ABSTRACT
The public relations and political successes of Peoples Temple give cause to wonder why Jim Jones did not move from a religious base directly into the realm of politics, as the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell had done, from his Harlem Abyssinian Baptist Church to the U.S. House of Representatives. The answer to that question has to do with the battles that took place between the Temple and its opponents. For all the political support Jones peddled in California, for all the Temple’s PR finesses, they also cultivated opposition. Apostates and their allies in turn harnessed their own PR, media and political connections to a conflict that confirmed Jones’s prophecy of “persecution” and precipitated the collective migration of Peoples Temple to its Promised Land.
