Tag Archives: Julia Scheeres

‘Jesus Land,’ a poignant memoir from a friend and fellow Hoosier, headed for the big screen

Leave a reply

The bright young faces in this photo belong to David and Julia.

The bright young faces in this photo are of Julia and David as portrayed by Ella Anderson and Xavier Jones.

My friend Julia Scheeres’ 2005 memoir, “Jesus Land,” is being made into a movie. If it’s anything like Julia’s book, the movie – directed by Saila Kariat – will be poignant and harrowing and heartfelt and, yes, controversial. Julia’s memoir is routinely banned because she tells the truth about the fundamentalist Christian life.

I’ll give you the shorthand version of why we should all care about “Jesus Land,” and why you should read Julia’s book and see the movie when it comes out. First, a little background.

Julia and I grew up in Indiana at about the same time. In the 1980s. I lived in Muncie and she lived in the Lafayette area. Her parents were abusive religious fundamentalists – my family was Baptist but never abusive when I was growing up. Julia’s parents ended up sending Julia and David to the Dominican Republic to a teen concentration camp run by an Indiana church.

I didn’t know Julia until about 20 years ago, when she contacted me from her home in California to ask if that church was undergoing a rebirth in Indiana.

I spoke with Julia and other survivors of the church gulag and, along with a small group of reporters and editors, wrote extensively about their experiences and the modern-day church and whether it was still sending, at parents’ expense, kids out of the country to hellholes, where they were abused and made to work.

I disappointed Julia back then because my editor at the time was so afraid of upsetting the church and the local chamber of commerce that they gutted our stories.

Julia’s “Jesus Land” had come out the year before, and it told the story better than we could have anyway.

Julia and I became friends – we never met but kept up to date on each other’s families and kids on Facebook – and I wrote about “Jesus Land” again in 2021, when I interviewed Julia for an article about fundamentalist groups that were pressuring Indiana schools to ban the book. It’s something that Julia has grown accustomed to: “Jesus Land” is among books regularly banned because it dares to tell the truth about the religion-based “troubled teen industry,” and how there’s money to be made by pseudo-religious organizations that incarcerate “troubled” young people.

The two of us also spoke while I was working on, shortly after that time, another story about money flowing to the troubled teen industry in Indiana. Julia encouraged me to pursue the story and read drafts of it, which I worked on on a freelance basis for more than a year. Ultimately, the cowardly editors of a major newspaper spiked my story but kept all my research – legal documents, video depositions, reports – and, a year later, did their own story. It remains a very bitter end to my newspaper career.

I’ve moved on from those disappointments to other forms of writing, and Julia has moved on in spectacular fashion: She’s written and published two more books, and now “Jesus Land” will move from the realm of New York Times bestseller to big-screen film.

Julia and David’s story, so movingly told in “Jesus Land,” will find a whole new audience.

Julia, always gracious and kind, was the first person I thought of when I thought of writers who could read my new 1984-set crime novel THAT OCTOBER. I hoped she would appreciate its story of Indiana teenagers grappling with injustice and forces beyond their control. Her comments about the book are prominently displayed on the back cover.

Thank you, Julia. I’m so happy for the movie version of your book.

An unflinching but moving look at Jonestown

Leave a reply

Most of us know how the story of Indiana preacher Jim Jones ended: Jones, a madman cloaked in the robes of a preacher, civil rights activist and would-be socialist, led nearly 1,000 of his followers to their deaths in a 1978 mass suicide in the South American country of Guyana.

But considering Jones grew up just a county over from where I sit as I write this, I didn’t know the full scope and breadth of Jones’ story. And I certainly didn’t know the lives and tragic deaths of his followers.

Until I read Julia Scheeres’ “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception and Survival at Jonestown.”

Scheeres — whose previous book, “Jesus Land,” was a wrenching memoir of her early years in Indiana and, along with her brother, incarceration in a twisted South American youth camp run by a religious group — found a surprisingly similar theme when she chose Jonestown as the focus of her second book: The evil that people do in the name of their beliefs.

In the case of Jim Jones and his self-named South American settlement, those beliefs were, almost whole-heartedly, focused on the group’s leader. Jones, who had churches in Indianapolis and San Francisco before he moved his flock to Guyana, might have gradually succumbed to the the depths of his mental illness but was certainly fixated on exerting control over others even from his early days in the pulpit.

That control extended to every area of their lives. Jones took money from his followers — perhaps millions of dollars by the end — as well as their dignity. He seduced, coerced and outright sexually assaulted many of his people. He broke up families and turned spouses and siblings against each other.

Well before the end, Jonestown was a place where members of the Peoples Temple informed on each other and willingly — perhaps even with a heady sense of the control that Jones enjoyed — exacted punishment from their fellow church members.

Scheeres, who writes in a matter-of-fact tone that packs a punch, retells the story of Jones and his church through not only interviews with survivors but information gleaned from thousands of FBI documents.

The picture she paints is powerful and disturbing. She captures the anxiety and fear of a handful of Jones’ followers as well as the frightening tactics the Peoples Temple leader employed. Even while Jones worked to persuade his church members that “revolutionary suicide” — a term that Jones misunderstood or deliberately misstated — was their only possible fate, he staged fake assassination attempts and attacks to sell his plan.

In hindsight it’s hard to imagine how the authorities didn’t put a stop to Jones’ plan. But church members were so afraid and so mentally enslaved that, until the very end, many didn’t try to get away from their inevitable fate. And the authorities, both in the U.S. and in Guyana, couldn’t believe the warning signs. Who could possibly imagine that one man would convince nearly a thousand people to kill themselves?

Who would want, or could exert, that kind of control?

The Hoosier state, maybe not even the United States, might never again spawn such a man as Jim Jones. But Julia Scheeres’ “A Thousand Lives” is an eyes-wide-open look at how it happened once thanks to belief in a madman and the disbelief of those on the outside looking in.