Introduction

The diverse units of social organization to which the concept of protest can refer, alert us to the complexity of the question of participation in protest. Sixties political protest faded and was replaced by the early and mid-seventies blossoming of new religions in America and other countries. The seventies flowering of new religions and scholarship on such groups created a new wave of conversion studies in the late seventies. The code of ethics of the American Sociological Association accords stronger rights of biographical anonymity to small and private human actions and associations than to large and public collectivities and persons in the public eye. The Unification Church has moved itself from the private to public categories of collectivity and has become subject to a different ethic of research anonymity. Some people have attributed to a kind of mystical prescience or at least some unusual ability to predict the development of social groups.