Jim Jones was born during the Great Depression. He was the only son of James Thurman Warren Jones Sr. (1887-1951) and Lynetta Putnam (1902-1977). His father was an alcoholic Klansman and he claimed his mother was part Cherokee Indian. He spent most of his formative years in conservative rural Indiana. His father struggled to earn a living as a mystic fortune teller. His parents separated in 1948 and he went to live with his mother in Richmond, Indiana. Jones also worked as an orderly at a local hospital. He got married young, to a nurse 4 years his senior, and adopted 3 children of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Jones began working as a Methodist minister in Indianapolis in the early 1950 decade. In 1954, when he claimed he had met God on a train ride near Philadelphia, he was defrocked. The charismatic leader then founded his own gathering - the Community National Unity Church. By 1955 he had renamed it the People's Temple Full Gospel Church. He set up a soup kitchen, gave away groceries and clothes to the poor, and established two nursing homes, while preaching messages of apostolic socialism and racial equality. Secretly, he also joined the Communist party on the side. He was appointed director of the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in 1961. Jones began a dubious path as a "spiritual healer" by planting actors among his believers and miraculously 'healing' them. Jones was getting richer and more popular.

In the early 1960s, during the height of the Cold War, Jones had a vision of apocalyptic destruction. Jones took the vision seriously and decided to move his congregation to Ukiah, California, in the Redwood Valley region north of San Francisco. This area was believed to be one of 9 places on earth that would be safe during a global nuclear war. He then moved to San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1965. Over the next 10 years, his 'flock' of believers reached a peak of 3,000. Jones could be heard on regular radio broadcasts over KFAX radio in California. However, there were occasional bizarre behaviors as well: in April of 1968, when Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, Jones staged a fake attempt on his own life.

Jones received several humanitarian awards in Northern California for his work with the poor. In 1976, he was appointed to the San Francisco Housing Authority by the Mayor George Moscone for his commitment to social activism. However Jones was becoming more and more of a dictator. He demanded sexual favors from some young women, was the only person who could decide if a couple in his congregation could get married, and often separated children from their parents. In 1973, eight close aides defected from his camp and revealed these details to the press, including allegations of misuse of church money. Very soon after, Jones had begun making plans to move his congregation to the socialist nation of Guyana in South America. By 1974, fifteen of Jones' followers had negotiated a lease for 27,000 acres on Guyana's western border with Venezuela, and began clearing the jungle for what would become the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, or "Jonestown." Jones eventually relocated to Guyana in July 1977. In December 1977, his mother Lynetta Jones died at Jonestown.

In 1978, a group of ex-members calling themselves the Committee of Concerned Relatives published literature that likened Jonestown to a concentration camp, complete with torture. Jones began teaching his followers about mass suicide and held practice drills to test his members' loyalty for the "White Night". In November 1978, U.S. House Representative Leo J. Ryan visited the compound and sought to bring back several defectors, including an ex-member's child. Leo's entourage, along with fifteen defectors, were ambushed and killed by Jones' people on the airstrip as they attempted to leave. The next day, the entire community of 914 'followers' (including 276 children) drank a deadly potion of Fla-Vor Aid laced with cyanide poison. Jones' wife was among them. After the mass suicide of his followers, Jones and a close aide shot themselves.