The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Morality and Society Series) - Hardcover

Munson, Ziad W.

9780226551197: The Making of Pro-life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works (Morality and Society Series)

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ISBN 10: 0226551199 ISBN 13: 9780226551197

Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 2009

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How do people become activists for causes they care deeply about? Many people with similar backgrounds, for instance, fervently believe that abortion should be illegal, but only some of them join the pro-life movement. By delving into the lives and beliefs of activists and nonactivists alike, Ziad W. Munson is able to lucidly examine the differences between them.Through extensive interviews and detailed studies of pro-life organizations across the nation, Munson makes the startling discovery that many activists join up before they develop strong beliefs about abortion - in fact, some are even pro-choice prior to their mobilization. Therefore, Munson concludes, commitment to an issue is often a consequence rather than a cause of activism."The Making of Pro-life Activists" provides a compelling new model of how people become activists while also offering a penetrating analysis of the complex relationship between religion, politics, and the pro-life movement. Policy makers, activists on both sides of the issue, and anyone seeking to understand how social movements take shape will find this book essential.

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Ziad W. Munson is the Frank R. Hook Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University.

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The Making of Pro-life Activists

How Social Movement Mobilization WorksBy ZIAD W. MUNSON

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright � 2008 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-55119-7

List of Illustrations...........................................................ixAcknowledgments.................................................................xi1 Explaining Mobilization in the American Pro-life Movement.....................12 Learning to Care..............................................................183 The Mobilization Process......................................................464 The Birth of a Movement.......................................................765 Together but Not One: The Pro-life Movement Structure.........................966 "United We Stand"? Tension in the Pro-life Moral Universe.....................1327 "My Life Is My Argument": Religion and the Movement...........................1558 Becoming an Activist: Ideas and Social Movements..............................185Appendix: Study Methodology.....................................................197Notes...........................................................................205References......................................................................215Index...........................................................................227

Chapter One

Explaining Mobilization in the American Pro-life Movement

"It's a shocking thing when you come to the realization of what they're doing and how many women are maimed, let alone the kids that are killed. And the fact that they feel every bit of that abortion. Every bit of pain, just like we feel, they feel, you know, while you're slicing and dicing and sucking them out of the womb. There's no nice way to do it." Tim, a pro-life activist in Oklahoma City, is explaining his view of abortion. "I more than 100 percent believe that abortion is killing an innocent human being. No amount of research or anything else will ever change my mind that from the time of conception, there's a child there. I mean my mind is set and it isn't gonna change." Tim sees abortion not only as wrong in and of itself but also as tied to many other issues. He believes, for example, that the controversy over so-called partial-birth abortion is really about "the selling and buying of body parts for kids, the billion-dollar industry that it is, you know, UPS and FedEx shipping body parts all over the country and saying they don't know what's going on."

In Tim's mind, these problems can ultimately be traced to the country's turn away from God. "If you don't believe in a Creator and you don't believe anything is created, then why does it matter if human life is destroyed, or if it's a fetus or a baby or whatever?" Tim asks rhetorically. "Who cares? All you care about is, you know, your next meal or your next drink or your next roll in the hay with hopefully somebody from the opposite sex." For Tim, God is the only solution to our moral decline. "This country is going to go south if God doesn't turn it around. That's the bottom line."

In Charleston, South Carolina, Jerome also thinks abortion is wrong. "I believe that there are some foundational truths that are eternal foundational truths," says Jerome, "and murder-killing babies, abortion-is one of them." Like Tim, Jerome has a dualistic worldview that he roots in his faith in God. Abortion "is not about politics, is not about choice," Jerome says, "it's about truth and what is right and wrong. And killing a baby, killing anybody, is not right." Jerome, too, draws a connection between the abortion issue and a larger moral decline in America. "The way that our country has gone? ... People are getting what they deserve, unfortunately."

Both men are similar in other ways as well. Jerome is a forty-four-year-old married father of five, and Tim is a thirty-eight-year-old married father of four. Both grew up in rural areas, attended small colleges, and married shortly after graduation. They were both raised as Methodists, and both have since become members of more conservative churches-Tim in a nondenominational church and Jerome in an evangelical Presbyterian congregation. An important difference between Tim and Jerome, however, is that Tim is an activist in the pro-life movement and Jerome is not. Tim is regularly involved in pro-life activity and sits on the board of directors of a major pro-life organization in Oklahoma City. Although Jerome also believes that abortion is simply murder by a different name and even knows many people who are involved in the movement, he himself has never become involved.

This book seeks to explain this important difference between Tim and Jerome. How did Tim become an activist? Why hasn't Jerome ever "put his money where his mouth is"? I answer these questions by developing a model of how people get involved in the pro-life movement. The model focuses attention on the process by which people become activists rather than on any different individual attributes they might have. Ultimately, the explanation of how Tim's and Jerome's stories differ shows how beliefs about social and moral issues are as much the product of social movement participation as they are the impetus for such involvement. The analysis here thus questions our conventional understanding of the relationship between ideas and action, and in doing so builds on and refines what we already know about how people become involved in all kinds of different social and political activities.

Who Becomes a Pro-life Activist?

The stories of Tim and Jerome highlight a question scholars and practitioners have asked repeatedly in the study of social movements: why do some people become mobilized into a social movement while others do not? Scholars have generally addressed this question by focusing on how individual attributes of activists differ from those of nonactivists. Doug McAdam (1986), for example, takes this approach in his classic study of participants in the 1964 Freedom Summer civil rights campaign. He found that the participants had greater numbers of organizational affiliations, higher levels of previous civil rights experience, and more extensive ties to other participants than those who withdrew from the campaign. David Meyer (2007) summarizes the research on the attributes of activists since McAdam's study by noting that activists in most movements are more politically active, better educated, and wealthier than the population as a whole.

In the case of the abortion debate, research has focused on comparing the characteristics of pro-life activists with their counterparts in the pro-choice movement. In terms of demographics, both Donald Granberg (1981) and Kristin Luker (1984) found pro-life activists are less educated, less wealthy, and more likely to be married, Catholic, and live outside of major cities than pro-choice activists. This same research also found those involved in the pro-life movement to be more religious and have more traditional views of sex, marriage, and the family than do those involved in the pro-choice movement. These generalizations about the demographic and attitudinal characteristics of pro-life activists have been echoed and reinforced, albeit with less empirical data, by subsequent influential work (Tribe 1990; Faludi 1991).

The focus on individual attributes begins to paint a picture of pro-life activists, but it is ultimately inadequate for understanding why Tim mobilized into the movement while Jerome did not. First, the empirical evidence that the individual characteristics of those in the pro-life movement differ substantially from the general population is weak. More recent studies of the abortion debate in Fargo, North Dakota (Ginsburg 1989/1998), and direct-action activists in St. Louis, Missouri (Maxwell 2002), found little evidence of demographic differences between pro-life and pro-choice activists. Moreover, much of the research on activism around abortion has focused on comparing pro-life and pro-choice activists rather than comparing activists and nonactivists. These studies are thus of limited help in answering the question being posed here.

There is also a strong theoretical reason to develop a deeper understanding of who becomes an activist. The problem lies in the inability of any explanation based on differences in attributes to account for the vast majority of people who share the same attributes as pro-life activists and yet are not part of the movement. One would be hard-pressed, for example, to find differences in the characteristics of Tim and Jerome that could explain why one is so active in the movement while the other is entirely uninvolved. This problem parallels a similar one in criminology: no matter how many individual traits are correlated with criminal behavior, there will always be more people who share those traits who are not criminals (Sampson and Laub 1993). Logicians call this problem the fallacy of affirming the consequent. We may identify a whole set of characteristics we attribute to pro-life activists, but not all activists will ever share all of those characteristics. Moreover, many nonactivists will have these same attributes. The causal connection between individual attributes and activism will therefore always be weak, no matter how many individual characteristics we identify or how many people we include.

In this study, I focus on developing a model of the process by which individuals come to participate in the pro-life movement. Becoming an activist is a dynamic, multistage process, not a singular event or discrete decision (Klandermans 2004; Schussman and Soule 2005). We thus need a rich description and theoretical focus on this process, how it develops, and how it affects those who get involved. Individual attributes are important, but my emphasis here is on understanding how individuals come to participate in order to develop a deeper, fuller account of becoming an activist than just the different attributes of people can provide. My goal is to offer an explanation that accounts not only for why Tim has become an activist and Jerome has not but also for the full range of different paths to activism followed by the tens of thousands of others in the movement.

How Do Pro-life Beliefs Matter in the Movement?

In answering the question of how individuals become pro-life activists, it is necessary to address a second important question regarding the movement they are joining: what role do personal ideas and beliefs about abortion play in the mobilization process? Tim and Jerome have very similar views on abortion, at least on the surface. What more do we need to know about their beliefs to differentiate the beliefs of activists from those of nonactivists? Is there even a difference between the two? How are beliefs important for understanding how people become activists?

Scholars typically treat the role of beliefs in social movements in one of three different ways. The standard approach is to look at the role of ideas in social movements under the rubric of frame analysis (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford and Snow 2000), in which the focus lies on the ties between the beliefs of the individual and the ideology of the movement. Ideas are seen as possessing mobilizing potential to the extent that they can be made to resonate with the beliefs of potential recruits. The second way is to see ideas as the central offering of a social movement: a social movement's core task is to reflect and affirm the identities and beliefs of its members. This view is common in new social movement theory (Inglehart 1977; Melucci 1989; Larana, Johnston, and Gusfield 1994). Rationalist explanations offer still a third approach, incorporating ideas and beliefs as a component of motivation. Beliefs are the impetus for people to get involved; activism is a way in which people express and act on their ideas (Lichbach 1994; Mason 1984; Muller and Opp 1986).

These approaches share a common assumption that individual beliefs logically and causally precede social movement participation. They conceptualize the link between belief and action in terms of individuals who have ideas about social issues, and only after these ideas are consistent with the ideology of a social movement is mobilization possible. In the case of the framing literature, for example, the challenge is to understand how movements frame issues in a way that will appeal to or draw in conscience adherents-that is, those who already have ideas consonant with the movement's cause. The task, then, is to understand how movements convince those who share their beliefs and goals to take action (Benford 1993).

One of the central claims I make in this analysis is that the common assumption underlying these three approaches is incorrect. In the pro-life movement, at least, many individuals get involved in the movement before they develop meaningful pro-life beliefs. Action in the movement actually precedes commitment to pro-life ideas or the development of pro-life "frames." The data I present contest the notion that social movements draw their members primarily from larger constituencies of those who already have sympathetic beliefs about an issue. The pro-life movement draws on people with a remarkably wide range of preexisting ideas about abortion for its potential recruits; those who already consider themselves "pro-life" are not the only ones who get involved. My data show that many individuals who become activists are at best ambivalent, and in many cases decidedly pro-choice, in their views on abortion before getting involved. Their views change during the actual process of becoming activists-that is, in the process of becoming mobilized.

Becoming an activist does not, however, have the same implications for the beliefs of each person who gets involved. The movement is not rooted in a single worldview, nor does it possess a unified "master frame" (Snow and Benford 1992; Benford and Snow 2000). As a result, the beliefs about abortion that new activists encounter are often fragmented and contradictory. Activists' beliefs develop differently depending on how they get involved in the movement and which organizations they encounter.

Tim understands abortion as the natural, evil consequence of a fallen society. "I mean, really, abortion is perfect for this day and age," he says. "I mean it really is what should be happening. As sinful as the rest of society is, abortion is really in vogue for the general society." He also sees conspiracy in abortion-conspiracy to keep it legal, conspiracy to sell human body parts, conspiracy to make money-ideas that parallel his larger worldview, in which conspiracies are rampant in politics, the economy, and society. Although his views are not unusual among pro-life activists, they are far from representative.

Robert, an activist in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, provides a much different view of pro-life activist belief. Like Tim, he believes that abortion is the killing of a child and therefore wrong. But Robert understands the issue in much different terms and situates it in a much different worldview from Tim's. Robert, a forty-four-year-old married father of three, first became involved in social movement activism as a student leader of the antiwar movement in the 1960s and later was part of the Central American peace movement of the 1980s. He understands abortion as a "capitalist plot that has to do with integrating women into the workforce." "The people who gave you napalm and Agent Orange," Robert says, "are now giving you abortion at home." Although he describes himself as a spiritual person, he is not religious and neither was raised as a churchgoer nor attends today. Although Robert finds common cause with Tim on the issue of abortion, they disagree on virtually every other social issue. "Part of my concern is that there is a resurgence of cultural conservatism in this country," Robert tells me, "and there is no resurgence of what I'd like to see: pro-life, left-wing radicalism, you know, that isn't there at all."

The views of Tim and Robert in many ways represent the two poles of pro-life beliefs. They demonstrate the surprisingly broad spectrum of ideas about abortion among those involved in the movement. These ideas fracture the movement into different social movement streams, consisting of mutually exclusive sets of organizations, people, and activities. Activists find themselves involved not in some singular and homogeneous movement but instead in particular streams of the movement that seldom work with or interact with the groups or individuals in other streams. Streams are defined and maintained by differences in beliefs about the abortion issue and, in particular, differences in beliefs about appropriate forms of activism. If I am right about the importance of the mobilization process in the development of individual beliefs, then these streams are enormously consequential in how people come to understand the abortion issue. The kinds of beliefs activists hold about the abortion issue are a function of the stream in which they become active.

Beliefs about abortion, beliefs about appropriate moral and political action, and beliefs about the movement matter to the movement, but they matter in different ways from what we would traditionally expect. Opposition to abortion is rooted in very different moral understandings among activists. These understandings cannot be collected in a single, coherent worldview. In fact, they are often in considerable tension with one another. Perhaps most important, different understandings of abortion structure both the movement and the process by which people become activists and adopt a pro-life view of the world. In part, this study is thus about more carefully specifying how and (especially) when beliefs matter in the mobilization process.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Making of Pro-life Activistsby ZIAD W. MUNSON Copyright � 2008 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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