THIS BOOK has been deliberately “understated.” Our intention has been to present as calm and objective a view as possible of the non-Christian religious attitudes which are preparing the way for the “religion of the future”; we have hardly touched on some of the “horror stories” that could be cited from some of the cults mentioned in this book: true stories that reveal what happens when one’s involvement with the unseen demonic powers becomes complete, and a man becomes the willing tool of their evil purposes.

But then, on the eve of the publication of the new edition of this book, the whole world was suddenly made aware of one of these “horror stories”: the mass suicide of Jim Jones and over 900 of his followers in the Marxist-religious commune of “Jonestown” in the jungles of Guyana, South America.

No more striking “sign of the times” could be imagined; Jonestown is a clear warning — and prophecy — of the future of mankind.

The secular press, understandably, did not know quite what to make of this monstrous event. Some of the foreign press took it as merely another example of American violence and extremism; the American press portrayed Jim Jones as a “madman,” and the event itself as a result of the evil influence of “cults”; more honest and sensitive journalists admitted that the magnitude and grotesqueness of the whole phenomenon baffled them.

Few observers saw Jonestown as an authentic sign of our times, a revelation of the state of contemporary humanity; but there are many indications that it was indeed such.

Jim Jones himself was unquestionably in touch with the mainstream of today’s religious-political world. His religious background as a “prophet” and “healer” capable of fascinating and dominating a certain kind of unsettled, “searching” modern man (chiefly lower-class urban blacks), gave him a respected place in the American religious spectrum, rather more acceptable in our more tolerant times than his hero of an earlier generation, “Father Divine.” His innumerable “good deeds” and unexpectedly generous gifts to the needy made him a leading representative of “liberal” Christianity and drew the attention of the liberal political establishment in California, where his influence increased with every year. His personal admirers included the Mayor of San Francisco, the Governor of California, and the wife of the President of the United States. His Marxist political philosophy and commune in Guyana placed him in the respectable political avant-garde; the lieutenant governor of California personally inspected Jonestown and was favorably impressed by it, as were other outside observers. Although there were complaints, especially in the last year or two, against Jones’ sometimes violent way of dominating his followers, even this aspect of Jonestown was within the limits allowed by the liberal West for contemporary Communist governments, which are not looked on with too great disfavor even for liquidating some hundreds or thousands or millions of dissenters.

Jonestown was a thoroughly “modern,” a thoroughly contemporary experiment; but what was the significance of its spectacular end?

The contemporary phenomenon that is perhaps closest in spirit to the Jonestown tragedy is one that at first sight might not be associated with it: the swift and brutal liquidation by the Cambodian Communist government, in the name of humanity’s bright future, of perhaps two million innocent people — one-fourth or more of the total population of Cambodia. This “revolutionary genocide,” perhaps the most deliberate and ruthless case of it yet in the bloody 20th century, is an exact parallel to the “revolutionary suicide”1 in Jonestown: in both cases the sheer horror of mass death is justified as paving the way for the perfect future promised by Communism for a “purified” humanity. These two events mark a new stage in the history of the “Gulag Archipelago” — the chain of inhuman concentration camps which atheism has established in order to transform mankind and abolish Christianity.

In Jonestown once again the incredible accuracy of Dostoyevsky’s 19th-century diagnosis of the revolutionary mind is proved: a key figure in his novel The Possessed (more precisely, The Demons) is Kirillov, who believes that the ultimate act proving that he has become God is precisely suicide. “Normal” people, of course, cannot understand such a logic; but history is seldom made by “normal” people, and the 20th century has been par excellence the century of the triumph of a “revolutionary logic” which is put into execution by men who have become thoroughly “modern” and have consciously renounced the values of the past, and especially the truth of Christianity. To those who believe in this “logic,” the Jonestown suicides are a great revolutionary act that “proves” there is no God and point to the nearness of the world totalitarian government, whose “prophet” Jones himself wanted to be. The only regret over this act in such minds was expressed by one of the residents of Jonestown, whose last-minute note was found on Jones’ body: “Dad: I see no way out — I agree with your decision — I fear only that without you the world may not make it to communism.”2 All the assets of the Jonestown commune (some seven million dollars) were bequeathed to the Communist Party of the USSR (The New York Times, Dec. 18, 1978, p. 1).

Jonestown was not the isolated act of a “madman”; it is something very close to all of us who live in these times. One journalist sensed this when he wrote of Jones (with whom he had some personal contact in San Francisco): “His almost religious and definitely mystical power, its evil well concealed, must somehow be construed as a clue to the mystery that is the 1970s” (Herb Caen, in The Suicide Cult, p. 192).

The source of this “mystical power” is not far to seek. The religion of the “People’s Temple” was not even remotely Christian (even though Jim Jones, its founder, was an ordained minister of the “Disciples of Christ”); it owed much more to Jones’ spiritualist experience of the 1950s, when he was forming his worldview. He claimed not merely to be the “reincarnation” of Jesus, Buddha, and Lenin; he openly stated that he was an “oracle or medium for discarnate entities from another galaxy.”3 In other words, he gave himself over into the power of evil spirits, who doubtless inspired his final act of “logical” madness. Jonestown cannot be understood apart from the inspiration and activity of demons; this, indeed, is why secular journalists cannot understand it.

It is all too likely that Jonestown is but the beginning of far worse things to come in the 1980s — things which only those with the profoundest and clearest Christian faith can even dare think about. It is not merely that politics is becoming “religious” (for the massacres in Cambodia were acts performed with “religious” — that is, demonic — fervor), or that religion is becoming “political” (in the case of Jonestown); such things have happened before. But it may well be that we are now beginning to see, in concrete historical acts, the particular blending of religion and politics that seems to be required for the zealots of antichrist, the religious-political leader of the last humanity. This spirit, to be sure, has already been present to some degree in the earlier totalitarian regimes of the 20th century; but the intensity of fervor and devotion required for mass suicide (as opposed to mass murder, which has been committed many times in our century) makes Jonestown a milestone on the path to the approaching culmination of modern times.

Satan, it would seem, is now entering naked into human history.

The years just ahead promise to be more terrible than anyone can now easily conceive. This one outburst of satan-inspired energy led nearly 1,000 people to revolutionary suicide; what of the many other enclaves of satanic energy, some much more powerful than this small movement, that have not yet manifested themselves?

A realistic view of the religious state of the contemporary world is enough to inspire any serious Orthodox Christian with fear and trembling over his own salvation. The temptations and trials ahead are immense: Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be (Matt. 24:21). Some of these trials will come from the side of pleasing deceptions, from the “signs and lying wonders” which we begin to see even now; others will come from the fierce and naked evil which is already visible in Jonestown, Cambodia, and the Gulag Archipelago. Those who wish to be true Christians in these frightful days had better begin to become serious about their Faith, learning what true Christianity is, learning to pray to God in spirit and in truth, learning to know Who Christ is, in Whom alone we have salvation.