[2] Stark had written over 30 books, including The Rise of Christianity (1996), and more than 140 scholarly articles on subjects as diverse as prejudice, crime, suicide, and city life in ancient Rome.

[2] Stark played high school football with another individual who would go on to have a distinguished academic career, Alvin Plantinga, an influential Christian philosopher who taught at Calvin College and Notre Dame.

Nowadays their theory, which aims to explain religious involvement in terms of rewards and compensators, is seen as a precursor of the more explicit recourse to economic principles in the study of religion as later developed by Laurence Iannaccone and others.

Although it is true that the forms and practices of religion change, the idea of a decline called “secularization,” Stark argued, derives from faulty quantitative analysis and ideological preconceptions.

Particularly in his book Bearing False Witness (2016), he argued that an anti-Catholic prejudice has poisoned the historical debate on the Crusades, the Inquisition and the relations of Pope Pius XII with Nazism, creating an "anti-Catholic history" that is at odds with contemporary academic research, yet is still taught in schools and promoted by mainline media.

Though not a creationist himself, he believed that though "the theory of evolution is regarded as the invincible challenge to all religious claims, it is taken for granted among the leading biological scientists that the origin of species has yet to be explained."

He suggested that governments "lift the requirement that high school texts enshrine Darwin's failed attempt as an eternal truth.