With God on Our Side

Chapter 8 Social Movement Impact and Success

1 Introduction

By definition, social movement activists aim to change aspects of their society – attitudes, laws, policies, institutions, or material conditions. Whether and to what extent they achieve these goals are major questions for social movement scholars, which who often discuss them under the rubric of ‘movement outcomes.’ When examining outcomes, many scholars look for objective measures of success: new laws, transformed social attitudes, reformed institutions, and so on. They ask, as Paul Almeida puts it, “how do movements win?” (Almeida 2019, 121). Of course, winning is not the only or most common outcome of social movement activity. The results range from “total failure and movement ...