J. Gordon Melton

J. Gordon Melton is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College (B.A., 1964), Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary (M.Div. 1968), and Northwestern University (Ph.D. 1975). He is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.

In 1968, he founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion and has remained its director ever since. The institute is devoted to organizing, motivating, and producing research-based studies and educational material on North American Religion. It has been responsible for the publication of more than 400 reference and scholarly texts since its founding, including multiple editions of the celebrated “Melton’s Encyclopedia of American Religions.” In 1985, the Institute, which was founded in Evanston, Illinois, moved to Santa Barbara, California. At that time the Institute donated its research library to the Davidson Library at the University of California—Santa Barbara, where it now exists as the J. Gordon Melton American Religion Collection. Melton became Distinguished Professor of American Religious History of Baylor University’s Institute for Studies in Religion in Waco, Texas, in March of 2011. He retired in 2022. He is the author of more than fifty books and hundreds of articles in peer-reviewed publications, and is regarded as one of the founders of the study of new religious movements as a specific academic subfield.