For the past four decades, it seems, we’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid when it comes to cults. In the wake of the spectacular human tragedy of Jonestown (from which the oft-quoted idiom about Kool-Aid comes), we’ve defaulted to seeing cults as homicidal and suicidal. Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple sits at the apex of this pyramid of doom, of course—but before he became a paranoid drug addict who led his followers to deprivation and mass death in Guyana, Jones was an outspoken advocate for racial integration, a fervent communist, and voracious reader who worked indefatigably for Civil Rights in his racist home state Indiana. Is it at all possible to examine those aims as well as the destruction he later wrought? How can we make sense of the utopian dream that lies just beyond the field of bodies?

AMERICAN MESSIAHS: FALSE PROPHETS FOR A DAMNED NATION by Adam Morris Liveright, 432 pp., $28.95

Adam Morris’s American Messiahs: False Prophets for a Damned Nation attempts this difficult task, tracing a series of cults and communes through history from the founding of the American Republic to the fall of Jonestown. Morris makes plain that “the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.” What else were the Puritans, after all, if not a fundamentalist, break-away, apocalyptic cult? The history of the United States is one of such groups, always eager to divorce themselves from the world in search of purity.

Morris’s book does for American history what Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium did for pre-modern European history: Rather than accept that the United States is ever proudly marching forward toward progress, enlightenment, and democracy, American Messiahs makes plain that we have always been a nation waiting on the cusp of the Millennium, and that time and time again we’ve turned to the prophets shouting that the End is close.

Morris doesn’t go into the wide panoply of American cults, focusing instead on six leaders: Public Universal Friend (who was born Jemima Wilkinson), Ann the Word (born Ann Lee), Thomas Lake Harris, Koresh (née Cyrus Teed), Father Divine (aka James Baker, Jr.), and, of course, Jim Jones. Each of these figures is well deserving of her or his own book (and to be certain, most of them—particularly Jones—have been the subject of several). By bringing them together, Morris succeeds in creating a lineage that spans the first 200 years of American history. From colonial New England to northern California, to Florida and back to Depression-era Harlem, American Messiahs offers a parallel history of a nation through its self-appointed deities.

The Friend established a template for other prophets to follow: Call out the hypocrisy of America, gather up converts, start a heaven on Earth, and watch it all go straight to hell.

Public Universal Friend, the first messiah of the young United States, was born in 1758, and was still unmarried when, at 23 years old, she came down with a fever that by all rights should have killed her. After six days of delirium, she awoke, announcing that she was no longer Jemima Wilkinson and that her body had been requisitioned by God for humanity’s salvation. The Friend now used male pronouns (though he insisted he was neither male nor female), and began delivering sermons of an impeding Apocalypse, riding through New England gathering up converts. Going by various titles, including not just the Public Universal Friend, but also “the All-Friend,” “Friend of Sinners,” and “the Comforter,” he brought neither friendship nor comfort to what he perceived as the hypocrites of New England society. “Wherever he went,” Morris writes, “the Friend had made himself disagreeable among well-to-do Quakers and old-light Congregationalists by chastising those who made their fortunes off the slave trade and selling rum to Native Americans.” Attracting a modest but respectable following, the Friend ultimately moved his flock to Utica, New York, to establish a utopian commune—where things gradually fell apart, as greed, selfishness, and inequality among the congregants exacerbated already difficult living conditions. The Friend died in 1819, but first he established a template for other prophets to follow: Call out the hypocrisy of America, gather up converts under an apocalyptic and utopian banner, start a heaven on Earth, and watch it all go straight to hell.

