ABSTRACT
The Jonestown group was drawn back into a preapocalyptic war with the forces of the established order, and thus "revolutionary suicide" came to be seen as a way of surmounting the frustration, of moving beyond the apocalypse to heaven, albeit not on earth. This chapter considers the origins of Jonestown and the ways in which it subsequently came to approximate the ideal typical other-worldly sect. It considers certain tensions within the Jonestown group with respect to its other-worldly existence in order to understand why similar groups did not encounter the same fate. The convergence of racial integration and crude communism gave a distinctly political character to what in many other respects was an other-worldly religious sect. The other-worldly sect typically establishes its existence on the "other" side of the apocalypse by withdrawing from "this" world into a timeless heaven-on-earth. The injection of radical politics gave a heightened sense of persecution to the Jonestown Agricultural Project.
