STOR
Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective
John Lofland; Rodney Stark
American Sociological Review, Vol. 30, No. 6. (Dec, 1965), pp. 862-875.
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BECOMING A WORLD-SAVER: A THEORY OF CONVERSION TO A DEVIANT PERSPECTIVE *
John Lofland Rodney Stark
University of Michigan University of California, Berkeley
Materials derived from observation of a West Coast millenarian cult are employed to develop a "value-added" model of the conditions under which conversion occurs. For conversion a person must experience, within a religious problem-solving perspective, enduring, acutely-felt tensions that lead him to define himself as a religious seeker; he must encounter the cult at a turning point in his life; within the cult an affective bond must be formed (or pre-exist) and any extra-cult attachments, neutralized; and there he must be exposed to intensive interaction if he is to become a "deployable agent."
All men and all human groups have ultimate values, a world view, or a perspective furnishing them a more or less orderly and comprehensible picture of the world. Clyde Kluckhohn remarked that no matter how primitive and crude it may be, there is a "philosophy behind the way of life of every individual and of every relatively homogeneous group at any given point in their histories." 1 When a person gives up one such perspective or ordered view of the world for another we refer to this process as conversion.2
Frequently such conversions are between popular and widely held perspectives—from Catholicism to Communism, or from the world view of an underdeveloped or primitive culture to that of a technically more advanced society, as from the Peyote Cult
* Publication A-lS of the Center for Research on Social Organization, "University of Michigan (also available as Publication A-S3, Survey Research Center, University of California, Berkeley). This investigation was supported in part by a Public Health Service fellowship to the senior author from the National Institute of Mental Health (MPM-16, 661; 5 Fl MH-16, 661-02).
1 Clyde Kluckhohn, "Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification," in Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (eds.), Toward A General Theory of Action, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962, p. 409.
2 The meaning of this term has been muddied by the inconsistent usage of Christian religious writers. Often they have used "conversion" to refer to an aroused concern among persons who already accept the essential truth of the ideological system. Yet, in keeping with the earliest Christian examples of conversion, such as that of St. Paul, they have also used the word to describe changes from one such system to another. These are very different events and ought to be indicated by different words.
of the Southwest Indians to Christianity. The continual emergence of tiny cults and sects in western industrial nations makes it clear, however, that sometimes persons relinquish a more widely held perspective for an unknown, obscure and often, socially devalued one.
In this paper we shall outline a model of the conversion process through which a group of people came to see the world in terms set by the doctrines of one such obscure and devalued perspective—a small millenarian religious cult. Although it is based on only a single group, we think the model suggests some rudiments of a general account of conversion to deviant perspectives. But the degree to which this scheme applies to shifts between widely held perspectives must, for now, remain problematic.
background
Our discussion is based on observation of a small, millenarian cult headquartered in Bay City,3 a major urban center on the West Coast. This "movement" constitutes the American following of a self-proclaimed "Lord of the Second Advent," a Mr. Chang, who has attracted more than 5,000 converts in Korea since 1954. The "Divine Precepts," the doctrine Chang claims was revealed to him by God, concerns a complete "Restoration of the World" to the conditions of the Garden of Eden by 1967. The message was brought to this country by Miss Yoon-Sook Lee, a graduate of Methodist seminaries, and a former professor of social welfare
3 All names that might compromise converts' anonymity have been changed.
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at a large, church-supported, women's college in Seoul.
In 1959 Miss Lee arrived in a university town (here called Northwest Town) in the Pacific Northwest, and, in two years gained five totally committed converts to the Divine Precepts (hereafter referred to as the D.P.). In December, 1960, after difficulties with local clergymen and public opinion, largely touched off when two female converts deserted their husbands and children, the group moved to Bay City.
By mid-1963, IS more converts had been gained and by the end of 1964 the cult numbered more than 150 adherents. Converts were expected to devote their lives to spreading "God's New Revelation" and preparing for the New Age theocracy which God and a host of active spirits were expected to create on earth shortly. Typically the converts lived communally in a series of houses and flats, contributed their salaries from menial jobs to the common treasury, thus supporting Miss Lee as a full-time leader, and gave all their spare time to witnessing and otherwise proselytizing.
In this brief report, analysis will be limited to the single problem of conversion.4 Under what conditions and through what mechanisms did persons come to share the D.P. view of the world, and, conversely, who rejected this perspective?
The logical and methodological structure of the analysis is based on a "value-added" 5 conception. That is, we shall offer a series of seven (more or less) successively accumulating factors, which in their total combination seem to account for conversion to the D.P. All seven factors seem necessary for conversion, and together they appear to be sufficient conditions.
The sequential arrangement of the seven conditions may be conceived in the imagery of a funnel; that is, as a structure that systematically reduces the number of persons who can be considered available for re-
* Other aspects of the cult's formation, development, maintenance and proselytization procedures are analyzed in John Lofiand, The World-Savers, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, forthcoming.
5 Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963, pp. 12-21. See also Ralph Turner, "The Quest for Uni-versals in Sociological Research," American Sociological Review, 18 (1953), pp. 604-611.
cruitment, and also increasingly specifies who is available. At least theoretically, since the mission of the cult was to "convert America," all Americans are potential recruits. Each condition narrows the range of clientele: ultimately, only a handful of persons responded to the D.P. call.
Typically, and perhaps ideally, the conditions develop as presented here, but the temporal order may vary. The ordering principle is activation, rather than temporal occurrence alone: the time of activation is the same whether a condition exists for a considerable time prior to its becoming relevant to D.P. conversion or only develops in time to accomplish conversion.
Data were gathered through participant observation in the cult from early 1962 to mid-19 63. Further information was obtained from interviews with converts, their acquaintances, families, and work-mates; with persons who took some interest in the D.P. but were not converts; and with a variety of clergymen, officials, neighbors, employers and others in contact with the adherents. Less intensive observation was conducted through mid-1964.
Although complete data pertinent to all seven steps of the conversion model were not obtainable for all 21 persons who were classified as converts by mid-1963, full information on all seven factors was available for 15 converts. All the available data conform to the model. In presenting biographical information to explicate and document the model, we shall focus on the most central of the early converts, drawing on material from less central and later converts for illustrations. The converts were primarily white, Protestant, and young (typically below 35); some had college training, and most were Americans of lower middle-class and smalltown origins.
conversion operationally defined
How does one determine when a person has "really" taken up a different perspective? The most obvious evidence, of course, is his own declaration that he has done so. This frequently takes the form of a tale of regeneration, about how terrible life was before and how wonderful it is now.6 But
6 Peter Bcrger has given us a delightful charac-
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verbal claims are easily made and simple to falsify. Indeed, several persons who professed belief in the D.P. were regarded as insincere by all core members. A display of loyalty and commitment, such as giving time, energy, and money to the D.P. enterprise, invariably brought ratification of the conversion from all core members, but to require such a display as evidence of "actual" conversion overlooks four persons who made only verbal professions but were universally regarded as converts by core members. To avoid this difficulty two classes or degrees of conversion may be distinguished: verbal converts, or fellow-travelers and followers who professed belief and were accepted by core members as sincere, but took no active role in the D.P. enterprise; and total converts, who exhibited their commitment through deeds as well as words.
Up to a point, the same factors that account for total conversion also account for verbal conversion and initially we shall discuss the two groups together. Later we shall attempt to show that verbal conversion is transformed into total conversion only when the last stage in the conversion sequence develops.
a model of conversion
To account for the process by which persons came to be world-savers for the D.P., we shall investigate two genres of conditions or factors. The first, which might be called predisposing conditions, comprises attributes of persons prior to their contact with the cult. These are background factors, the conjunction of which forms a pool of potential D.P. converts. Unfortunately, it has become conventional in sociology to treat demographic characteristics, structural or personal frustrations, and the like, as completely responsible for "pushing" persons into collectivities dedicated to protest against the prevailing social order. These factors are not unimportant, but a model composed entirely of them is woefully incomplete. The character of their incompleteness is expressed by a Meadian paraphrase of T. S. Eliot: "Between the impulse and the act
terization of the reconstructive functions of such tales. See his Invitation to Sociology, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 19S3, Ch. 3.
falls the shadow." The second genre of conditions is this shadowed area, the situational contingencies.
Situational contingencies are conditions that lead to the successful recruitment of persons predisposed to the D.P. enterprise. These conditions arise from confrontation and interaction between the potential convert and D.P. members. Many persons who qualified for conversion on the basis of predisposing factors entered interpersonal relations with D.P. members, but because the proper situational conditions were not met, they did not become converts.
With these two classes of factors in mind, we may turn to a discussion of the first and most general of predisposing conditions.
1. Tension. No model of human conduct entirely lacks a conception of tension, strain, frustration, deprivation, or other version of the hedonic calculus. And, not surprisingly, even the most cursory examination of the life situations of converts before they embraced the D.P. reveals what they at least perceived as considerable tension.7
This tension is best characterized as a felt discrepancy between some imaginary, ideal state of affairs and the circumstances in which these people saw themselves caught up. We suggest that acutely felt tension is a necessary, but far from sufficient condition for conversion. That is, it creates some disposition to act. But tension may be resolved in a number of ways (or remain unresolved) ; hence, that these people are in a tension situation does not indicate ivhat action they may take.
Just as tension can have myriad consequences, its sources can also be exceedingly disparate. Some concrete varieties we discovered were: longing for unrealized wealth, knowledge, fame, and prestige; hallucinatory activity for which the person lacked any successful definition; frustrated sexual and marital relations; homosexual guilt; acute fear of face-to-face interaction; disabling and disfiguring physical conditions; and—perhaps of a slightly different order— a frustrated desire for a significant, even
7 We conceive this tension as subjective to avoid judgments about how tension-producing the "objective" circumstances actually were, attending instead to the way these circumstances were experienced.
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heroic, religious status, to "know the mind of God intimately," and to be a famous agent for his divine purposes.8
Brief life histories of a few central believers will indicate concretely what bothered them as pre-converts. The case of Miss Lee, the "Messiah's" emissary in America, illustrates the aspiration to be an important religious figure.
Miss Lee was born and raised in Korea and converted to Chang's cult in 19S4 when she was 39. During her early teens she was subject to fits of depression and used to sit on a secluded hilltop and seek spirit contacts. Shortly she began receiving visions and hearing voices—a hallucinatory pattern she was to maintain thereafter. Her adolescent mystical experience convinced her she had a special mission to perform for God and at the age of 19 she entered a Methodist seminary in Japan. She was immediately disenchanted by the "worldly concern" of the seminarians and the training she received, although she stuck out the five-year course. Prior to entering the seminary she had become engrossed in the Spirtualistic writings of Emmanuel Sweden-borg, who soon began to appear to her in visions. Her estrangement from conventional religious roles was so great that upon graduating from seminary she, alone among her classmates, refused ordination. She returned to Korea at the start of World War II, and by 1945 was professor of social welfare at a denominational university in Seoul. In 1949 the Methodist Board of Missions sent her to a Canadian university for further theological training. There she wrote her thesis on Swe-denborg, who continued to visit her in spirit form. In Canada, as in Japan, she was bitterly disappointed by the "neglect of things of the spirit," caused concern among the faculty by constantly hiding to pray and seek visions, and occasionally stole away to Swe-denborgian services. Her spirits continued to to tell her that she was a religious figure of great importance. Returning to her academic life in Korea she fell ill with chronic diarrhea and eventually nephritis, both of which resisted all medical treatment. After two years of this, her health was broken and she was completely bedridden. At this time her servant took her to see Chang.
Thus is summarized a portrait of a desperately estranged maiden lady, with secret convictions of grandeur, frequent "heterodox" hallucinations, and failing health, who felt herself badly entangled in the mundane affairs of modern religious bureaucracy.
8 It is currently fashionable to reduce this last to more mundane "real" causes, but it is not necessary here to pre-judge the phenomenology.
Although the cultural context is rather different, the cases of Bertha and Lester follow lines rather similar to Miss Lee's, but include an important sexual theme.
Bertha, 29 at conversion, was the daughter of German immigrants and was raised in a suburban town. After high school she attended a modeling school, the kind operated in large cities for naive, fame-hungry girls, regardless of suitability. She returned to marry a local boy who was employed as a stereotyper in a printing plant. On her wedding night she spent two hours locked in their hotel bathroom, and subsequently did not improve her evaluation of sexual intercourse. Later the couple separated briefly, reunited, and after five years of marriage had their first child (19SS). The second came in 19S7, and they moved to the West Coast. There Bertha began having private religious hallucinations, including "sanctifkation"—being made holy and free of all sin. She went to various ministers to tell of her marvelous experiences, but was not warmly received; indeed, most advised psychiatric help. She began, then, to tell her husband that one day she would be very important in the service of the Lord. Following a homosexual episode with a neighbor woman, Bertha demanded to be taken elsewhere and the family went to Northwest Town in April 1959. There they settled in rural Elm Knoll, a collection of half a dozen houses about seven miles from town. This was soon to be the scene of the initial formation of the cult group, and here she came to know two neighbors, Minne Mae and Alice. These young housewives drew the attention of other neighbors by spending many hours hanging around the nearby general store, sometimes drinking beer and often complaining a good deal about their husbands. During this period, Bertha attended churches of various denominations and continued to have frequent ecstatic religious experiences, mostly while sitting alone in a clump of bushes near her house, where she was also reported to have spent a good deal of time crying and moaning.
Like Miss Lee, Lester (25 at conversion) went to a seminary (Lutheran) after a series of hallucinatory, spiriutalistic experiences and aroused a good deal of curiosity and opposition among his fellows and the faculty. He left after an abortive part-time year to take up full-time graduate work in linguistics at a large state university in the same Bay City as the seminary. He remained convinced he was destined to be a one-man revitalization movement in the church. He took an extremely active role in campus student religious programs, meanwhile increasing his preoccupation with spiritualism and his own psychic experiences. For his first full-time year of graduate school he was awarded a Woodrow
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Wilson fellowship. But he was much more concerned about his religious life, and a new interest: he went to live with a young Hungarian ex-aristocrat, well-known in the area as a practicing homosexual. The young Hungarian led Lester to organized Spiritualism, where his religious preoccupations and hallucinations were greatly reinforced and increased, but Lester found these groups wanting. They contented themselves with very mundane affairs and seemed uninterested in speculations on larger theological matters. In addition, Lester was very ambivalent about his homosexuality, unable to explain it, unable to accept it, and unable to quit it. Then he met Miss Lee.
Bertha's friend, Minnie Mae, did not aspire to significant status, religious or otherwise. She pined, rather, for the more modest goal of marital satisfaction.
Minnie Mae (27 at conversion) was born in Possum Trot, Arkansas, of hillbilly farmers. She was one of 11 children, began dating at 12, and married at IS, having completed only rural elementary school. She and her young husband left Arkansas for lack of jobs and settled in Northwest Town. Her husband took a job as a laborer in a plywood factory. Although the young couple did not join a church, they came from a religious background (Minnie Mae's mother was a Pentecostal lay preacher), and they began attending tent meetings near Northwest Town. During one of these Minnie Mae began speaking in "tongues" and fell into a several-hour trance. After this her husband discouraged church activities. The couple had three children at roughly two year intervals, and until 1960 Minnie Mae seems to have spent most of her time caring for these children and watching television. She reported tuning in a local channel when she got up in the morning and keeping it on until sign-off at night. In 1958 the couple built a small house in Elm Knoll. Here, in her behavior and conversations with neighbors, she began to reveal severe dissatisfactions in her marriage. She repeatedly complained that her husband only had intercourse with her about once a month, but she also reported being very afraid of getting pregnant again. Furthermore, she wanted to get out and have some fun, go dancing, etc., but her husband only wanted to watch TV and to fish. She wondered if she had let life pass her by because she had been married too young. And, often, she complained about her husband's opposition to fundamentalist religious activities.
Merwin and Alice followed quite a different pattern. Theirs was not an intensely-religious concern, indeed their grandiose ambitions were for fortune.
Merwin (29 at conversion) was raised in a Kansas hamlet where his father was the railroad depot agent. After high school he tried a small Kansas junior college for a year, did poorly, and joined the Marines. Discharged in 1952, he spent one year at the University of Kansas majoring in architecture, and did well, so he transferred to what he felt was a better school in Northwest Town. Here he didn't do well and adopted a pattern of frequently dropping out, then going back. Estranged and alone, he bought a few acres in Elm Knoll with a small ramshackle cottage and took up a recluse's existence—he rarely shaved or washed, brewed his own beer, and dabbled in health foods, left-wing political writings, and occult publications, while supporting himself by working in a plywood plant. Next door, about 20 yards away, lived Alice, her two children and her husband, also a plywood plant worker. Alice's husband, however, worked a swing shift, while Merwin worked days. The result was that Alice filed for divorce and moved over to Merwin's. The husband departed without undue resistance. After their marriage, Merwin began to put his plans for financial empires into action. He considered a housing development, a junkyard, and finally bought a large frame house in Northwest Town to convert into a boarding house for students. After he had bought furniture and made other investments in the property, the city condemned it. Merwin filed bankruptcy and returned to Elm Knoll to lick his wounds and contemplate his next business venture. Merwin had long been disaffected with the established religions, had considered himself an agnostic, but was also interested in the occult. These interests were developed by his work partner, Elmer, whom we shall meet in a moment.
Alice, also a small town girl, had traded for what she felt was a better man, one who was "going places," but these hopes seemed to be fading after the bankruptcy. She still bragged to Minnie Mae and Bertha that Merwin would be a big man someday, but there was little evidence to support her.
Elmer's case illustrates yet another kind of frustrated ambition, that of attaining status as a man of knowledge and invention.
Elmer was born on a farm in North Dakota but his parents fled the drought and depression for the West Coast during the late thirties and settled on a farm near Northwest Town. Elmer, 26 at the time of his conversion, was slightly built with something of a vacant stare. After high school, he flunked out of the university after one semester and spent the next two years in the army where he flunked medical technician school. After the army he enrolled in a nearby state college and again lasted only one semester.
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He then returned to his parents' farm and took a job in the plywood factory. Elmer conceived of himself as an intellectual and aspired to be a learned man. He undertook to educate himself, and collected a large library toward this end. Unfortunately, he was virtually illiterate. In addition to more conventional books (including much of the Random House Modern Library), he subscribed to occult periodicals such as Fate, Flying Saucers, Search, etc. He also viewed himself as a practical man of invention, a young Thomas Edison, and dreamed of constructing revolutionary gadgets. He actually began assembling materials for a tiny helicopter (to use for herding cattle) and a huge television antenna to bring in stations hundreds of miles away. On top of all this, Elmer was unable to speak to others above a whisper and looked constantly at his feet while talking. Furthermore, he had great difficulty sustaining a conversation, often appearing to forget what he was talking about. But despite his "objective" failures at intellectual accomplishment, Elmer clung to a belief in his own potential. The consequences of failure were largely to make him withdraw, to protect this self image from his inability to demonstrate it.
These case histories provide a concrete notion of the kinds of things that bothered pre-converts. These problems apparently are not qualitatively different from the problems presumably experienced by a significant, albeit unknown, proportion of the general population. Their peculiarity, if any, appears to be that pre-converts felt their problems were quite acute, and they experienced high levels of tension concerning them over rather long periods.
From the point of view of an outside observer, however, their circumstances were not extraordinarily oppressive; in the general population, many persons undoubtedly labor under tensions considerably more acute and prolonged. Perhaps the strongest qualitative generalization supported by the data is that pre-converts felt themselves frustrated in their rather diverse aspirations. Most people probably have some type of frustrated aspiration, but pre-converts experienced the tension rather more acutely and over longer periods than most people do.
Explanation cannot rest here, for such tensions could have resulted in any number of other resolutions, and in fact they usually do. Thus, these unresolved problems in living are part of the necessary scenery for the
stage, but the rest of the props, the stage itself, and the drama of conversion remain to be constructed.
2. Type of Problem-Solving Perspective. Since conversion to the D.P. is hardly the only thing people can do about their problems, it becomes important to ask what else these particular people could have done, and why they didn't. Because people have a number of conventional and readily available alternative definitions for, and means of coping with, their problems, there were, in the end, very few converts to the D.P. An alternative solution is a perspective or rhetoric denning the nature and sources of problems in living and offering some program for their resolution. Many such alternative solutions exist in modern society. Briefly, three particular genres of solution are relevant here: the psychiatric, the political and the religious. In the first, the origin of problems is typically traced to the psyche, and manipulation of the self is advocated as a solution. Political solutions, mainly radical, locate the sources of problems in the social structure and advocate reorganization of the system as a solution. The religious perspective tends to see both sources and solutions as emanating from an unseen and, in principle, unseeable realm.
The first two secular rhetorics bear the major weight of usage in contemporary society. No longer is it considered appropriate to regard recalcitrant and aberrant actors as possessed of devils. Indeed, modern religious institutions tend to offer a secular, frequently psychiatric, rhetoric concerning problems in living. The prevalence of secular definitions of tension is a major reason for the scarcity of D.P. converts. Several persons, whose circumstances met other conditions of the model, had adopted a psychiatric definition of their tensions and failed to become converts. In one exaggerated instance, an ex-GI literally alternated residence between the D.P. headquarters and the psychiatric ward of the veterans' hospital, never able to make a final decision as to which rhetoric he should adopt.
All pre-converts were surprisingly uninformed about conventional psychiatric and political perspectives for defining their problems. Perhaps those from small towns and
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rural communities in particular had long been accustomed to define the world in religious terms. Although all pre-converts had discarded conventional religious outlooks as inadequate, "spiritless," "dead," etc., prior to contact with the D.P., they retained a general propensity to impose religious meaning on events.
Even with these restrictions on the solutions available for acutely felt problems, a number of alternative responses still remain. First, people can persist in stressful situations with little or no relief. Second, persons often take specifically problem-directed action to change troublesome portions of their lives, without adopting a different world view to interpret them. Bertha and Minnie Mae might have simply divorced their husbands, for instance, and presumably, Lester could have embraced homosexuality. Clearly many pre-converts attempted such action (Merwin did start a boarding house, Elmer did attend college, etc.) but none found a successful direct solution to his difficulties.
Third, a number of maneuvers exist to "put the problem out of mind." In general these are compensations for or distractions from problems in living: e.g., addictive consumption of the mass media, pre-occupation with child-rearing, or immersion in work. More spectacular examples include alcoholism, suicide, promiscuity, and so on. Recall, for example, that Minnie Mae, Alice and Bertha "hung around" the general store during the day getting high on beer during the summer of 1959. Had they done this in a more urban setting, in bars with strange men available, their subsequent lives might have been different.
In any event, we may assume that many persons with tensions not only explore these possible strategies, but succeed in some cases in "making it," and hence, are no longer potential D.P. recruits.9
3. Seekership. Whatever the reasons, pre-converts failed to find a way out of their
9 Our analysis is confined to isolating the elements of the conversion sequence. Extended analysis would refer to the factors that in turn bring each conversion condition into existence. That is, it would be necessary to develop a theory for each of the seven elements, specifying the conditions under which each appears. On the form such theory would probably take, see Ralph Turner's discussion of "the instrusive factor," op. cit., pp. 609-611.
difficulties through any of the strategies outlined above. Their need for solutions persisted, and their problem-solving perspective was restricted to a religious outlook, but all pre-converts found conventional religious institutions inadequate as a source of solutions. Subsequently, each came to define himself as a religious seeker, a person searching for some satisfactory system of religious meaning to interpret and resolve his discontent, and each had taken some action to achieve this end.
Some hopped from church to church and prayer group to prayer group, pursuing their religious search through relatively conventional institutions. A male convert in his early twenties recounted:
My religious training consisted of various denominations such as Baptist, Methodist, Con-gregationalist, Jehovah's Witnesses and Catholicism. Through all my experiences, I refused to accept . . . religious dogma . . . because it was Truth I was seeking, and not a limited belief or concept.
Others began to explore the occult milieu, reading the voluminous literature of the strange, the mystical and the spiritual and tentatively trying a series of such occult groups as Rosicrucians, Spiritualists and the various divine sciences.
In April, 1960, my wife and I . . . [began] to seek a church connection. [We] began an association with Yokefellow, a spiritual growth organization in our local church. My whole religious outlook took on a new meaning and a broader vision. I grew emotionally and spiritually during the next two and one half years.
However, as I grew, many spiritual things remained unanswered and new questions came up demanding answers which Yokefellow and the Church seemed not to even begin to touch upon. . . . My wife and I became interested in the revelation of Edgar Cayce and the idea of reincarnation which seemed to answer so much, we read searchingly about the Dead Sea Scrolls, we decided to pursue Rosicrucianism, we read books on the secret disclosures to be gained from Yogi-type meditation. The more we searched the more questions seemed to come up. Through Emmet Fox's writings I thought I had discovered a path through Metaphysics which through study would give me the breakthrough I longed for.
Or, the seeker might display some amalgam of conventional and unusual religious con-
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ceptions, as illustrated by a male convert's sad tale:
I was reared in a Pentecostal church and as a child was a very ardent follower of Christianity. Because of family situations, I began to fall away and search for other meanings in life. This began . . . when I was about 12 years old. From that time on, my life was most of the time an odious existence, with a great deal of mental anguish. These last two years have brought me from church to church trying to find some fusion among them. I ended up going to Religious Science in the morning and fundamentalist in the evening.
Floundering about among religions was accompanied by two fundamental postulates that define more specifically the ideological components of the religious-seeker pattern. Although concrete pre-convert beliefs varied a good deal, all of them espoused these postulates about the nature of ultimate reality.
First, they believed that spirits of some variety came from an active supernatural realm to intervene in the "material world." Such entities could, at least sometimes, "break through" from the beyond and impart information, cause "experiences" or take a hand in the course of events.
Second, their conception of the universe was teleological, in the sense that beyond all appearances in the "sensate world" exists a purpose for which every object or event is created and exists. The earth is as it is to meet the needs of man, for example, and man manifests the physical structure he does to do the things he does. More important, man himself as a phenomenon must "be on earth" because, somewhere, sometime, somehow, it was decided that homo sapiens should "fulfill" a purpose or purposes. Accordingly, each person must have been "put on earth" for some reason, with some sort of "job" to perform.
Beliefs were typically no more specific than this. The religious seeking itself was in terms of finding some more detailed formulation of these problematically vague existential axes.
A few words on the general question of the importance of prior beliefs in effecting conversion are necessary at this point. A number of discussions of conversion have emphasized congruence between previous
ideology and a given group's "appeal,"10 while others treat the degree of congruence as unimportant so long as the ideology is seen as embodied in what appears to be a successful movement.11 Both views seem extreme.12
Our data suggest that only the two gross kinds of congruence that make up the ideology of religious seekership are necessary for conversion to the D.P. Presumptively important items, such as fundamentalist Christianity, millenarian expectations, and hallucinatory experience were far from universal among pre-converts. Most pre-converts believed in a vaguely defined "New Age" that would appear gradually, but they became apocalyptic pre-millenarian only upon conversion.
The role of these gross points of congruence is suggested in the substantive D.P. appeals to pre-converts. Active spirits were rampant in their view of reality. Converts lived with an immediate sense of unseen forces operating on the physical order (e.g., the weather) and intervening in human affairs—in relations among nations, in the latest national disaster, and in their own moment-to-moment lives. Nothing occurred that was not related to the intentions of God's or Satan's spirits. For persons holding a teleological conception of reality, the D.P. doctrine had the virtue of offering a minute and lawful explanation of the whole of human history. It systematically defined and revealed the hidden meaning of individual lives that had lacked coherence and purpose, and of course, it explained all hallucinatory behavior in terms of spirit manifestations. These spirits had been preparing the pre-convert to see the truth of theDJP.
Although acute and enduring tensions in the form of frustrated aspirations is not an ideological component, in the sense of being a more abstract postulate about the nature
10 E.g., H. G. Brown, "The Appeal of Communist Ideology," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2 (1943), pp. 161-174; Gabriel Almond, The Appeals of Communism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954.
11 E.g., Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, New York: Mentor, 1958 (copyright 1951), p. 10.
12 Cf. Herbert Blumer, "Collective Behavior" in Joseph B. Gittler (ed.), Review of Sociology, New York: Wiley, 1957, pp. 147-148.
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of reality, it should be noted here, in relation to the matter of congruence, that the D.P. also offered a proximate and major solution. Converts were assured of being virtual demi-gods for all eternity, beginning with a rule over the restored and reformed earth in the immediate future. By 1967 God was to impose the millennium upon earth, and those who converted early, before the truth of this message became self-evident, would occupy the most favored positions in the divine hegemony. Converts particularly stressed this advantage of conversion in their proselytization: "those who get in early," as one member often put it, "will be in on the ground floor of something big."
Religious seekership emerges, then, as another part of the path through the maze of life contingencies leading to D.P. conversion. It is a floundering among religious alternatives, an openness to a variety of religious views, frequently esoteric, combined with failure to embrace the specific ideology and fellowship of some set of believers.13 Seekership provided the minimal points of ideological congruence to make these people available for D.P. conversion.
4. The Turning Point. The necessary attributes of pre-converts stated thus far had all persisted for some time before the pre-converts encountered the D.P.; they can be considered "background" factors, or predispositions. Although they apparently arose and were active in the order specified, they are important here as accumulated and simultaneously active factors during the development of succeeding conditions.
We now turn to situational factors in which timing becomes much more significant. The first of these is the rather striking circumstance that shortly before, and concurrently with their encounter with the
13 For further suggestive materials on seekers and seeking see H. T. Dohrman, California Cult, Boston: Beacon, 19S8; Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schacter, When Prophecy Fails, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956; Sanctus De Santis, Religious Conversion, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927, esp. pp. 260-261; H. Taylor Buckner, "Deviant-Group Organizations," Unpublished M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1964, Ch. 2. For discussion of a generically similar phenomenon in a different context, see Edgar H. Schein, Coercive Persuasion, New York: Norton, 1961, pp. 120-136, 270-277.
D.P., all pre-converts had reached or were about to reach what they perceived as a "turning point" in their lives. That is, each had come to a moment when old lines of action were complete, had failed or been disrupted, or were about to be so, and when they faced the opportunity (or necessity), and possibly the burden, of doing something different with their lives.14 Thus, Miss Lee's academic career had been disrupted by long illness from which she recovered upon meeting Chang; Bertha was newly arrived in a strange town; Lester was disaffected from graduate studies after having quit the seminary; Minnie Mae no longer had a pre-school child at home to care for; Merwin had just failed in business after dropping out of school; and Elmer had returned to his parents' farm after failing in college for the second time.
Turning points in general derived from recent migration; loss of employment (a business failure in Merwin's case); and completion, failure, or withdrawal from school. Perhaps because most converts were young adults, turning points involving educational institutions were relatively frequent. Illustrations in addition to the cases described above are a graduate student who had just failed his Ph.D. qualifying examinations, two second-semester college seniors who had vague and unsatisfying plans for the future, and a seventeen year-old who had just graduated from high school. Recovery from or the onset of an illness, marital dissolution and other changes, extant or imminent, such as Minnie Mae's new freedom, were relatively infrequent. The significance of these various turning points is that they increased the pre-convert's awareness of and desire to take some action about his problems, at the same time giving Mm a new opportunity to do so. Turning points were situations in which old obligations and lines of action were diminished, and new involvements became desirable and possible.
14 Everett C. Hughes, Men and Their Work, Glencoe: Free Press, 19S8, Ch. 1; Anselm Strauss, "Transformations of Identity," in Arnold Rose (ed.), Human Behavior and Social Processes, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, pp. 67-71. Cf. the often-noted "cultural dislocation" and migration pattern found in the background of converts to many groups, especially cults.
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5. Cult Affective Bonds. We come now to the contact between a potential recruit and the D.P. If persons who go through all four of the previous steps are to be further drawn down the road to full conversion, an affective bond must develop, if it does not already exist, between the potential recruit and one or more of the D.P. members. The development or presence of some positive, emotional, interpersonal response seems necessary to bridge the gap between first exposure to the D.P. message and accepting its truth. That is, persons developed affective ties with the group or some of its members while they still regarded the D.P. perspective as problematic, or even "way out." In a manner of speaking, final conversion was coming to accept the opinions of one's friends.15
Miss Lee's recollections of her conversion provide a graphic illustration:
In addition to this change [her recovery from illness] I felt very good spiritually. I felt as if I had come to life from a numb state and there was spiritual liveliness and vitality within me by being among this group. As one feels when he comes from a closed stuffy room into the fresh air, or the goodness and warmth after freezing coldness was how my spirit witnessed its happiness. Although I could not agree with the message intellectually I found myself one with it spiritually. I reserved my conclusions and waited for guidance from God. [Italics added.]
Miss Lee further revealed she was particularly attracted to Mr. Chang and resided in his dwelling to enjoy the pleasure of his company, until, finally, she decided his message was true. Her statement that she "could not agree with the message intellectually" is particularly significant. Other converts reported and were observed to experience similar reservations as they nevertheless developed strong bonds with members of the group. Thus, for example, Lester, the most highly intellectual of the converts, displayed an extremely strong attachment
15 Cf. Tamatsu Shibutani, Society and Personality, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961, pp. 523-532, S8S-S92. Schein (op. cit., p. 277) reports that "the most potent source of influence in coercive persuasion was the identification which arose between a prisoner and his more reformed cellmate." See also Alan Kerckhoff, Kurt Back and Norman Miller, "Sociometric Patterns in Hysterical Contagion," Sociometry, 28 (1965), pp. 2-15.
to the middle-aged Miss Lee and manifested the "intellect problem" for some weeks after he had turned his life over to her. At one point late in this period he could still reflectively comment to an observer:
I have not entirely reconciled [the D.P. world view] with my intellect, but [Miss Lee] keeps answering more and more questions that are in my mind so I am beginning to close the holes I have found in it.
It is particularly important to note that conversions frequently moved through preexisting friendship pairs or nets. In the formation of the original core group, an affective bond first developed between Miss Lee and Bertha (the first to meet Miss Lee and begin to espouse her views). Once that had happened, the rest of the original conversions were supported by prior friendships. Bertha was part of the housewife trio of Minnie Mae and Alice; Merwin was Alice's husband, and Elmer was Merwin's friend and workmate. Subsequent conversions also followed friendship paths, or friendships developed between the pre-convert and the converts, prior to conversion.
Bonds that were unsupported by previous friendships with a new convert often took the form of a sense of instant and powerful rapport with a believer. Consider, for example a young housewife's account of her first view of Lester while attending an Edgar Cayce Foundation retreat: 16
I went to [one of the] Bible class [es] and saw [Lester] in our class—I had seen him for the first time the night before and had felt such love for him—he was my brother, yet I had not met him. He looked as if he were luminous! After the class I wanted to talk to him—but our project group had a discipline that day—complete silence—I did not want to break it, yet I felt such a need to talk to him. I prayed and asked God what He would have me do—I received such a positive feeling—I took this as an answer and sought out [Lester], When I found him, I did not have anything to say—I just mumbled something—But he seemed to understand and took me to the beach where he told me "He is on earth!" Oh, what joy I
16 Lester was at this retreat precisely for the purpose of meeting potential converts. Attendance at religious gatherings in the masquerade of a religious seeker was the primary D.P. mode of recruiting.
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felt! My whole body was filled with electricity.
The less-than-latent sexual overtones of this encounter appeared in a number of other heterosexual attachments that led to conversion (and quite a few that did not). Even after four years of cult membership Elmer could hardly hide his feelings in this testimonial:
Early in 1960, after a desperate prayer, which was nothing more than the words, "Father if there is any truth in this world, please reveal it to me," I met [Miss Lee]. This day I desire to never forget. Although I didn't fully understand yet, I desired to unite with her. . . .
Although a potential convert might have some initial difficulty in taking up the D.P. perspective, given the four previous conditions and an affective tie, he began seriously to consider the D.P. and to accept it as his personal construction of reality.
6. Extra-Cult Affective Bonds. One might suppose that non-D.P. associates of a convert-in-process would not be entirely neutral to the now immediate possibility that he would join the D.P. group. We must inquire, then, into the conditions under which extra-cult controls are activated through emotional attachments, and how they restrain or fail to restrain persons from D.P. conversion.
Recent migration, disaffection with geographically distant families and spouses and very few nearby acquaintences made a few converts "social atoms;" for them extra-cult attachments were irrelevant. More typically, converts were acquainted with nearby persons, but none was intimate enough to be aware that a conversion was in progress or to feel that the mutual attachment was sufficient to justify intervention. Thus, for example, Lester's social round was built primarily around participation in religious groups. Although he was well-known and appreciated for his contributions, he was not included in any local circles of intimacy. Many people knew him, but no one was a personal friend. Further, Lester's relations with both parents and stepparents manifested considerable strain and ambivalence, and his homosexual liaison was shot through with strain.
In many cases, positive attachments out-
side the cult were to other religious seekers, who, even though not yet budding converts themselves, encouraged continued "investigation" or entertainment of the D.P. rather than exercising a countervailing force. Indeed, such an extra-cult person might be only slightly behind his friend in his own conversion process.
In the relatively few cases where positive attachments existed between conventional extra-cult persons and a convert-in-process, control was minimal or absent, because of geographical distance or intentional avoidance of communication about the topic while the convert was solidifying his faith. Thus, for example, a German immigrant in his early thirties failed to inform his mother in Germany, to whom he was strongly attached, during his period of entertainment and only wrote her about the D.P. months after his firm acceptance. (She disowned him.)
During the period of tentative acceptance, and afterwards, converts, of course, possessed a rhetoric that helped to neutralize affective conflicts. An account by a newly converted soldier in Oklahoma conveys the powerful (and classic) content of this facilitating and justifying rhetoric:
I wrote my family a very long detailed but yet very plain letter about our movement and exactly what I received in spiritual ways plus the fact that Jesus had come to me himself. The weeks passed and I heard nothing but I waited with deep trust in God.
This morning I received a letter from my mother. She . . . surmised that I was working with a group other than those with the "stamp of approval by man." She . . . called me a fanatic, and went on to say: "My fervent constant prayer is that time will show you the fruitlessness of the way you have chosen before it consumes you entirely. A real true religion is deep in the heart and shines through your countenance for all to see. One need not shout it to the house tops either."
At first it was the deepest hurt I had ever experienced. But, I remember what others in [the D.P.] family have given up and how they too experienced a similar rejection. But so truly, I can now know a little of the rejection that our beloved Master experienced. I can now begin to understand his deep grief for the Father as he sat peering out of a window singing love songs to Him because he knew that the Father would feel such grief. I can now begin to feel the pain that our Father in heaven felt for 6,000 years. I can now begin to see that to come into the Kingdom
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of heaven is not as easy as formerly thought. I can now see why many are called but few are chosen. I began to understand why men will be separated, yes even from their families. I begin to see the shallowness of human concern for God as a Father and their true blindness. Oh my heart cries out to Our Father in greatful [wc] praise and love for what He has given.
*     * *
[In the words of Miss Lee:] "As we get close to the Father the road shall become more difficult;" "Only by truly suffering, can we know the Leader and the heart of the Father;" "You shall be tested." "He will come with a double-edged blade." Only now am I beginning to realize the deep significance of these words. Only now am I beginning to know the heart of the Father and the great suffering of our Lord.
When there were emotional attachments to outsiders who were physically present and cognizant of the incipient transformation, conversion became a "nip-and-tuck" affair. Pulled about by competing emotional loyalties and discordant versions of reality, such persons were subjected to intense emotional strain. A particularly poignant instance of this involved a newly-wed senior at the local state university. He began tentatively to espouse the D.P. as he developed strong ties with Lester and Miss Lee. His young wife struggled to accept, but she did not meet a number of the conditions leading to conversion, and in the end, seemed nervous, embarrassed, and even ashamed to be at D.P. gatherings. One night, just before the group began a prayer meeting, he rushed in and tearfully announced that he would have nothing further to do with the D.P., though he still thought the message was probably true. Torn between affective bonds, he opted for his young bride, but it was only months later that he finally lost all belief in the D.P.
When extra-cult bonds withstood the strain of affective and ideological flirtation with the D.P., conversion was not consummated. Most converts, however, lacked external affiliations close enough to permit informal control over belief. Affectively, they were so "unintegrated" that they could, for the most part, simply fall out of relatively conventional society unnoticed, taking their co-seeker friends, if any, with them.
7. Intensive Interaction. In combination, the six previous factors suffice to bring a
person to verbal conversion to the D.P. but one more contingency must be met if he is to become a "deployable agent,"17 or what we have termed a total convert. Most, but not all, verbal converts ultimately put their lives at the disposal of the cult. Such transformations in commitment took place, we suggest, as a result of intensive interaction with D.P. members, and failed to result when such interaction was absent.
Intensive interaction means concrete, daily, and even hourly accessibility to D.P. members, which implies physical proximity to total converts. Intensive exposure offers an opportunity to reinforce and elaborate an initial, tentative assent to the D.P. world view, and in prolonged association the perspective "comes alive" as a device for interpreting the moment-to-moment events in the convert's life.
The D.P. doctrine has a variety of resources for explicating the most minor everyday events in terms of a cosmic battle between good and evil spirits, in a way that placed the convert at the center of this war. Since all D.P. interpretations pointed to the imminence of the end, to participate in these explications of daily life was to come more and more to see the necessity of one's personal participation as a totally committed agent in this cosmic struggle.18
Reminders and discussion of the need to make other converts, and the necessity of supporting the cause in every way, were the main themes of verbal exchanges among the tentatively accepting and the total converts, and, indeed, among the total converts themselves. Away from this close association with those already totally committed, one failed to "appreciate" the need for one's transformation into a total convert.
In recognition of this fact, the D.P. members gave highest priority to attempts to persuade verbal converts (even the merely interested) to move into the cult's communal dwellings. During her early efforts in Northwest Town, Miss Lee gained verbal conversions from Bertha, Minnie Mae, Alice,
17 On the concept of the "deployable agent" or "deployable personnel" in social movements see Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon, New York: The Free Press, 1960 (copyright 19S2), pp. 18-29.
18 Cf. Schein, op. cit., pp. 136-139, 280-282.
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Merwin, and Elmer, many months before she was able to turn them into total converts. This transformation did not occur, in fact, until Miss Lee moved into Alice and Merwin's home (along with Elmer), placing her within a few dozen yards of the homes of Minnie Mae and Bertha. The resulting daily exposure of the verbal converts to Miss Lee's total conversion increasingly engrossed them in D.P. activities, until they came to give it all their personal and material resources.19 Recalling this period, Minnie Mae reported a process that occurred during other verbal converts' periods of intensive interaction. When one of them began to waver in his faith, unwavering believers were fortunately present to carry him through this "attack of Satan."
Most verbally assenting converts were induced out of this tenuous state, through contrived or spontaneous intensive interaction, within a few weeks, or more typically, a few months. In a few instances the interval between assent and total commitment spanned a year or more. When the unmarried older sister of the German immigrant mentioned above came to entertain the D.P. perspective, some 11 months of subtle and not-so-subtle pressures were required to get her to leave her private apartment and move into the communal dwelling. Within two months she went from rather lukewarm belief to total dedication and subsequent return to Germany as a D.P. missionary. The following ecstatic testimonial given during her second month of cult residence contrasts sharply with her previously reserved and inhibited statements:
In the beginning of May I moved into our center in [Bay City]. A complete new life started for me. Why had I not cut off my
19 Although a number of our illustrative cases are drawn from the period of the group's formation, the process of cult formation itself should not be confused with the analytically distinct process of conversion. The two are merely empirically compounded. Cult formation occurs when a network of friends who meet the first four conditions develop affective bonds with a world-view carrier and collectively develop the last two conditions, except that condition seven, intensive interaction, requires exposure to each other in addition to the world-view carrier. (For a different conception of "subculture" formation see Albert K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys, Glencoe, 111.: The Free Press, 19SS, Ch. 3.)
self-centered life earlier! Here under [Miss Lee's] care and guidance I felt God's power and love tremendously and very soon it became my only desire to wholeheartedly serve our Father. How fortunate I am being a child and student of our beloved mother and teacher, [Miss Lee]. She reflects in all her gestures, words and works the love and wisdom of our Lord and Master.
Thus, verbal conversion and even a resolution to reorganize one's life for the D.P. is not automatically translated into total conversion. One must be intensively exposed to the group supporting these new standards of conduct. D.P. members did not find proselytizing, the primary task of total converts, very easy, but in the presence of persons who reciprocally supported each other, such a transformation of one's life became possible. Persons who accepted the truth of the doctrine, but lacked intensive interaction with the core group, remained partisan spectators, who played no active part in the battle to usher in God's kingdom.
summary
We have presented a model of the accumulating conditions that appear to describe and account for conversion to an obscure millenarian perspective. These necessary and constellationally-sufficient conditions may be summarized as follows:
For conversion a person must:
1. Experience enduring, acutely felt tensions
2. Within a religious problem-solving perspective,
3. Which leads him to define himself as a religious seeker;
4. Encountering the D.P. at a turning point in his life,
5. Wherein an affective bond is formed (or pre-exists) with one or more converts ;
6. Where extra-cult attachments are absent or neutralized;
7. And, where, if he is to become a deploy-able agent, he is exposed to intensive interaction.
Because this model was developed from the study of a small set of converts to a minor millenarian doctrine, it may possess few generalizable features. We suggest, how-
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ever, that its terms are general enough, and its elements articulated in such a way as to provide a reasonable starting point for the study of conversion to other types of groups and perspectives.
A closing caveat. The D.P. had few competitive advantages, if any, over other unusual religious groups, in terms of the potential converts' predispositions. In terms of situational conditions the D.P. advantage was simply that they were on the scene and
able to make their "pitch," develop affective bonds and induce intensive interaction. We hope our effort will help dispel the tendency to assume some "deep," almost mystical, connection between world views and their carriers. Like conceptions holding that criminals and delinquents must be "really different," our thinking about other deviants has too often assumed some extensive charac-terological conjunction between participant and pattern of participation.
DURKHEIM'S ONE CAUSE OF SUICIDE * Barclay D. Johnson
University of California, Berkeley
In this paper I attempt to clarify Durkheim's theory of suicide rates. He maintains that two social variables, integration and regulation, jointly determine rates of suicide. A high rate is caused by an extreme condition of integration (egoism or altruism) or of regulation (anomie or fatalism), or by some combination of extreme conditions. A closer look at Suicide suggests, however, that altruism and fatalism really do not belong in Durkheim's scheme, and that egoism and anomie are identical. Thus, his four causes of suicide can be reduced to one, so that all variation in suicide rates is attributed to a single cause.
Although Durkheim's Suicide is among the most widely read classics in our field, sociologists rarely seek to clarify the theory it contains. The present paper is devoted to this task. I shall formulate Durkheim's theory in a manner harmonious both with his own words and with the demands of logical consistency. In the process, I shall call attention to certain inconsistencies in his argument, and try to resolve them. Since this is primarily an attempt to understand Dürkheim, I shall not attempt to "improve" the theory by introducing changes of my own invention.
The aforementioned purpose is a restricted one, and should be clearly distinguished from several related endeavors. Some of the things I will not attempt to do are the following: (1) Evaluate Durkheim's empirical claims about suicide rates of particular groups.1
* I am grateful to Neil J. Smelser, Kenneth E. Bock, Max Heirich, and R. Stephen Warner for their help in the preparation of this paper.
1 For comments on this question, see Jack P. Gibbs, "Suicide," in Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (eds.), Contemporary Social Problems, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961, pp. 222-261, passim.
This is a study in theory, not an examination of the incidence of suicide. (2) Review studies of suicide rates carried out since Durkheim's day.2 (3) Interpret and collate the work of various authors who have elaborated such Durkheimean concepts as "integration" and "anomie."3 (4) Present a new theory of suicide, or new data pertaining to suicide.4
2 Ibid. On the question of the validity of suicide statistics, see Warren Breed, "Occupational Mobility and Suicide Among White Males," American Sociological Review, 28 (1963), esp. pp. 181-182. A recent review of data on suicide is in Louis I. Dublin, Suicide, New York: Ronald Press, 1963.
3 On concepts of "integration," see Werner S. Landecker, "Types of Integration and Their Measurement," in Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Morris Rosenberg (eds.), The Language of Social Research, Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 19SS, pp. 19-27. On concepts of "anomie," articles and books have been appearing at an astonishing rate, to a great extent stimulated by Robert K. Merton, "Social Structure and Anomie," in Social Theory and Social Structure, Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1957, Ch. 4.
4 Theories of suicide rates are offered in at least two recent books: Andrew F. Henry and James F. Short, Jr., Suicide and Homicide, Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1954, and Jack P. Gibbs and Walter T. Martin, Status Integration and Suicide, Eugene: