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.3 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