Photograph of Dr. Melissa J. Wilde (Photo Credit: Alex Schein)
(Photo Credit: Alex Schein)

One overarching question has driven my research as a comparative-historical sociologist: How can we better understand religious change?

In pursuit of this question, I have investigated a number of different levels and cases of religious change.  These include: the cultural factors and social movements that directed the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church (1962-65); the demographic factors that explain why American Protestantism has gone from being majority Mainline to majority conservative and evangelical; the role religious competition and marketing played in encouraging the Roman Catholic Church to exponentially increase its granting of marital annulments; and how racialized concerns about “runaway fertility” among Catholic and Jewish immigrants caused many of America’s most prominent religious groups to rather suddenly liberalize on birth control in the early 1930s – and the path that put them on well into the 1960s.  Most recently, my interest in religious change has led me to examine the ways in which the structure of American religion has not changed – especially how and why religion remains deeply intertwined with inequality – in the US, but also around the world – and what this means, both theoretically and methodologically.

Examining these various research questions has, more often than not, required gathering my own data – from personal letters and Council votes from the Vatican Secret Archive on the part of 3000 bishops, to more than 10,000 articles from denominational periodicals for more than 30 religious groups over more than 50 years, to, most recently, developing a module for the General Social Survey so that we can better the changing nature of religion and its connection to American politics.  As a result, the research methods I use are varied – requiring everything from careful qualitative analysis of obscure archival sources in foreign languages to advanced statistical analysis of databases that I build or finding funding for myself.

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