Published November 18, 2018

The greatest fact-checking lesson I ever received didn’t happen in a newsroom. It came almost five years before my first byline in a daily newspaper, and it was prompted by the deaths of more than 900 people. Nearly 40 years later, I wish everyone could experience as powerful a lesson. Its relevance today cannot be overstated.

In a departure from our normal schedule, teachers at my high school, St. Louis Catholic in Lake Charles, Louisiana, brought the entire senior class into a lecture hall one day. Peter Stubbs, one of the vice principals, spoke to us as Thomas Paine, a Founding Father and, among other things, a philosopher, political theorist, and activist. Paine’s influential writings included “Common Sense,” a pamphlet (1775-76) that challenged the authority of the British government and the monarchy, and “The Age of Reason,” a criticism of Christian theology. We had studied some of his writing. We weren’t prepared for what we were about to hear.

Stubbs, channeling Paine, delivered a blistering attack on the Catholic Church, including its representatives at our school. The Rev. Marty Borcherding, our pastor, and Sister Mary Carmel Murphy, a vice principal and a history teacher, stood off to the side as Stubbs shocked us by calling them out, as well as the church they served.

In a barrage of “did you know” revelations about what he portrayed as the church’s shortcomings, hypocrisy and worse, the Thomas Paine given voice by Peter Stubbs planted seed after seed of doubt about the institutions and leaders that were such a big part of our lives. He cited an absurd number of doorbells with different-sounding rings at the rectory on campus. That, he suggested, and other ways in which Borcherding was pampered, went against the priest’s vow of poverty. He cast a suspicious eye on the school’s admissions policy. He went on and on and on. The priest and nun said nothing. When Stubbs was done, we were dismissed and resumed our usual class schedule.

We were ripe for the plucking. Challenging the people and institution that had so much authority and control over us was an act of defiance that sat well in the rebellious corners of our teenage minds. I was particularly vulnerable. Stubbs, in part because of his disciplinarian role, was unpopular with students. I’d come to like him while taking in his world literature class, which was as close to a philosophy course as I’d come until college. He let us bring albums to class so we could play songs that related to what we were studying. I decided he’d been hiding a secret cool, and I felt special being allowed to see that side of him.

When I passed him in the commons not long after his guest appearance as Thomas Paine, I smiled, excited to have been witness to the verbal flame-throwing and the fearlessness that I imagined it must have required. Struggling with how to articulate that and probably eager to score points with him, I blurted out, “I was proud of you today!” He said nothing, and the look on his face is burned into my memory. It didn’t exactly say, “Oh, you poor, stupid child,” but that probably wouldn’t be far off the mark. In retrospect, I see it as the face of disappointment — and silence about what was to come.

A point-by-point rundown

The next day, we were brought back into the lecture hall. We heard, one by one, the truth about the false allegations that had been made the day before. The story about the number of doorbells and different ring tones? Not entirely true. The vow of poverty? Not true. Not a standard requirement for diocesan priests. The rest of it? All untrue, although close enough to the truth — or to popular misconception — that there was a degree of plausibility to it all. That, of course, is why it worked.

The most unsettling fact they shared? That precious few of us — perhaps no one — bothered to ask the staff if any of it had been true. (It was 40 years ago, so I don’t know for sure if nobody checked things out on their own, but we didn’t exactly line up at the teachers’ doors demanding answers. I know I didn’t, and I’ll always wonder if that would have been true well past the 24 hours that passed before the second part of the lesson.)

Not long after, I told the story to a priest who had worked there the year before. He had graduated from one of the three schools that consolidated to create our high school, and he knew the place and its recent history well. Before I could get to the “gotcha” part of the lesson, he hollered, “And you all sucked it like fish, didn’t you!” He’d known where the story was headed. I had the impression that it wasn’t the first time the faculty had done something like this. In our case, the impetus for our fact-checking lesson had happened not long before.

Tragedy in Guyana

On Nov. 18, 1978, a mass murder-suicide in South America, near Georgetown, Guyana, in a place called “Jonestown,” claimed the lives of more than 900 people. They had followed Jim Jones, the leader of the Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, from California to Guyana, where a compound for communal living and worship sprang up in the middle of a jungle. They left the U.S. for Jonestown in the summer of 1977 when Jones learned of the impending publication of a story that portrayed him and Peoples Temple in an unflattering light. “We leave tonight,” Jones reportedly told temple leaders while the New West magazine publisher read the story to him over the phone on the eve of its August 1 publication.

A year later, Leo Ryan, a congressman from California, had heard stories of human rights abuses and other problems from concerned family members worried about their relatives who had followed Jones to Guyana. Ryan flew there with staff and journalists on a fact-finding mission. A reception on the first night, Nov. 17, was joyous and celebratory, but after word got out that Peoples Temple members had passed notes to Ryan asking if they could go back with him, everything changed. The next day, as Ryan and his entourage headed to the airstrip to return to the U.S., accompanied by 15 Peoples Temple members, Jones’ guards caught up with them and began shooting. Ryan, three members of the media and one member of Peoples Temple were killed.

Jones knew there would be immediate repercussions. He ordered everyone to a pavilion where cyanide was mixed with Flavor Aid, a powdered concentrate drink mix (and possibly Kool-Aid), and told to drink. Some drank the mixture. Some had it injected in them. Within minutes, 909 people died at the site — reportedly, all but two by cyanide poisoning. (The tragedy led to the phrase “drink the Kool-Aid,” although there is disagreement about whether Kool-Aid was used in the deadly mixture.)

Initial reports underestimated the number of the dead because the bodies on the ground outside the pavilion were bunched together, with people on top of other people. From the air, it was impossible to grasp the extent of the tragedy at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, its formal name. Jones was found with a gunshot wound to the head, his death later ruled a suicide. He is, controversially, included on a mass grave in Oakland, California, marking the deaths of the more than 900 victims. Approximately 80 residents of Jonestown, including Jim Jones Jr., were away on Nov. 18, 1978, and survived.

Blind faith

When teachers and administrators at our high school learned of the tragedy, they decided to act. The fact-checking lesson in two parts was their way of driving home a point about the unquestioning following of leaders, about abdicating one’s responsibility — to oneself and to others — to employ critical thinking regarding things that seem too good to be true.

We failed the lesson in the immediate sense but were wiser for having been taught it. I remain grateful that the faculty cared enough about us to hold such a powerful exercise for our benefit. I’ve tried to find ways to replicate it for journalists just starting out in the business, but it’s all but impossible to re-create the conditions in place for our senior class in 1978.

Seven years later, Bruce Springsteen famously told concertgoers that “in 1985, blind faith in your leaders or in anything will get you killed.” He was speaking in the thick of the Reagan era, so U.S. involvement in wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala were on his mind, but I have to think the Jonestown massacre had made an impression on him. That’s where my thoughts went when I heard his words, an introduction to the song “War.”

The implications of blind faith 40 years after Jonestown should be obvious for anyone who’s paying attention to the world today.

The anniversary

The 40th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre will be less than two weeks after the Nov. 6 midterm elections. There is already coverage out there. There will be more, with a spectrum of interpretations and points of emphasis.

Focus will, in turns, be on religion, socialism, hippies, drugs, sex, abuse, cults, racial integration in the Peoples Temple, unchecked power, politics and more. There is a significant link to the election of George Moscone as mayor of San Francisco, followed by Jones’ subsequent appointment to the city’s housing authority commission. The political circles he sometimes intersected with, including prominent local, state and national Democrats, might surprise people who know only the basic facts of the tragedy. There is so much more. Each point of emphasis is instructive, and yet, by itself, incomplete. Beware the retelling that has too tight a focus.

Those of any political or religious affiliation who try to make the lessons of Jonestown small enough to fit into their narrow agenda will rob you of the larger picture. So many people don’t know how much they don’t know about the tragedy. My agenda in writing this story is simple: If something seems almost too good or too bad to be true, check it out. Blind faith can get you killed.

If you want to learn more about what happened, I recommend starting with “Jonestown: Life and Death of Peoples Temple,” a 2006 documentary that features interviews with survivors. Many of the details in this piece come from the film. The survivors’ perspectives are invaluable to answering the central question: How could this happen?

The first words you’ll hear in the film, from a surviving member of Peoples Temple, are a great start on the way to the answers.

Nobody joins a cult.”

Think about that.

“Nobody joins something they think’s gonna hurt them,” Deborah Layton, author of “Seductive Poison,” goes on to say. “You join a religious organization, you join a political movement, and you join with people that you really like.”

Filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s epilogue speaks to that. As he and his crew began digging into the story, the growing reality that it would have many layers and nuances became clear.

“The more we thought about it,” Nelson says, “we thought, well, you know, over 900 people can’t be insane.”

It’s a realization that must have dawned on the teachers at my high school pretty quickly.

‘Wait a minute’

The comparisons to Hitler were inevitable. It’s chilling now to hear Jim Jones invoking that name in a sermon for his followers as he speaks out against euthanasia.

“Who’s going to decide who, and when a person’s going to die,” he says in a powerful moment in the documentary. “We must never allow that, because this is the kind of thing that ushers in the terror of a Hitler’s Germany. We must not allow these kind of things to enter our consciousness.”

In a New Year’s Eve celebration with about 120 people, he told everyone to drink from a punch that was passed out to the group. After they drank it, he said it was poison and that they were all going to die. Then, amid crying and hollering and shocked silence, he told them it wasn’t poison, that it had been a test of loyalty. Survivors later saw it as his test for himself, to see if he really could have people drink poisoned punch when he decided it was time.

There are so many stories and allegations. There were fake healings. A woman was told to remove her clothes during a planning meeting. Jones had sex with men and women. Some would say he forced them. Others would say they submitted to him. Citing the power imbalance, others would call it something else. He would say that he was the only heterosexual on the planet. Layton says that when he forced himself on her, he told her he was doing it to help her.

“Jim was not celibate,” she says. “Nobody knew that until perhaps it was their time to find out what he spoke from the pulpit wasn’t what he did behind the scenes.”

One survivor’s quote about all of the things she witnessed has an unsettling echo as longheld norms are destroyed and a new normal takes hold in America.

“It’s like a child in a dysfunctional family,” Jordan Vilchez says. “On a certain level, it’s normal. I just kind of took everything in stride.”

Survivor Tim Carter, who lost five family members, watched it all in silence.

“I have a conscious memory of sitting there thinking to myself, ‘This is wrong,’ and I didn’t do a damn thing to stand up and say, ‘This is wrong.’ ”

Jones kept Peoples Temple members from talking with each other as much as possible. Nelson, the filmmaker, understood the effects of that after interviewing the survivors.

Jim Jones, like any leader like that, was really good at compartmentalizing stuff so nobody ever saw the big picture, and I think that’s one of the lessons of Peoples Temple. How much can we excuse in the name of something that’s bigger? How much can we excuse before we say, ‘Wait a minute, something’s wrong, something is terribly wrong?'”

For three years, I’ve wondered how often conservative Christians wrestle with those questions, with the unholy alliance they joined to bring us to this moment in time. How many are even asking them? How much will they excuse before they say, “Wait a minute, something’s wrong, something is terribly wrong”?

They are questions that, looking back, I think my high school teachers and administrators wanted us to be asking long before it ever got to a point of no return. I will always be grateful for the lesson, and I wanted to share it with you before what could be the most important elections of your life.

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Fact-check image by David Carillet via Shutterstock.
Mass grave photo by Dan Schreiber via Shutterstock.