328 Rhys H. Williams
institutional structures and demands of policy formation – especially at the national
level – should be evident. But in a crowded field of competing movement organizations,
many PSMOs may feel that they have little choice.
To be sure, more moderate SMOs may benefit from the existence of more radical
groups through what sociologists call “flank effects” (see Minkoff 1995). Institutional
authorities, faced with some radical factions, become willing to deal with representa-
tives of moderation. For example, by the mid-to-late 1960s, the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee made Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference seem moderate to many whites who had been worried about Communists
in the SCLC just a few years before. But the flank effect also can work in the other direc-
tion, forcing moderate groups to move to the edges. If they must compete for resources
from within the same pool of sympathizers, moderate SMOs – especially those with
large organizations to support – may be pushed to stretch their rhetoric and stridency
in order to prove their fidelity to the cause.
Whatever the benefits of radicalism, it is important to bear in mind that many
religious SMOs are not solely focused on political change. James Dobson’s “Focus on
the Family,” or Jerry Falwell’s “Old Time Gospel Hour” have been important bases for
Christian Right organizing. But that is not all they do. Like ordinary churches, they
serve their constituents’ religious and family needs as well. One needs to be careful
about assuming that average people using an organization’s services necessarily align
completely with its political messages (or if they do agree, that they are willing to
be active in that regard). People have the ability to select among many of the media
messages they receive. In some of my own research, I was unable to find “direct effects”
of exposure to politicized religious television; that is, those who watched the more
political televangelists were not much more likely to be politicized than those who
watched more traditional, nonpolitical TV preachers (Will and Williams 1986; see also
Frankl 1987). It seemed as though respondents were able to watch such programs largely
for their religious content and filter out the politics. Certainly many prominent clergy
who have engaged in public politics have had difficulty sustaining their advocacy efforts
(Falwell being the best example).
While organizational names, logos, and chains-of-command are meant to provide
both the reality and image of unity, that unity should not be assumed (see, for ex-
ample, the diversity of justifications for involvement in the Civil Rights Movement
analyzed by Platt and Fraser 1998). Prominent religious activists use their ideological
claims and rhetoric to try tocreatejust such unity – they are not merelyexpressingthe
existing preferences of their constituents. It is obviously in their interest to inflate their
membership numbers, but it is also in their interest to exaggerate the unity of that mem-
bership. Leaders portray themselves as the servants of their constituents – and there is
some truth in that claim – but leaders also must create through their rhetoric some of
that unity behind them. Promise Keepers is an obvious example here, where a number
of sociological studies show that the rank-and-file participants in the stadium rallies
have no common political agenda (see chapters in Williams 2001). Another example
would be the Central American Peace Movement of the 1980s. While several groups,
such as Witness for Peace and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, shared a common goal
of opposing Reagan Administration policies, the grounds of their opposition, and the
targets of their actions, were often widely divergent (Smith 1996a). Moreover, SMOs
need victories to keep their adherents motivated and the media convinced of their