J. Gordon Melton

Gordon Melton is an American scholar of religion whose encyclopedic mapping of the United States’ religious landscape has given researchers a reference point for more than half a century.

Born on September 19, 1942, in Birmingham, Alabama, Melton encountered Elmer T. Clark’s The Small Sects in America during his final year of high school, and the book set the direction of his life’s work. He earned a B.A. in geology from Birmingham-Southern College in 1964, an M.Div. from Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in 1968, and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1975. He’s an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.

In 1968, while still finishing his graduate work, Melton founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion, which he directed for nearly five decades. The Institute’s research library was donated to the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1985, where it became the J. Gordon Melton American Religions Collection. His Encyclopedia of American Religions, first published by Gale in 1979 and revised through a ninth edition in 2016, is the work he’s most associated with. He also edited multiple editions of the Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology and co-authored the four-volume Faiths across Time: 5,000 Years of Religious History in 2014. In 2011 he joined Baylor University as Distinguished Professor of American Religious History, a post he held until retiring around 2023.

There’s something quietly remarkable about a Methodist minister spending a career cataloguing traditions his own church would have regarded with suspicion: Spiritualists, Scientologists, Buddhist communities, new religious movements of every variety. Melton didn’t evaluate them so much as document them, and that discipline of documentation is its own form of respect. Every tradition, however strange it looks from outside, contains people trying to answer the oldest questions. He seems to have understood that early.

His methods have drawn scrutiny. In 1995 he travelled to Tokyo to investigate alleged persecution of Aum Supreme Truth, the sect suspected in the Tokyo subway sarin attack, with travel expenses paid by the group itself, a conflict critics noted at the time. Melton has remained a prolific author. He’s written more than fifty books.