Seven days after he learned that two of his daughters and his grandson had died in the mass murder-suicide of Jonestown, the Rev. John V. Moore delivered his Sunday sermon to his United Methodist congregation in Reno, Nev. He had not planned to speak, but his wife Barbara convinced him the effort was crucial.
Twenty years later, she says: "It was a testimony of love for our family and the frailty of the human spirit."The Moores, who now live in Davis, Calif., have been married and joined in Christian ministry for 55 years. With their living child, Rebecca, a professor of religion and philosophy at the University of North Dakota, they have labored for two decades to keep their daughters - and all those who died at Jonestown on Nov. 18, 1978, - from being one-dimensionalized as poor, stupid sheep.
"Our family refused to be imprisoned by shame," said Barbara Moore. "Now, for the first time in 20 years, there is a sense (among the public) of the humanity of the people who died in Jonestown."
The Moores' dead girls, Carolyn and Annie, shatter all the lonely loser stereotypes that experts tend to slap on people who join cults like Jim Jones' Peoples Temple. They came from a close and loving home that thrived on a solid commitment to classic Christian service and social justice.
The biblical quotation that adorned the Peoples Temple stationery - the one from Matthew about serving Jesus by helping the poor, sick and imprisoned - was practically the Moore family credo.
In the years the Moore children were growing up, they shared their home with some 15 kids who needed a safe, loving place to heal. They marched with their parents in rallies for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
While serving as pastor at San Francisco's Glide Memorial Church in 1965, John Moore preached about the open inclusion of homosexuals in the Methodist Church. He picketed vineyard owners with Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers. He and Barbara counseled college students about everything from unplanned pregnancies to accepting or resisting the military draft.
Carolyn's husband, Larry Layton, discovered Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple in Mendocino County when Layton was serving alternate duty as a conscientious objector at a state hospital. (The only person convicted after the massacre at Jonestown, Layton is serving a life sentence.)
Even before the Moores' easygoing dog, Willy, broke character and growled at meeting Jim Jones, John and Barbara had misgivings about the charismatic pastor. There was too much "Jim says" in Carolyn's letters.
"That adulation of Jim Jones, that idolatry and the secrecy and paranoia were there from the beginning," said John. "When I first met him (then realized Carolyn was intimately involved with him), I thought, `Here's another Elmer Gantry.' "
But the Moores also saw their daughter "living out the guiding spiritual principles" that their whole family had shared. And they knew that drawing a line in the sand and alienating Carolyn was the quickest way to lose her.
When Annie, too, joined Peoples Temple after nursing school, John and Barbara tried to combat their mistrust of Jones by focusing on the multitude of Christian positives in the church, from its diverse and multiethnic population to its work with the poor, uneducated and mentally retarded. As Barbara writes in an essay on a comprehensive Jonestown Web site (www.und.nodak.edu/dept/philrel/jonestown/witness.html):
"I told myself that some good things were happening in Peoples Temple and that it would probably phase out in time as many movements do."
But, of course, Jonestown ended in unthinkable horror, with the murder and suicide of more than 900 members in the jungles of Guyana. Among the 409 children was Carolyn's 4-year-old son Jim Jon or "Kimo." His father was not Layton but Jim Jones.
For most of the last 20 years, the media, academic and religious attention have centered on Jones. The hundreds of others who died in Guyana became only a nameless, faceless mass, posthumously represented by grotesque photographs of poisoned, bloated bodies.
Such dehumanization, the Moores contend, not only profanes the inherent sanctity of each Peoples Temple member's life but dangerously deludes the rest of us. If we believe that Jones was simply a whacko and that everyone who followed him was too, we'll miss any chance we have to learn from Jonestown, to acquire tools that can help us discern the false prophet from the true servant of God.
Scripps Howard News Service