he's developing the political part of the church, which is so egalitarian that he calls himself a socialist. And he says, that's what the world should be. It should be socialist, goods should be distributed equally.
And so many young people, including a bunch of white-collar types like lawyers and teachers, are attracted to the church for that reason, not for... the Pentecostal preaching.
Yeah. So the healings he discovers bring a lot of people. Like he's a showman. He's a great showman. They end up going on these national tours where they have this fleet of Greyhound buses eventually that take all of them all over the country and they do these services, and the healings are, I suppose, an evangelistic kind of standby, if you're the right kind of preacher.
So yeah, he heals people, supposedly, he brings people back from the dead, supposedly. And, and I guess he's very, very convincing. You know, I mean, as a As a natural born skeptic, I never would have believed it, but he manages to make it believable. And of course, he has this little inner core of workers who make these possible and do all kinds of nefarious things to make the healings look real.
You know, like I would suppose it's more like a magic show.
Yes. I mean, so they get a They have their headquarters in San Francisco, and they also have a church in Los Angeles, and they go back and forth a lot.
I guess I don't know about that language. I don't know if I'd use that language. I mean, he... I mean, Jones is a really shrewd guy, and he understands that his style of preaching is very attractive to African-Americans and that he can get lots more human beings where there are Black neighborhoods. And, you know, Ukiah doesn't have any, and San Francisco has plenty, and Los Angeles has plenty.
So that's another reason for the move out of Ukiah. And in San Francisco still, Kind of in exchange for offering the support of the People's Temple to the candidate, Mayor Moscone, who wins and Harvey Mill gets his spot on the Board of Supervisors, Jones is rewarded with a political position of being head of the Housing Board in San Francisco.
Housing is a super important part of the political landscape.
Yes. I mean, he called himself a socialist, and I guess the technical term is apostolic socialism that he was preaching. So he got to keep the God part for the God-fearing, but he started moving away from that.
And if you've read some of the anecdotes from that time, you probably remember that he at one point holds up this Bible to his huge congregation and says, there's no sky God who cares about you. And he throws the Bible on the ground and stamps on it. And he says, if there's a sky God, let him come get me for doing this. And that's pretty scandalous for especially the old people.
And I haven't quite mentioned that.
Yeah. Yeah. And so he manages that. You say they're mutually exclusive, but he brings them together in the people's temple and makes it work for a little while.
Well, the communal living did not fail in San Francisco. That's not why they left. They have, you know, multiple, like you can call them urban communes. And part of that is how Temple accumulates wealth. they get their members. And this is also apparently a very common thing in a lot of evangelical churches.
People give up all of their worldly goods and they give all the profits or in Jones's case, like the titles to their places of habitation, they give that over to the church. And so then they have communal living as part of the ethos of the church. And And they eat very frugally.
And so People's Temple is gathering wealth as an organization, but the people are living like poor people and sharing living facilities and sharing meals. And they get an allowance of like a few bucks a week to live on. you know, to buy extras. Then when they run the collections at church services, like they're supposed to give some of that back to the church too. They're a few bucks a week.
Yes, he offers himself. The messianic thing is not unusual. The throwing in the political messiah with the religious messiah, that's unusual. So yeah, he's Jesus, he's Buddha. He's Marx. No, Lenin. He preferred Lenin to Marx. So the whole political dimension added to the religious dimension is what makes him unusual, I would say. But the messianic thing is the cult leader, or however you say it,
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