Jonestown and Bishop Hill: Continuities and Disjunctures in Religious Conflict

IN NORTHERNILLINOIS, the traveler who takes the byway to the quiet hamlet of Bishop Hill will find it difficult to imagine the streets as they were one spring day in 1850, filled with an angry mob that terrorized innocent citizens and threatened to burn the entire town to ashes.There is justifiably great pride in the accomplishments of the Swedish immigrant communal religious colony that once was Bishop Hill, so it is especially difficult to understand that community as the object of collective rampage.Yet Bishop Hill was born of religious conflict in the old country, and in the New World, its leader, Eric Janson, died of an assassin's bullet born of conflict between the community and the outside.In 1977 a migration of a quite different Utopian religious social movement left its "Babylon" (as Janson called his native Sweden) for the shores of another land.Like Janson's group, their hopes were of following their way of life free from the controversies that stormed around them in the old country.Led by Jim Jones, some 1,000 members of Peoples Temple left California for what Jones called their Promised Land-the colony of Jonestown, in the socialist republic of Guyana on the northeast coast of South America.A little over a year after the migration came the murders and mass suicide at Jonestown.Even today the stigma hangs over those events so strongly that it is difficult for us to gain perspective on what happened.In what follows, I seek to pinpoint the continuities and the different outcomes of religious conflict in Bishop Hill and Jonestown. 1 To compare