ABSTRACT
Motivations for joining a new religious movement may be quite diverse and may, of course, not in any concrete sense, exist prior to contact with the movement itself. Contact may lead to the acquisition of a new vocabulary or conceptual apparatus which leads in turn to the reformulation of a broad range of attitudes and values. None the less it would seem to be the case that social categories are differentially receptive to the salvational commodity which is purveyed by movements of each type. Distinctive kinds of social circumstances and social experience appear to provide stronger grounds or more frequent occasions for coming to view the world as essentially evil or worthless, for example, and to conceive as viable, some radical alternative to it.
