ABSTRACT
Some eighteen years ago, the respected historian of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith, delivered an influential paper entitled “The Devil in Mr. Jones.” The subject of Smith’s paper was the profoundly disturbing mass suicide of some 914 members of the Peoples Temple, led by the Reverend James Warren Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. For his entrée into this troubling and perplexing phenomenon, Smith reminds us that the academic study of religions was born largely during the era of the European Enlightenment. As a product of the Enlightenment quest
for rational understanding and humanistic tolerance, the study of religion has a fundamental duty to try to make some kind of coherent sense of even the most seemingly senseless of religious events:
Indeed, Smith even suggests that the Jonestown incident really poses the ultimate challenge to the historian of religions: precisely because of its seeming irrationality, incomprehensibility, and shocking enigma, it poses the greatest threat to an academic discipline that claims to make rational sense out of all religious phenomena: “One might claim that Jonestown was the most important single event in the history of religions, for if we continue to leave it un-understandable, we will have surrendered our rights to the academy.”4
