Bainbridge received his Ph.D. in sociology at Harvard University in 1975 and went on to study the sociology of religious cults. In 1976, he published his first book, "The Spaceflight Revolution", which examined the push for space exploration in the 1960s. In 1978, he published his second and most popular 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. The study was one of the last of this type of academic studies done before new rules were introduced restricting unregulated participatory observation and study.