Conservatives of all stripes learn at a very young age that there are certain figures we must keep at arm's length or else be prepared to explain away; this theorist had a wrong view of slavery, so and so politician or opinion writer took the wrong stance on civil rights. Protestants have to explain away Luther's anti-Semitism and the Salem Witch Trials, while Catholics are saddled with the Inquisition. Much of this is good in the sense that it has traditionally forced conservatives and traditionalists to smooth their rough edges, though recent years remind us all that plenty of cranks and weirdos remain. This phenomenon has also spurred a reaction among conservatives who see a double standard wherein progressive heroes are granted a pass on their own shortcomings, whether it be sexual peccadilloes in the case of Bill Clinton, racism with Margaret Sanger, or anti-Semitism with Louis Farrakhan.
This is a key revelation in Daniel J. Flynn's Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and Ten Days That Shook San Francisco. Modern America, to the extent that it knows its own history at all, knows Jim Jones as a fundamentalist pastor who went crazy. It knows Harvey Milk as a gay rights icon, murdered in his prime for his brave leadership on the issue. Most importantly, it “knows” the two men as unrelated, with Jones's nightmare taking place in a Guyana jungle and Milk martyred in free-wheeling San Francisco. Flynn reveals something different. Though neither man was from San Francisco, and both had troubling private lives, it was San Francisco that gave them the space to flower into the personas that would bring them fame. It was San Francisco that incubated their ambitions, quirks, and, in the case of Jones, insanity. In this respect, Flynn's highly readable and compelling work is a story about San Francisco, a city with seemingly no limiting principles to reign in its excesses. More broadly, it is a story about the extent to which unfettered ideology excuses a multitude of sins, which in this case led to the deaths of hundreds—in the jungle of Guyana and the concrete jungle of San Francisco.
Flynn makes clear from the outset that Jones was simply not a Christian minister in any traditional sense. His message was socialism and any variety of progressive causes he picked up along the way. Jim Jones's early biography is almost cliched at this point. He grew up in rural Indiana in an oppressive, fundamentalist environment with an overbearing mother. Flynn mentions that past fundamentalism, but it is worth noting that Jones grew up outside any particular denominational structure and theological framework. It is also worth noting that Jones ultimately settled in a Pentecostal church, in a tradition without strong ecclesiastical moorings that placed, and continues to place, heavy weight on the internal pull of the believer's conscience. In this respect, there was never a limiting principle at work within Jones, or those around him, that could say “enough.” He was free to continue apace, as much as his appetites demanded.
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