With God on Our Side

Chapter 3 Studying Social Movements

1 Introduction

Although people have organized to change their societies for centuries, the scholarly study of social movements is relatively new. Its origins date to the 1960s and 1970s, when protest movements in the US and globally generated interest in the causes, dynamics, strategies, and outcomes of social mobilization. Social movement theory is now a robust and diverse field, mainly practiced by sociologists but with interest from anthropologists, historians, and political scientists as well. These scholars together explore a range of movements and examine various features of them, especially in the US, Europe, and Latin America. However, they rarely highlight religion as a factor, which means that ...