ABSTRACT
Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) differ in the degree to which joining is defined as involving a deep discontinuity with the person's previous life and a radical reorganization of life-style and personal identity. SMOs vary in the forms and degrees of personal risk that membership entails. By definition, all SMO membership is risky, but the nature and intensity of it are variable. SMO members almost always display considerable variation in the intensity — the extent — of their participation and in, moreover, the forms of participation — the kinds of things they do in the SMO. Researchers examining how people join religious SMOs have been impressed with the degree to which some and perhaps many such joiners are often quite consciously deliberate and active in their examination of alternative affiliations and their decisions about them. Many studies of joining religious SMOs have highlighted the concurrent presence of private, proximate circumstances that joiners define as stressful or tension-producing.
