It only became a way-out group the morning after the death of the members who were in Guyana. If Jonestown has any message for us, it is that we better watch out for mainline churches they can be dangerous to your health. That is, of course, another problem. We usually call it war, or maybe terrorism, as is the case in Northern Ireland. That is an important point to keep in perspective.
Danger tends to escalate the more the mainline a group is.
More pointedly, as we have gone through the years, the present concern with destructive cultism has been the Solar Temple and the Aum Shinrikyo. The Jonestown incident, however, had the effect of generating a considerable observation of new religions in their broad spectrum. Over the last 20 years we have had very close observation of a number of new groups, and it is of some interest that the groups that have shown up as moving in a destructive direction are those that nobody knew about. When the Aum Shinrikyo incident hit, only one article in English had been published about them. When the Branch Davidian incident occurred, only one article in English had been published about them.