ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a single instance of white-hot mobilization, asking: By means of what strategies was it possible to turn a warm into a white-hot mobilized movement. The movement to be analyzed— here called "the Divine Precepts (DPs)"— is the American wing of a Korean-spawned millenarian religion. White-hot mobilization would appear to be an enormously difficult achievement and an even more precarious state to sustain. White-hot mobilization had been achieved in a socially benign context. Social criticism started and reached a crescendo in mid-1976, embodied in a wide variety of local and federal investigations, convert-parent lawsuits and other actions, and uniformly negative and extensive media coverage. The DP organization was only one of dozens of religious groups that prospered between 1971 and 1974. Good organization, conversion technique, and large funding help, certainly, but only this more fundamental matter of auspicious social context made it possible for these movement-manipulable factors to be effective.
