Watching Movies in Jonestown: A Cultural Interlocutor Approach to Visual Media and New Religions

Abstract

This article argues that new religious movements (NRMs) develop as cultural interlocutors. As emergent social bodies that respond to extant norms, structures, and values, NRMs can deploy cultural products as a shared vocabulary and grammar in their response to surrounding society. To demonstrate this approach’s ability to parse NRMs’ relations to popular culture while highlighting organizationally distinctive dimensions of such interactions, this article examines Jim Jones’s references to visual media shown in Jonestown in 1978. Jones critiqued movies and television as tools of social control, repurposed documentaries and films as evidence to support his proffered doctrine, and creatively presented movies as analogues of the commune’s perceived challenges. This threefold hermeneutic shaped the Peoples Temple’s beliefs and behavior, as well as its own media productions.