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Saving The Children by Killing Them: Redemptive Sacrifice in the Ideologies of Jim Jones and Ronald Reagan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 June 2018

David Chidester
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Extract

It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.

U.S. Army officer, after the destruction of Ben Tre, Vietnam, 1968

I ‘d rather see them lay like that than to see them have to die like the Jews did.

Resident of Jonestown, Guyana

I would rather see my little girls die now, still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God.

Resident of California, USA

We win when we go down.

Jim Jones

Win one for the Gipper.

Ronald Reagan

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , Summer 1991 , pp. 177 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1991

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References

Notes

1. Chidester, David, Salvation and Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple, and Jonestown (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 129-59.Google Scholar

2. Talbott, Strobe, The Russians and Reagan (New York: Random House, 1984), 115-16;Google Scholar Reagan, Ronald, The Quest for Peace, the Cause of Freedom: Selected Speeches on the United States and the World (Washington, D.C.: United States Information Agency, 1988), 55–56.Google Scholar

3. Contra Costa Times, November 30,1978.

4. Denton, Robert E., Jr., and Hahn, Dan F., Presidential Communication: Description and Analysis (New York Praeger, 1986), 68–70.Google Scholar

5. Beatty, Jack, “The Presidenf s Mind,” The New Republic (April 7, 1982): 12.Google Scholar

6. Rogin, Michael, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 5.Google Scholar

7. Ragsdale, Lynn, “Presidential Speechmaking and the Public Audience: Individual Presidents and Group Attitudes,” The Journal of Politics 49 (1987): 733.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. In his foundational article on civü religion, Robert Bellah noted that “sacrificial death and rebirth” was a biblical archetype that became “indelibly written into the civü religion” with the Civü War. Bellah, Robert N., “Civü Religion in America,” in American CM Religion, ed. Richey, Russell E. and Jones, Donald G. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 40,31–32.Google Scholar This theme of sacrificial death and redemption has been usefully developed in Edward Tabor linenthal's works, Changing Images of the Warrior Hero in America: A History of Populär Symbölism (New York: Edwin Meilen, 1982); “Ritual Drama at the little Big Hörn: The Persistence and Transformation of a National Symbol,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983): 267-81; and “ ‘A Reservoir of Spiritual Power’: Patriotic Faith at the Alamo in the Twentieth Century” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 91 (1988): 509-31. With respect to Reagan, the importance of sacrificial death was ignored in the only attempt to analyze “Reagan's Civil Religion” while he was in office; see Adams, David S., “Ronald Reagan's ‘RevivaT: Voluntarism as a Theme in Reagan's Civil Religion,” Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 17–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Talbott, The Russians and Reagan, 115-16; Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 55-56. The emphasized passage was omitted in the latter reference, the U.S. Infor¬mation Agency collection of Reagan Speeches, but it reappeared in Reagan, Ronald, Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 178.Google Scholar

10. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 15-16.

11. Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 41-44.

12. Ibid., 217.

13. Ibid., 14-24.

14. Ibid., 38-39.

15. Ibid., 173.

16. Congressional Quarterly, Historie Docwnents of 1986 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1987), 701-2. See Wallace, Mike, “Hijacking History: Ronald Reagan and the Statue of Liberty,” Radical History Review 37 (1987): 119-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 228.

18. Ibid., 71.

19. Watson, Russell et al., “A Tragedy in the Gulf,” Newsweek (June 1, 1987): 16.Google Scholar

20. New York Times, November 15, 1985; Anderson, Martin, Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988), 19–21;Google Scholar Niskanen, William A., Reaganomics: An Insider's Account of the Politics and the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 283-84.Google Scholar

21. For example, see Reagan's first inaugural address in Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 35-37.

22. Carrasco, David, ‘The Hermeneutics of Conquest,” History of Religions 28 (1988): 160.Google Scholar

23. For important discussions of sacrifice and war, see Burkert, Walter, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Bing, Peter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 47;Google Scholar and Girard, Rene, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Gregory, Patrick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 280.Google Scholar

24. Kellner, Douglas, “Baudrillard, Semiurgy and Death,” Theory, Culture and Society 4(1987): 126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25. Anderson, Revolution, 54.

26. Smith, Jonathan Z., “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” History ofReligions 20 (1980): 124-25;Google Scholar Imagining Religion: Front Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 63.

27. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 39; Reagan, Ronald and Hubler, Richard G., Where's the Rest of Me? (New York: Hawthorn, 1965).Google Scholar

28. Barrett, Laurence I., Gambling zvith History: Ronald Reagan in the White House (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983), 42.Google Scholar

29. Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 41.

30. Chidester, Salvation and Suicide, 109-15.

31. Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 121.

32. Johnson, Gary R., “Kin Selection, Socialization, and Patriotism: An Integrating Theory,” Politics and the Life Sciences 4 (1986): 127-54;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Johnson, Gary R., “In the Name of the Fatherland: An Analysis of Kin Term Usage in Patriotic Speech and Literature,” International Political Science Review 8 (1987): 165-74;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Johnson, G. R., Ratwik, S. H., and Sawyer, T. R., “The Evocative Significance of Kin Terms in Patriotic Speech,” in The Sociobiology of Ethnocentrism, ed. Reynolds, V., Falger, V., and Vine, I. (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 157-74.Google Scholar

33. Chidester, Salvation and Suicide, 127-28.

34. Valeri, Valerio, Kingship and Sacrifice: Ritual and Society in Ancient Hawaii, trans. Wissing, Paula (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 84.Google Scholar This analysis can be applied here, I think, without entering into the controversy over the analysis of sacrificial ritual: whether sacrifice is about Saving” (the sacrificial gift of some valued possession), about “being” (the sacrificial Substitution of animal for human), about “eating” (the sacrificial communal meal shared by humans and superhuman beings), or about “dividing” (the systematic distribution of the sacrificial animal as a symbolic reconstruction of social relations).

35. Chidester, Salvation and Suicide, 109-15.

36. Linenthal, Edward Tabor, Symbolic Defense: The Strategie Defense Initiative in American Populär Culture (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

37. Chidester, David, “Religious Studies as Political Practice in South Africa,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 58 (1987): 4–17;Google Scholar “Stealing the Sacred Symbols: Biblical Interpretation in the Peoples Temple and the Unification Church,” Religion 18 (1988): 137-62; and “Worldview Analysis of African Indigenous Churches,” Journal for the Study of Religion 2 (1989): 15-29. I “stole” this notion of religion from Kenneth Burke—by way of Lentricchia, Frank, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar—by modifying Burke's characterization of culture as “the stealing back and forth of Symbols” in his Attitudes Toward History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 328. The act of appropriation is an important, dynamic factor in the semiology of symbolic forms, as Roland Barthes noted in his 1956 work “Myth as Stolen Language”: “What is characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form. In other words, myth is a language robbery. I rob the Negro who is saluting, the white and brown chalet, the seasonal fall in fruit prices, not to make them into examples or Symbols, but to naturalize through them the Empire, my taste for Basque things, the Govern¬ment…. One could say that a language offers to myth an open-work meaning. Myth can easily insinuate itself into it, and swell there: it is a robbery by colonization…” A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 118-120. However, I think that this notion of appropriation is even more important for our understanding of what might be called the politics of symbolic forms. In this respect, T. O. Beidelman has pointed to “the deep ambiguity and hence negotiability of symbols This negotiability is rooted in the ‘politics’ of social life, especially in areas of contested power and authority. Negotiability rests in the ambiguity of Symbols, which allows for continued struggle by groups seeking to define what they mean.” See Beidelman, “Sacrifke and Sacred Rule in Africa,” American Ethnologist 14 (1987): 546. Beidelman developed this theme of the nego¬tiability of Symbols in a little more detail in his work on Kaguru moral imagina-tion, where he observed that, “No patterns of relations are set. Instead, each congeiies of people and situations poses a field for negotiation and struggle over which symbolic qualities come to center stage and which remain in the back-ground or even in the wings.” Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 207. Beidelman has sug-gested that Symbols are negotiated because they are ambiguous; perhaps he would also agree that symbols are ambiguous because they are always already negotiated, contested, and stolen back and forth in the very process of their pro-duction and reproduction as symbols. For other discussions of the “essential negotiability” of “essentially contested” symbols, see Gallie, W. S., Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken, 1968), 157-91;Google Scholar and Rosen, Lawrence, Bargaining for Reality: The Construction of Social Relations in a Muslim Com¬munity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 185-86.Google Scholar

38. Hamerton-Kelly, Robert G., ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 188.Google Scholar

39. New York Times, November 15, 1985; Anderson, Revolution, 19; Niskanen, Reaganomics, 283.

40. Chidester, Salvation and Suicide, 51-57; “Stealing the Sacred Symbols,” 146-48.

41. Reagan, 77H? Quest for Peace, 57.

42. Hall, John, “Collective Weifare as Resource Mobilization in Peoples Temple: A Case Study of a Poor People's Religious Social Movement,” Sociological Analysis 49 (1988 Supplement): 64–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

43. Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 8-9.

44. Bataille, Georges, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Stoekl, Allan; trans. Stoekl, Allan, Lovitt, Carl R., and Lesie, Donald M., Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118.Google Scholar On Bataille, see Richman, Michele H., Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).Google Scholar Certainly, we need not be committed to French theorists in developing this notion of sacrificial expenditure. We could refer back to Dutch theorist of religion Van der Leeuw on the power of sacrifice: “For the broad stream of life, the eternal flux of power is assured by the greatest possible ‘expenditure.’ ” Van der Leeuw, Geerardus, Reli¬gion in Essence and Manifestation, trarts. Turner, J. E. (Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1986), 356.Google Scholar In addition, Van der Leeuw had certain ideas about the mystical properties of “property” (e.g., “a ‘mysticaT relation between owner and owned” [50]), which he variously described as sacred, inalienable, and powerful (210, 249). These ideas not only fit into his reflections on sacrifice—the inter-changeability of “having” and “being” in the sacrificial offering, the ways in which “giver and gift can interchange their roles” (356)—but might also be extended to an analysis of negotiated daims on the ownership of Symbols as Claims to their power.

45. Hshtain, Jean Bethke, “Citizenship and Armed Civic Virtue: Some Critical Questions on the Commitment to Public Life,” in Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, ed. Reynolds, Charles H. and Norman, Ralph V. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 51.Google Scholar

46. Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 125.

47. Gusdorf, Georges, L'experience humaine du sacrifice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), 72.Google Scholar

48. Chidester, Salvation and Suidde, 127-28.

49. My distinction between “locative” and “utopian” sacrificial expenditure has been adapted from Smith, Jonathan Z., Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History ofReligions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 101.Google ScholarPubMed

50. Reagan, The Quest for Peace, 41-42; Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, 15.

51. Podhoretz, Norman, ‘The Future Danger,” Commentary 71 (1981): 29, 38.Google Scholar See Linenthal, Edward Tabor, “Restoring America: Political Revivalism in the Nuclear Age,” in Religion and the Life of the Nation: American Recoveries, ed. Sherrill, Rowland A. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 23–45.Google Scholar

52. Lincoln, C. Eric, Race, Religion, and the Continuing American Dilemma (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 3.Google Scholar

53. Chidester, “Stealing the Sacred Symbols,” 153-55; “Rituals of Exdusion and the Jonestown Dead,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56 (1988): 698-700.

54. Lasswell, Harold, World Politics and Personal Insecurity (New York: Whittlesy House, 1935), 33–34.Google Scholar