Religion

EDITORS NOTE: This is part one of a two-part series on the spiritual rebirth of Leslie Wilson, survivor of the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. Part two will run in the Religion Section on Saturday.

By PATRICK S. BUTLER
Religion Editor

Under the guise of church, Leslie Wilson said, she was "indoctrinated as a child" into socialism, Marxism and communism -- "Socialism 101" is how she put it.

Instead of quoting the Bible, Jim Jones, leader of The People's Temple in San Francisco, would frequently refer to Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro or other "progressive" revolutionaries of the era.

The twisting of religious appearances to suit Jones' evil purposes, Ms. Wilson said, would lead to spiritual destruction, death and mass murder far from American shores -- and justice -- in the remote jungles of South America. Nearly 1,000 members of People's Temple would die for their misplaced trust in Jones.

The handful of survivors including Leslie Wilson, then 21 -- who escaped into the jungles as her husband, sister, mother, brother and sister's children were herded under gunpoint to altars of death and forced to commune in cyanide laced Kool-Aid, quickly killing 909 of them -- would still suffer post-traumatic stress more than 30 years later at the recollection of those who perished under the hands of cruelty.

People's was never "church" to begin with, said Ms. Wilson, who spoke to the Tyler Morning Telegraph from her Atlanta home on Thursday.

In her book "Slavery of Faith" -- a double entendre referring to the positive biblical passage of Romans 6:22 and faith in Christ, she said, in contrast to the negative and slavish bondage to Jones -- she writes of the warning signs few saw in the days of social strife in San Francisco.

"Jim only quoted the Bible when he had to keep up appearances," Ms. Wilson said. "The rest of the time, it was Socialism 101. But I was only 13 years old when my family started attending People's and what could I do? I thought, 'My parent's seem to think this is OK,' so I went along with it."

Raised in various churches in her native Northern California, Leslie was familiar with Protestant church culture, language and the central emphasis on "Jesus as Lord." But when she arrived at People's Temple in Ukiah, Calif. -- and then later in San Francisco -- the so-called church culture changed dramatically.

"Jim was lord," she said simply. "It was all about him, his sayings and his references to revolutionaries. We were taught to embrace socialism and we did. It's taken years to get over. When I was being returned to America soon after everyone at Jonestown had died, I remember looking out the plane's window at New York City and thinking, 'My God, how am I going to live here?' We were taught to hate capitalist America. Now, after all those years of indoctrination, here I was returning to it. Everything had been taken from me."

The methods Jones used in San Francisco showed that he understood how to exploit "the loyalty of black Americans," Ms. Wilson said. She said her youth group meetings -- a staple of any church seeking to nurture and protect the young from evil influences -- definitely had a different tone from any group she'd previously attended.

The years of her indoctrination at People's had, she said, always kept the outward appearance of a Christian church -- she sang in the choir for instance -- but Jones' twisted influence and subtle manipulative tactics would not be seen for what they were "until it was too late."

"It was the early 1970s," she said, "and there was a lot of rebellion going around, a lot of thinking in different directions and actually, what was happening at People's seemed pretty normal at the time. We were given copies of Mao's Little Red Book or "The Communist Manifesto" or the writings of Che Guevara or Fidel Castro. Our youth group was given assignments to read them, and we would discuss them with our college student leadership at group meetings."

There was one warning sign she didn't see for its significance at the time.

"We never studied the Bible," she said, "never."

Anywhere from 25 to 50 children would attend group meetings. But the "indoctrination," as she called it, included more than conjectural thinking about solving societal ills. Fear also kept the members of People's cohesive and in line -- and dependent on Jones.

"Jim was always talking about nuclear destruction and that we had to be prepared for it," she said. "He often told us there was a cave in Redwood Valley stocked with food he had ready for us when the nuclear holocaust came. We even had some paramilitary defense training."

The horrific effect of the mass murders -- some still mistakenly call it mass "suicide" -- that included the unwilling participants of most of her family, still haunt the memories of Leslie Wilson and her son Jakari who fled into the jungle on that day in 1978. For years, she was unable to set foot into a church, the association of her childhood vulnerability, the stolen loyalty of her friends and family and the cruel consequences of misplaced faith destroyed the path to the one thing that would eventually bring peace to her hurting heart: The love of Jesus.

"I saw the devil with my own eyes," she said. "I talked with him, lived with him and almost died because of him. That's something you don't get over by simply saying a prayer, and you're done with it. No, it takes years and years to let God lead you through what you have to re-experience and see, in order to finally be free and find your purpose on the earth. I have my purpose now."

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