Criticism
As a scholar who reports on New Religious Movements without condemning those groups, Melton has received criticism from scholars and organizations, especially from the anti-cult movement, that feel that New Religious Movements are dangerous, and that scholars should actively work against them. Stephen A. Kent and Theresa Krebs published a critical article When Scholars Know Sin, in which they characterize Gordon Melton, James R. Lewis, and Anson Shupe as biased towards the groups they study. Melton was also characterized as an "apologist" in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and by a Singaporean lawyer as a "cult apologist who has a long association of defending the practices of destructive cults" in the Straits Times, and in an article: "Apologist versus Alarmist", in Time Magazine. The term "cult apologist" was also used in Esquire Magazine in describing Melton's actions in the Aum Shinrikyo incident.
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“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
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