c. 2007 Religion News Service

TORONTO _ Experts are still picking over the events of Nov. 18, 1978, when more than 900 members of the People’s Temple _ nearly 300 of them children _ died in the jungles of Guyana on orders of their charismatic, messianic, drug-addled leader, Jim Jones.

Jonestown disintegrated when U.S. Rep. Leo J. Ryan arrived to investigate allegations of widespread abuse, rape, forced labor and coercion. Convinced the outside world wanted to destroy his South American utopia, Jones ordered a hit squad to kill Ryan; five people were killed, including Ryan and two NBC journalists.

Jones ordered a mass suicide that had been rehearsed repeatedly. Cult members drank or were force-fed fruit punch laced with cyanide. Others were murdered by lethal injection or, like Jones himself, by gunshot to the head.

A handful of members survived, including Jones’ then 19-year-old son, Stephan, who was playing in a basketball tournament. Stephan Jones, who also lost his mother, Marceline, that day in Jonestown, spiraled into a haze of drugs and despair.

Now 47, Jones is a gentle, soft-spoken (and sober) vegetarian who sells office furniture in the San Francisco Bay area and looks back on Jonestown with a mixture of bluntness and even love for his father.

He was in Toronto to promote a new film, “Jonestown: Paradise Lost.”

Q: What kind of religious upbringing did you have?

A: Religion was always a part of my life. Either (it was) being railed against or used to attract. The good parts of my upbringing were heavily influenced by what I’ve come to know as a healthier religion based on values, principles and service _ and that came from my mother’s side.

(My father) was determined to supplant God. He was adept at telling people what they wanted to hear and showing them what they wanted to see to get them to do what he wanted.

Q: You state in the film that your father knew he was sick and believed he was a fraud. Did he ever move to the point where he really believed he was a kind of messiah?

A: Tough to say. I doubt it. The delusion at that point, the level of drugs he was taking toward the end, especially, I can’t say. I think there was always part of him that knew he was a fraud, part of him that was deeply insecure. His whole agenda was about trying to drown out that voice with as much adulation as he could conjure and cajole out of people.

(When) it became clear that people were tuning him out, and many of them were likely to go back and let others know what they had experienced, his world unraveled. He had no reason to continue living. He was destroyed. And so he took a lot of people with him.

Q: What was Jonestown like for you?

A: I’ve got to tell you, up to that time (November 1978), it was the best time of my life. Living in the jungle, we were building a town for our community. We were working our tails off. (We were) mostly a bunch of young guys who played hard and even enjoyed work, and really seeing the fruit of our labor.

(But) living in the jungle with Jim Jones … there was no part of me that liked the idea of that. When he got down there, it really changed overnight from work being a means of production to a means of control. It was just a prison.

Q: You weren’t in Jonestown the day of the suicides. What do you think would have happened if you had been?

A: (Pauses). It’s possible that I might have been the one … to kick over the only vat of poison in the whole place. It might have been that I or someone else could have interrupted or averted the (assassination squad). I can’t say.

But once things got rolling and the first child died, it would have been hard for me to run away and pull away from that. Could I have assisted it? I don’t know; I wasn’t there.

Q: You say in the film that you never grieved for your father. Has that changed as you get older?

A: I never grieved him because my grief was long over before I came to terms (with the events). But I have certainly come to forgive him and love him and even appreciate him.

There were parts of him that were quite gentle and loving. He taught me more than any other man that it was OK to be affectionate, to have a warm and soft side. So I have not grieved him, but I’ve come to love him my own way, and miss him and feel sadness for him.

Q: Do you consider your father a murderer?

A: There’s no way around that. Yeah. (But) I don’t think he was the only murderer there, frankly. People have asked me if he was a monster and I say, “I guess by my definition, by the time he went, he was a monster.” I don’t know how much of little Jimmy Jones who was born in 1931 remained at that time.

Q: What has been your personal spiritual development and how has it helped you cope?

A: I have a path. It’s private to me. I can say (it’s) a belief in a God, a loving and truly all-knowing, all-powerful force in the universe that’s beyond any religion I’ve encountered. I’ve certainly done my time in hell on earth.

I’m blessed to have hit enough of a bottom and to have been surrounded by amazing, wonderful, honest, compassionate and challenging people to see me through that.

Q: What are the lessons of Jonestown?

A: There are a couple, and one is finding your own understanding of something greater, and (to) nurture it above all else. I think we can take anything that happens to us and make it a gift if we’re willing to bring it to the present. Forget trying to change it; it happened. There’s no taking it back, so why not learn to hold it in a way that we can learn from? Let go of blaming, let go of shame.

KRE/PH END CSILLAG

Editors: To obtain a photo of Stephan Jones, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.