"Reads almost like a well-written novel. . . . The story it tells is unsettling, but important. Anyone interested in finding an acceptable solution to the vexed issue of abortion should read it."--Harvey Cox, The Divinity School, Harvard University
On Christmas Day in 1984 three Pensacola abortion clinics were bombed by four young people who later went to trial and were convicted and sentenced. The authors explore this moral drama as a case study of religiously motivated political action (the perpetrators identified with Gideon, the Old Testament slayer of those who sacrificed firstborn...

Their detailed account of the nationally publicized trial and the fundamentalist Christian community's response to the bombings will be important and compelling reading for those concerned with the abortion controversy and other issues that encompass social violence and contemporary religion.
Scholars will be interested in the work as a comprehensive sociological analysis of religious fundamentalism, an ideology that the authors tie to a medieval world view. Placing anti-abortion violence in the context of social movement theory, they conclude that persons who are predisposed toward such...