Guru on world's religions knows vampires, too
By Louis Sahagun
Los Angeles Times
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — It's often said of academics, but for J. Gordon Melton it's true: He really does have an encyclopedic mind.
After all, Melton is the author of the Encyclopedia of American Religions, the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology and the Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena. Then, for fun, there's "The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead."
"It's my little niche," Melton said.
Actually, it's a big niche.
Erudite and eternally curious, Melton, 64, is one of the foremost U.S. authorities on religion (and vampires, too) and research specialist with the department of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The 30 books he has written and 17 more he co-wrote or edited are expansive and eclectic, and weave a colorful and diverse history of the currents of spiritual worship and tensions around the world.
Sauntering through the aisles of his collection of 40,000 volumes, now housed at UC Santa Barbara, he tried to explain his need to classify religions, the myriad ways people recognize a higher power.
"In 1900 there were 330 different religious groups," he said. "Now, there are over 2,000, and I find every one of them incredibly interesting."
Melton speaks sparingly about his personal life, but his rigorously documented books reflect a mind never at rest.
Ask him about, say, the West African evangelical missionary leader Panya Baba, or the satanic imagery in gothic rocker Marilyn Manson's songs, or how Christadelphian revivalists depart from the Protestant mainstream, and he talks a blue streak.
His encyclopedias brim with thousands of entries written in a clean, crisp and deceptively simple style. Their prices underline the stature they command as essential reference works in universities, seminary libraries and theological schools.
His 1,250-page, 7-pound Encyclopedia of American Religions sells new for $320.
Browsing through Melton's works leads a reader from one unexpected fact to another:
"Melton does very good work," said S. Scott Bartchy, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. "My sense in reading him is that he has a lot of insight and information, and doesn't belong to anybody. He's independent."
It's not surprising that Melton has been an arbiter in matters of dispute concerning religious groups large and small, mainstream and fringe, old and new, for nearly four decades.
He also has been asked to stand with religions gone bad when they needed a scholar of both God and sin on their side.
In 1995 he joined a controversial delegation of American lawyers and religious leaders that traveled to Tokyo at the expense of some members of Aum Shinrikyo after that group was accused of a sarin nerve gas attack on a subway that killed 12 people.
"I was one of the few American scholars who knew anything about the group," Melton said. "So they asked if I could investigate them to prove they had nothing to do with the attack."
Five days later, however, "We concluded that there was a high likelihood that the group's leaders had done what they were accused of," he said.
Melton says he's "on the road about 100 days a year, giving speeches, organizing research projects, meeting with scholars and lawyers. I also do a little lobbying for the First Amendment."
His steadfast defense of the right of new religions to express themselves has made him a target of leaders of the anti-cult movement, who regard him an apologist for extremists.
Melton, however, says every religious group in America has, at one time or another, been accused of being cult-like.
"I've come to believe that coercion in matters of religion are self-defeating," said Melton, who is also a Methodist minister. "If you leave people alone, the great majority will find their way to the center of one of the 15 or 16 great religious traditions."
