The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, originally Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church and commonly shortened to Peoples Temple, was an American new religious organization which existed between 1954 and 1978 and was affiliated with the Christian Church. Founded by Jim Jones in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Peoples Temple spread a message that combined elements of Christianity with communist and socialist ideology, with an emphasis on racial equality. After Jones moved the group to California in the 1960s and established several locations throughout the state, including its headquarters in San Francisco, the Temple forged ties with many left-wing political figures and claimed to have 20,000 members.
Jim Jones's first church in Indianapolis, Indiana
Peoples Temple headquarters, 1859 Geary Blvd., San Francisco, 1978
Peoples Temple members attend an anti-eviction rally at the International Hotel, San Francisco, January 1977.
Rev. Jim Jones receives a Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian award at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, January 1977.
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
A member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness proselytising on the streets of Moscow, Russia
1893 Parliament of the World's Religions
Practitioners of Falun Gong perform spiritual exercises in Guangzhou, China.
A Rasta man wearing symbols of his religious identity in Barbados