ABSTRACT
When the occasion called for it, Jim Jones could deliver his revolutionary religious message in the style of a talented and practiced evangelist. As the advertisements on the revival circuit say, he was “dynamic,” “electrifying.” Using the standard device of folk preachers in the United States, White and Black, Jones spoke extemporaneously, piecing together memorized phrases, hopping from one topic to another, drawing in current events, relating them back to his basic doctrines. Sometimes he worked off associate pastors and shills planted in the audience who would shout out provocations and encouragements. More often the audience itself came forth with the “amens,” the murmers, applause, and the cries that mark the shifting tempos and spiritual possession of the revival sermon as a social event. Throughout Jones’s career, his “services” kept to this expressive format of Pentecostalism: people in the audience could speak out, in tongues or otherwise, when they felt “the spirit.” 1
