Bainbridge began his academic career at the Choate Rosemary Hall preparatory school in his birthstate of Connecticut.

In 1978, he published his second and most popular[2] book, entitled Satan's Power, which described several years in which Bainbridge infiltrated and observed the Process Church, a religious cult whose founders had been members of Scientology.

As of 2013, 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 later developed by Laurence Iannaccone and others.

He then joined the National Science Foundation as the director of its sociology program (1992-1999) before holding a series of positions that prefigured his current appointment in 2006.

Books authored by Bainbridge include: In addition, The Future of Religion was reprinted in Chinese in 2006 and Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult was translated into Italian in 1994.