April 1, 2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Cult Deaths Recall Jonestown - Ugandan sect's similarities to Peoples Temple disputed, by Don Lattin,

April 1, 2000, San Francisco Chronicle, Cult Deaths Recall Jonestown - Ugandan sect's similarities to Peoples Temple disputed, by Don Lattin, Chronicle Religion Writer,

For Northern Californians, the mounting cult horror in Uganda revives a 1978 nightmare in another jungle, the murder-suicide in Jonestown of 914 members of San Francisco's Peoples Temple.

Yesterday, Ugandan police revised the number of deaths linked to an African doomsday sect to 924, surpassing the Guyana tragedy and making it one of the largest cult-related killings in modern history.

As the death toll mounts, religion scholars disagree as to whether the Ugandan sect is "another Jonestown," a unique event, or just the latest chapter in Africa's bloody history of religious violence and tribal conflict.

Since an enormous church fire in Uganda on March 17, the remains of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God have been recovered from the charred rubble of the sect's sanctuary and pulled from a series of mass graves.

Local authorities initially called the deaths a "mass suicide," but now believe many or most of the members were murdered -- perhaps when they began to question the failed doomsday prophecies of three sect leaders.

PEOPLES TEMPLE REDUX

For Berkeley psychologist Margaret Singer, author of "Cults in Our Midst," the carnage in Uganda is a Peoples Temple reprise.

Amid a mounting government and media probe, followers of the Rev. Jim Jones fled from San Francisco to the jungle in Guyana, where they and their leader died in a macabre ritual of murder and mass suicide. Many temple members willingly drank cyanide-laced "Flavor- Aid;" some had it poured down their throats, and others were shot.

In Uganda, the church was led by a defrocked Roman Catholic priest, an excommunicated Catholic layman, and a woman who claimed to receive messages from God and apocalyptic prophesies from the Virgin Mary. Authorities say two of those three leaders may still be alive.

In recent days, stories of abuses in the Ugandan sect have emerged that are reminiscent of those committed by Jones, a Christian socialist who was originally ordained in the Disciples of Christ, a mainline Protestant church. Both sects demanded strict obedience, demonized outsiders and promised impoverished members a utopian afterlife.

"It looks like the usual cult pattern where a corrupt person wants power and money. He gets this woman helper, and they start making ridiculous predictions that the world will end," Singer said. "When it didn't end, people probably wanted their money so they could return to their villages.

"It's just like we've seen before," she added. "Jonestown was also a constructed, engineered mass murder."

Other experts warned against comparing the Uganda church to Peoples Temple, or to other notorious doomsday cults and mass suicide sects such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or Heaven's Gate, the UFO cult in Southern California.

J. Gordon Melton, who directs the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara and is an authority on new religious movements, said most of the adult members at Jonestown were sincere ideological converts who decided that their religious and political views were worth dying for in an act of "revolutionary suicide."

A UNIQUE HORROR

That's different than what happened in Uganda, Melton said, where it appears that most of members were led into a series of traps and murdered.

"This is looking like a unique event that could become the largest mass murder in history, apart from war," Melton said. "Killing this many people is heinous no matter why, but there's a difference between premeditated murder and psychopathology."

Other scholars said it's important to view the Ugandan tragedy in its African context.

"In Africa, there is a long tradition of similar Christian movements going back 300 years," said David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, which monitors global church growth. "Mass killings are not that unusual in tropical Africa. There are also large numbers of clergy who are eased out, or kicked out, of churches and start something on their own."

Rosalind Hackett, a professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, said there are between 8,000 and 12,000 new religious movements in Africa. Most of them are offshoots from established Protestant or Catholic churches.

RELIGIOUS FERMENT

"There is tremendous religious ferment in Africa," said Hackett, who has studied the explosion of indigenous African churches. "They range from humble storefronts to mega-churches based on the American model, from churches with illiterate leaders to pastors with Ph.D.s in nuclear physics."

Hackett said many of these sects break away from mainstream churches over money, politics, style of worship, or the feeling that the mother church is not "morally upright."

Famine, poverty, violence and a rampaging AIDS epidemic have encouraged some churches to embrace an apocalyptic Christian vision that sees a new era of peace and harmony following a time of cataclysmic upheaval.

Doomsday theology also has been spread by Bible tracts, videos and satellite broadcasts from American televangelists and Pentecostal preachers, she said.

Hackett emphasized, however, that the overwhelming majority of African indigenous churches are making a positive contribution .

"They are helping people who are marginalized by the system," she said. "Survival is what most of these churches are really all about."