ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines 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. It suggests some rudiments of a general account of conversion to deviant perspectives. The chapter offers a series of seven more or less successively accumulating factors, which in their total combination seem to account for conversion to the Divine Precepts (DP). It shows that verbal conversion is transformed into total conversion only when the last stage in the conversion sequence develops. The chapter investigates two genres of conditions or factors. The first, predisposing conditions, comprises attributes of persons prior to their contact with the cult. 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 DP enterprise.
