Jones was born on May 13, 1931 in a rural area of Crete, Indiana, to James Thurman Jones (1887-1951), a World War I veteran, and Lynetta Putnam (1902-1977). Jones was of Irish and Welsh descent; he later claimed partial Cherokee ancestry through his mother, but his maternal second cousin later stated this was likely untrue. Economic difficulties during the Great Depression necessitated that Jones' family move to the town of Lynn in 1934, where he grew up in a shack without plumbing.

In 1951, Jones began attending gatherings of the Communist Party USA in Indianapolis. He became flustered with harassment he received during the McCarthy Hearings, particularly regarding an event he attended with his mother focusing on Paul Robeson, after which she was harassed by the FBI in front of her co-workers for attending. He also became frustrated with ostracism of open communists in the United States, especially during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. This frustration, among other things, provoked a seminal moment for Jones in which he asked himself, "How can I demonstrate my Marxism? The thought was, infiltrate the church." Jones was surprised when a Methodist superintendent helped him get a start in the church even though he knew Jones to be a communist and Jones did not meet him through the Communist Party USA. In 1952, he became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church, but claimed he left that church because its leaders barred him from integrating blacks into his congregation. Around this time, Jones witnessed a faith-healing service at a Seventh Day Baptist Church. He observed that it attracted people and their money and concluded that, with financial resources from such healings, he could help accomplish his social goals. Jones organized a mammoth religious convention to take place on June 11 through June 15, 1956, in a cavernous Indianapolis hall called Cadle Tabernacle. To draw the crowds, Jim needed a religious headliner, and so he arranged to share the pulpit with Rev. William M. Branham, a healing evangelist and religious author who at the time was as highly revered as Oral Roberts. Following the convention, Jones was able to launch his own church, which changed names until it became the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. The Peoples Temple was initially made as an inter-racial mission. In 1960, Indianapolis Mayor Charles Boswell appointed Jones director of the Human Rights Commission. Jones ignored Boswell's advice to keep a low profile, finding new outlets for his views on local radio and television programs. When the mayor and other commissioners asked Jones to curtail his public actions, he resisted and was wildly cheered at a meeting of the NAACP and Urban League when he yelled for his audience to be more militant, and then climaxed with, "Let my people go!" During this time, Jones also helped to racially integrate churches, restaurants, the telephone company, the police department, a theater, an amusement park, and the Methodist Hospital. After swastikas were painted on the homes of two African-American families, Jones personally walked the neighborhood comforting local black people and counseling white families not to move, in order to prevent white flight. Jones set up stings to catch restaurants refusing to serve black customers and wrote to American Nazi leaders and then leaked their responses to the media. When Jones was accidentally placed in the black ward of a hospital after a collapse in 1961, he refused to be moved; he began to make the beds and empty the bed pans of black patients. Political pressures resulting from Jones' actions caused hospital officials to desegregate the wards. Jones received considerable criticism in Indiana for his integrationist views. White-owned businesses and locals were critical of him. A swastika was placed on the Temple, a stick of dynamite was left in a Temple coal pile, and a dead cat was thrown at Jones' house after a threatening phone call. Other incidents occurred, though some suspect that Jones himself may have been involved in at least some of them. When Jones returned from Brazil in December 1963, he told his Indiana congregation that the world would be engulfed by nuclear war on July 15, 1967, that would then create a new socialist Eden on Earth, and that the Temple had to move to Northern California for safety. Accordingly, the Temple began moving to Redwood Valley, California, near the city of Ukiah. According to religious studies professor Catherine Wessinger, while Jones always spoke of the social gospel's virtues, he chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism before the late 1960s. By that time, Jones began at least partially revealing the details of his "Apostolic Socialism" concept in Temple sermons. He also taught that "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment - socialism". Jones often mixed these ideas, such as preaching that, "If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin." By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as "fly away religion", rejecting the Bible as being a tool to oppress women and non-whites, and denouncing a "Sky God" who was no God at all. Jones wrote a booklet titled "The Letter Killeth", criticizing the King James Bible. Jones also began preaching that he was the reincarnation of Gandhi, Father Divine, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and Vladimir Lenin. Former Temple member Hue Fortson, Jr. quoted Jones as saying, "What you need to believe in is what you can see ... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father ... If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God." In a 1976 phone conversation with John Maher, Jones alternately stated that he was an agnostic and an atheist. Despite the Temple's fear that the IRS was investigating its religious tax exemption, Marceline Jones admitted in a 1977 New York Times interview that Jones was trying to promote Marxism in the U.S. by mobilizing people through religion, citing Mao Zedong as his inspiration. She stated that, "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion", and had slammed the Bible on the table yelling "I've got to destroy this paper idol!" In one sermon, Jones said that, "You're gonna help yourself, or you'll get no help! There's only one hope of glory; that's within you! Nobody's gonna come out of the sky! There's no heaven up there! We'll have to make heaven down here!" CANNOTANSWER

What was supposed to happen on July 15, 1967?

When Jones returned from Brazil in December 1963, he told his Indiana congregation that the world would be engulfed by nuclear war on July 15, 1967,