World Order/Series2/Volume 25/Issue 3/Text
←Issue 2 | World Order, Series 2 Volume 25 - Issue 3 |
Issue 4→ |
Return to PDF view![]() |
Spring 1994
World Order
THE CENTENARY OF THE
AMERICAN BAHÁ’Í COMMUNITY
EDITORIAL
THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH IN AMERICA:
ONE HUNDRED YEARS
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
SPEAKING TO AMERICA IN THE 1990s
TARAZ SAMANDARI
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE
IRANIAN BAHÁ’Í COMMUNITY
CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
RECONSIDERING RELIGION’S
ROLE IN SOCIETY
MONIREH KAZEMZADEH
World Order
VOLUME 25, NUMBER 3
WORLD ORDER IS INTENDED TO STIMULATE, INSPIRE, AND SERVE THINKING PEOPLE IN
THEIR SEARCH TO FIND RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY LIFE AND CONTEMPORARY
RELIGIOUS TEACHINGS AND PHILOSOPHY
Editorial Board:
FIRUZ KAZEMZADEH
BETTY J. FISHER
HOWARD GAREY
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
JAMES D. STOKES
Consultant in Poetry:
HERBERT WOODWARD MARTIN
Subscriber Service:
CECELIA ICE-MAYS
WORLD ORDER is published quarterly by
the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís
of the United States, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette,
IL 60091. POSTMASTER: Send address
changes to WORLD ORDER Subscriber
Service, Bahá’í National Center, Wilmette, IL
60091. The views expressed herein are those
of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of the publisher, the National Spiritual
Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United
States, or of the Editorial Board. Manuscripts
can be typewritten or computer generated.
They should be double spaced throughout,
with the footnotes at the end. The contributor
should send four copies—an original and three
legible copies—and should keep a copy. Return
postage should be included. Send manuscripts
and other editorial correspondence to
WORLD ORDER, 415 Linden Avenue, Wilmette,
IL 60091.
Subscription rates: U.S.A., 1 year, $10.00; 2 years, $18.00; single copies, $3.00. All other countries, 1 year, $15.00; 2 years, $28.00; single copies, $3.00. Airmail, 1 year, $20.00; 2 years, $38.00.
WORLD ORDER is protected through trademark registration in the U.S. Patent Office.
Copyright © 1994, National Spiritual Assembly
of the Bahá’ís of the United States. All
Rights Reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
ISSN 0043-8804
IN THIS ISSUE
- 2 The Centenary of the American
- Bahá’í Community
- Editorial
- 5 Interchange: Letters from and to the Editor
- 9 The Bahá’í Faith in America:
- One Hundred Years
- by Robert H. Stockman
- 27 Speaking to America in the 1990s
- by Taraz Samandari
- 44 The Emancipation of the Iranian
- Bahá’í’ Community
- a Concurrent Resolution
- 47 Mashriqu’l-Adhkár
- poem by M. Riesa Clark
- 48 Lakota Hoop Dancer
- poem by Clif Mason
- 51 Two Heroines of the American
- Bahá’í Community
- a review of two books by James D. Stokes
- 57 Ascending Poem
- poem by Sen McGlinn
- 57 Wise Man
- poem by Arnold Harris
- 59 Reconsidering Religion’s Role in Society
- a book review by Monireh Kazemzadeh
- 64 Authors & Artists in This Issue
The Centenary of the American Bahá’í Community
IN 1994 Bahá’ís celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of the Báb and the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Bahá’í Faith in North America. Shortly after sunset on 22 May 1844 in Shiraz, Persia, a saintly young man proclaimed that He was the Báb, the Gate through which Divine Revelation would pour down upon an expectant world, and the Herald of a still mightier One Who would inaugurate a new cycle in the religious history of humanity. Over the next nineteen years the Báb and as many as twenty thousand “dawn-breakers,” as His followers have been called, were killed by the combined forces of a fanatical clergy and a corrupt government.
Bahá’u’lláh fulfilled the Báb’s promise that a greater revelation would come and founded a religion that immediately spread beyond its Iranian Shiite base to include Sunni Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists. In 1892, only months after Bahá’u’lláh’s passing, His Faith reached the shores of North America. In 1894 the first residents of the United States became Bahá’ís.
Among the early adherents of the Bahá’í Faith in the Western hemisphere was Thornton Chase, a New Englander who postponed college to lead a company of African-American soldiers in the Civil War and who devoted much of his adult life to a passionate search for truth. He found it in 1894 in the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh and devoted the rest of his life to their propagation. The profound faith evinced by Chase and his fellow believers in America earned them, and those who followed them, the title “spiritual descendants of the dawn-breakers.”
Soon Bahá’í communities sprang up in Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, New York, and several other cities. A group of American pilgrims traveled to Akka in Palestine, establishing a direct tie to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’u’lláh’s Son and the appointed Interpreter of His Writings. The tie grew stronger when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, freed after forty years of imprisonment and exile as a result of His Father’s teachings, came to North America and traveled widely throughout the United States and Canada, speaking to gatherings large and small at churches, clubs, universities, and civic organizations.
During that trip ‘Abdu’l-Bahá unfolded His vision of America and of
America’s destiny: “The American people [He declared] are indeed worthy
of being the first to build the Tabernacle of the Great Peace, and proclaim
the oneness of mankind. . . . For America hath developed powers and
capacities greater and more wonderful than other nations. . . . The
American nation is equipped and empowered to accomplish that which
[Page 3] will adorn the pages of history. . . . The American continent gives
signs and evidences of very great advancement. Its future is even more
promising, for its influence and illumination are far-reaching. It will lead
all nations spiritually.”
But America’s spiritual potential, Bahá’u’lláh had declared, could be realized only if her material power were placed at the service of the highest ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century He appealed to the “Rulers of America and the Presidents of the Republics therein” to adorn “the temple of dominion with the ornament of justice and of the fear of God” and to bind “the broken with the hands of justice, and crush the oppressor who flourisheth with the rod of the commandments of your Lord.”
While addressing an American audience, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, reiterating and amplifying Bahá’u’lláh’s wishes for America, raised His voice in a prayer “that the ensign of international peace may be uplifted and that the oneness of the world of humanity may be realized and accomplished. . . . May this American democracy be the first nation to establish the foundation of international agreement. May it be the first nation to proclaim the universality of mankind. May it be the first to upraise the standard of the Most Great Peace, and through this nation of democracy may these philanthropic intentions and institutions be spread broadcast throughout the world.”
Ever since the Bahá’í Faith was established in North America a century ago, American Bahá’ís have labored to help realize Bahá’u’lláh’s vision of the destiny of their nation. They have worked for world peace, struggled for racial unity, promoted the equality of women and men, and spread the message of understanding, harmony, and love. They know full well that their country is as yet far from achieving the ideals to which it must aspire. They are aware of the injustices, the moral decay, the pervasive materialism that infect much of American life. They remember the words of Shoghi Effendi, who wrote: “Many and divers are the setbacks and reverses which this nation, extolled so highly by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and occupying at present so unique a position among its fellow nations, must, alas, suffer. The road leading to its destiny is long, thorny and tortuous. The impact of various forces upon the structure and polity of that nation will be tremendous. Tribulations, on a scale unprecedented in its history, and calculated to purge its institutions, to purify the hearts of its people, to fuse its constituent elements, and to weld it into one entity with its sister nations in both hemispheres, are inevitable.”
At the threshold of their second century the American Bahá’ís are confident and “feel assured that that great republic . . . will continue to evolve, undivided and undefeatable, until the sum total of its contributions to the birth, the rise and the fruition of that world civilization, the child of the Most Great Peace . . . will have been made, and its last task discharged.”
Interchange LETTERS FROM AND TO THE EDITOR
THIS issue of World Order is dedicated to
two important Bahá’í anniversaries. One
hundred fifty years ago, on the evening of
22 May 1844, the Báb declared His mission
in Shiraz, launching a movement that
would spread widely throughout Persia and
become the foundation of the Bahá’í Faith.
One hundred years ago the Bahá’í Faith
was introduced to America, as a result of
teaching efforts begun in the spring and
summer of 1894; such activities marked
the inception of the American Bahá’í
community. In 1943 Shoghi Effendi, the
Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, referred to
the “marvelous coincidence” of these two
events, and encouraged the American
Bahá’ís to celebrate them with various
events and programs. This issue of World
Order is part of the 1994 commemorations.
Robert H. Stockman’s essay on the history of the Bahá’í Faith in this country is especially fitting, as it is one of the first scholarly attempts to survey the entirety of American Bahá’í history. It recounts the struggles of American Bahá’ís to understand the religion they had joined and teach it to their fellow citizens; to build enduring administrative institutions embodying the ideals of their Faith; to take that Faith not only to remote areas of their own nation but to other countries as well; to express Bahá’í values in literature and art in ways that have contributed to American and world culture; and to foster acceptance of key Bahá’í principles in society as a whole. Two principles have proven to be of central importance in their efforts: the establishment of the oneness of humanity and of a lasting world peace. As Stockman’s essay shows, these two goals, central to the Bahá’í teachings and stressed repeatedly by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His historic visit to North America in 1912, provide the framework for understanding much of American Bahá’í history.
Taraz Samandari’s essay, “Speaking to America in the 1990s,” presents a sober, realistic account of the decay of the moral and social values underpinning American society. He speaks of the pain of change, the impossibility of a return to an idealized past, and the deficiencies of a purely individualistic capitalism. He offers a new set of values, based on the Bahá’í scriptures, on which to rebuild society. He also draws extensively on social commentaries by renowned scholars to clarify Bahá’í values and explain their application to America’s challenge.
An essential priority of American Bahá’ís
throughout their history has been
ameliorating the conditions under which
their fellow believers in Iran are forced to
live. In 1900 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the head of the
Bahá’í Faith, directed William Hoar, one
of the first American Bahá’í’s, to go to
Washington and ask the American government
to approach the government of
Persia about the unjust treatment of its
Bahá’í citizens. Since then, the American
Bahá’í community has remained committed
to making the governments and international
[Page 6] organizations of the world aware
of the continuing violation of the human
rights of Bahá’ís in Iran. The latest chapter
in the American Bahá’ís’ continuing
effort is found in this issue. The U.S.
Congress, recognizing the egregious persecution
of the Bahá’ís in Iran, has drafted
its sixth resolution calling for an end to
their mistreatment by the Islamic republic
of Iran. The resolution is stronger than
the previous ones because of the existence
of a document, the Golpaygani memorandum,
unearthed by the United Nations
Special Rapporteur in Iran (and published
in the Fall 1993 issue of World Order),
which reveals a systematic governmental
policy to persecute Bahá’ís both inside and
outside Iran. The new resolution calls for
an end to the government-sanctioned denial
of economic, social, and political rights of
Bahá’ís in Iran.
Scattered throughout this issue of World Order are a number of quotations from the principal figures of the Bahá’í Faith that help explain the importance of America in establishing the viable moral, material, and political world order envisioned by Bahá’u’lláh.
In memorable passages addressed to “the Rulers of America
and the Presidents of the Republics therein”
He [Bahá’u’lláh], in His Kitáb-i-Aqdas, calls upon them to
“adorn the temple of dominion with the ornament
of justice and of the fear of God, and its head
with the crown of remembrance” of their Lord;
declares that “the Promised One” has been made manifest;
counsels them to avail themselves of the “Day of God”;
and bids them “bind with the hands of justice the broken”
and “crush” the “oppressor” with “the rod of the
commandments of their Lord, the Ordainer, the All-Wise.”
—SHOGHI EFFENDI
The Bahá’í Faith in America:
One Hundred Years
BY ROBERT H. STOCKMAN
Copyright © 1994 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States. This essay has been adapted from an article that will appear in The Short Encyclopedia of the Bahá’í Faith (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, forthcoming).
THE BAHÁ’Í FAITH, which originated in Persia in 1844, was established in
America in 1894, only fifty years after its message was first proclaimed.[1]
The United States Bahá’í community has, in the course of one hundred years,
become one of the most important strongholds in the Bahá’í world, second
only to Iran, the birthplace of the Faith. Because of the vital role America
has played in establishing the Bahá’í organizational system conceived by
Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, Shoghi Effendi, the great-grandson
of Bahá’u’lláh and the appointed leader of the Bahá’í Faith from
1921 until his death in 1957, has called the United States “the cradle of the
Bahá’í Administrative Order.”[2] The Bahá’í scriptures state that the United
States will play a pivotal role in the development of a world civilization.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Son of Bahá’u’lláh and His appointed Successor, emphasized
that America was destined to “lead all nations spiritually.”[3] ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
revealed a prayer for America that elaborates on three themes: first, America
should become “glorious in spiritual degrees even as it has aspired to material
degrees”; second, it must “upraise the standard of the oneness of humanity”;
and third, it must “promulgate the Most Great Peace.”[4] The Bahá’í scriptures
[Page 10] thus view the promotion of the oneness of humanity, which includes equality
of races, religions, classes, and genders; the combating of materialism; and
the advancement of the cause of world peace as the central priorities not just
for American Bahá’ís, but for the nation as a whole.
The Nineteenth Century
THE FIRST known contact between the United States and the Bahá’í Faith occurred in 1867, when the Bahá’ís in Baghdad sent a petition to the American government through its consul in Beirut, appealing for the release of Bahá’u’lláh, Who had been a religious prisoner and an exile since 1853, and for greater tolerance of the Bahá’í community in the Ottoman Empire.[5] When Bahá’u’lláh revealed His Kitáb-i-Aqdas around 1873, He addressed the presidents and rulers of America.[6]
The first Bahá’í to travel to North America was Anton Haddad, who arrived in 1892. He was soon followed by Ibrahim Kheiralla. Bahá’ís of Christian background from what is now Lebanon, both hoped to become successful entrepreneurs. Haddad returned to the Middle East in April 1894. As early as 1893 Kheiralla began to share his understanding of the Bahá’í religion with the Americans he met. Lacking books of Bahá’í scripture and intrigued by biblical prophecy, spiritual healing, Middle Eastern magic, and American folk Protestantism, Kheiralla forged his own version of Bahá’í belief and taught it to a growing number of Americans. By 1899 fifteen hundred Americans had been attracted to the new faith. Bahá’í communities of over two hundred members each sprang up in Chicago; New York; and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Cincinnati, northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Racine, Wisconsin, had communities of ten to fifty members.[7]
Middle and lower middle class Americans of British, German, and Scandinavian
heritage were particularly attracted to the Bahá’í Faith. Most early
American Bahá’ís came from mainline Protestant backgrounds; some had been
active in churches when they converted, though most were inactive or unchurched.
Many early declarants had been interested in alternative religious
expressions such as Swedenborgianism, Christian Science, Theosophy, Vedanta,
Buddhism, and New Thought before becoming Bahá’ís. Others had been
Masons, members of other secret societies, or had been interested in philosophies
[Page 11] focused on health and healing.[8]
In late 1898 Kheiralla and a group of American Bahá’ís went on pilgrimage to Palestine, where many Bahá’í holy places are located. This initiated the community’s first formal contact with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Who had become head of the Bahá’í Faith on the passing of Bahá’u’lláh in 1892 in accordance with Bahá’u’lláh’s will, the Kitáb-i-‘Ahd. The American Bahá’ís discovered, much to their shock, that Kheiralla had been teaching them a mixture of his own opinion and true Bahá’í belief. They also realized that the Bahá’í scriptures contradicted some of his teachings. When they returned to North America, a crisis ensued. Kheiralla insisted that his interpretations of the Bahá’í Faith were correct and that they constituted orthodox Bahá’í belief. The American Bahá’í pilgrims disagreed and asserted that Bahá’ís should turn to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá for guidance, for Bahá’u’lláh had appointed Him the sole Interpreter of Bahá’í scripture. In 1900 Kheiralla attempted to start his own independent Bahá’í sect, an effort that attracted no more than a few hundred of the American Bahá’ís and that endured approximately half a century before disappearing. About half of the American Bahá’ís became disaffected from their new religion as a result of the crisis. In 1900 and 1901 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá sent a number of Bahá’í teachers from the Middle East—Abdu’l-Karím-i-Ṭihrání, Ḥájí Ḥassan-i-Khurásání, Mírzá Asadu’lláh, and Mírzá Abu’l-Faḍl—to provide the remaining American Bahá’ís with accurate information about the Bahá’í teachings.[9]
1900-1921
BETWEEN 1900 and 1912 the American Bahá’í community went through a
series of developmental phases. The first, from 1900 through 1904, was one
of consolidation. The Middle Eastern teachers traveled to the various cities
where Bahá’ís resided, deepening them and helping them to organize themselves.
Chicago, New York, Kenosha, and northern New Jersey all elected
consultative bodies, forerunners of today’s spiritual assemblies. The second
phase, from 1904 through 1908, saw a burst of translations of the writings
of Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, providing the American Bahá’ís with a
substantial body of Bahá’í scripture in English. Consultative bodies were
formed in Washington, D.C.; Boston; Spokane; and briefly in Oakland,
California. The third phase, from 1909 through 1911, saw the establishment
of a national organization and the focusing of energy on several national
projects: the construction of the Bahá’í Temple in Wilmette, Illinois; the
establishment of a national coordinating body, the Bahai Temple Unity, the
[Page 12] forerunner of the National Spiritual Assembly; the foundation of Star of the
West, the first successful national Bahá’í periodical; and the creation of the
Persian-American Educational Society, a social and economic development
project through which the American Bahá’ís provided the Persian Bahá’ís with
educational, medical, and technical assistance.[10]
In 1912 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá visited the United States and Canada for eight months, a trip that had an enormous impact on the American Bahá’ís.[11] Most were too poor to afford the lengthy and arduous trip to Palestine; thus ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit was the only chance many had to see Him. Many brought friends to meet ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and to hear His talks, producing a modest upswing in the enrollment of new members. His talks were regularly published in Star of the West and were eventually compiled into a larger volume titled The Promulgation of Universal Peace, thereby bringing them to an even wider audience. Hundreds of newspaper articles were published about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Bahá’í Faith, resulting in the first widespread publicity for the Bahá’í Faith in North America.
Consolidation of the Bahá’í community was perhaps the most important result of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá instructed the Chicago and New York Bahá’í consultative bodies to disband and be reelected. His talks brought deeper knowledge of the Bahá’í teachings to some Bahá’ís, but they convinced others that Bahá’í ideals would be widely disseminated if the Bahá’í community mixed more with others and did not view the Bahá’í Faith as an independent religion. Many found obedience to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá a difficult membership requirement to accept. During His visit to America, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was forced to expel three individuals for Covenant-breaking—that is, failing to obey ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, appointed the Center of the Covenant by Bahá’u’lláh.[12]
The years between 1913 and 1921 witnessed a dialectic of consolidation and
crisis. Many Bahá’ís questioned whether the Bahá’í Faith was an independent
religion and whether it could be organized. Those who saw it as an independent
religion usually favored organization; those who preferred to see the
Bahá’í ideals as a set of teachings that one could mix with other beliefs and
with adherence to other movements often criticized the organizers as exclusivist
and as narrow-mindedly sectarian. In 1917 some of the inclusivist-minded
Bahá’ís established a reading room in Chicago, which split the Bahá’í community;
‘Abdu’l-Bahá eventually expelled them from the Bahá’í Faith as
[Page 13] Covenant-breakers.[13] In 1919 another inclusivist-minded group of Bahá’ís in
New York founded Reality, a magazine that, after 1922, evolved into a platform
for attacking the organization of the Bahá’í Faith and what it considered
exclusivism.[14] Reality eventually ceased to be affiliated with the Bahá’í Faith.
World War I (1914-18) proved to be another serious test for the American Bahá’ís. During much of the war, the American Bahá’ís were cut off from communication with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. With no strong national institutions and no communication with the head of their religion, the Bahá’ís soon differed over their attitude toward the war. Some advocated American support of the Allies and sold war bonds; others opposed the war. Some of the latter published a large compilation of Bahá’í scriptures on peace.
But the period between 1913 and 1921 also saw many important and positive developments in the American Bahá’í community. In 1916 and 1917 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote the Tablets of the Divine Plan, a series of letters to the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada that gave them a mandate to take the Bahá’í religion to every nation and territory on the globe.[15] The tablets focused the Bahá’ís’ attention on teaching the Faith. They also produced a renewed concern about the strengthening of Bahá’í organization. The Chicago and Kenosha consultative bodies, which had ceased to function, were reestablished; Cleveland established a consultative body, the first new body to be formed since 1910. By 1917 the American Bahá’í community had approximately six local Bahá’í governing bodies, the forerunners of local spiritual assemblies.[16] In 1919 the visit to North America by the renowned Persian Bahá’í teacher Jináb-i-Fáḍil-i-Mázindarání further accelerated the teaching and consolidation work of the Bahá’í community.[17] In 1920 the architectural design for the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette was selected.[18]
The period between 1913 and 1921 also saw a significant diversification of
the American Bahá’í community. Catholics and Jews were attracted to the
[Page 14] Bahá’í Faith in large numbers.[19] A shift from an emphasis on fulfillment of
biblical prophecy to a focus on the Bahá’í teachings on social reform probably
contributed to their greater receptivity. Most significantly, African-Americans
enrolled in the Bahá’í Faith in many of the larger communities, resulting in
greater racial integration. Before 1912 no more than two dozen African-Americans
had joined the Bahá’í Faith, nearly all of them in Washington,
D.C. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s strong insistence on racial integration was beginning to
have an important effect on the white Bahá’ís.
1921-1963
ON 28 November 1921 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá died, plunging the Bahá’í world into grief.[20] In His Will and Testament, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá appointed Shoghi Effendi, His grandson, to be His successor. He also specified the mechanism for establishing local and national spiritual assemblies and the Universal House of Justice.[21] Shoghi Effendi took ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Will and Testament as the mandate for organizing the Bahá’í world community and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablets of the Divine Plan as the mandate for systematically spreading the Bahá’í religion throughout the entire planet. The American Bahá’í community was to be the chief instrument for accomplishing both goals.
In a March 1922 letter Shoghi Effendi instructed the Bahá’ís to elect local
spiritual assemblies in every locality where nine or more Bahá’ís reside and
to form national spiritual assemblies.[22] It took four years to modify the
procedures of the Bahai Temple Unity Executive Committee so that it met
Shoghi Effendi’s criteria for a national governing body; in 1925 he recognized
the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and
Canada.[23] Bahá’ís gradually learned how to form local spiritual assemblies as
[Page 15] well; by April 1928 the continental United States had forty-five such bodies.[24]
The establishment of the Bahá’í organizational system was not accomplished without resistance. Some Americans who had been interested in the Bahá’í Faith drifted away from the newly organized community. Others (such as Ahmad Sohrab, who created an organization of his own independent of the Faith, and Ruth White, who attacked the authenticity of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Will and Testament) opposed Shoghi Effendi and Bahá’í organization so strenuously they had to be expelled from the Faith as Covenant-breakers. But the vast majority of American Bahá’ís accepted Shoghi Effendi’s leadership and the new emphasis on organization it entailed.
Covenant-breaking and the lack of understanding of basic Bahá’í beliefs compelled Shoghi Effendi to write many letters to the American Bahá’ís clarifying basic aspects of the Bahá’í religion. Among the subjects he addressed were the stations of the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; the status of the Bahá’í Faith as an independent religion; the nature of the Bahá’í social and spiritual teachings; and the centrality of the Bahá’í Administrative Order to the Faith’s continuing progress. Many of these were subsequently published in The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh and The Advent of Divine Justice.[25]
One result of the clarification of the nature of local and national Bahá’í
administrative structures and of basic Bahá’í teachings was permanent and
measurable growth of the American Bahá’í community, the membership of
which had fluctuated between about 1,000 and 2,000 from 1898 to 1926.
The 1936 religious census conducted by the United States government counted
2,584 Bahá’ís in the United States, double the number of Bahá’ís ten years
earlier.[26] In 1936 the U.S. Bahá’í community had sixty-four local spiritual
assemblies.[27] Since that year the Bahá’í community has had periods of rapid
expansion followed by plateaus. The Great Depression (1929-1940) and the
period between 1968 and 1974 were times of particularly rapid increase, while
[Page 16] the years following World War II and the 1980s were times of very slow
expansion. However, the number of Bahá’ís in the United States has continued
to increase.[28]
Growing membership, greater understanding of the basic teachings, and stronger organization paved the way for the launching of systematic plans for growth. In 1937 Shoghi Effendi gave the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada a Seven Year Plan, which had three principal goals: the opening of every republic in Latin America to the Bahá’í Faith through the settlement of pioneers; the completion of the exterior of the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois; and the establishment of at least one local spiritual assembly in every state in the United States and in every province in Canada.[29] When the plan began in 1937, eleven states and provinces had no Bahá’ís; thirty-four lacked spiritual assemblies. In spite of World War II, which hampered transportation, prevented the obtaining of construction materials, and made it nearly impossible for Bahá’í pioneers to find housing in their goal areas, all of the goals of the Seven Year Plan were won by 1944. The number of North American Bahá’ís increased to about 4,800. Indeed, some goals were surpassed, with local spiritual assemblies being elected in fifteen Latin American cities; by 1949 this number had increased to thirty-five.[30]
Shoghi Effendi gave the American Bahá’ís a two-year respite before launching a second Seven Year Plan in 1946. The new plan called for the completion of the interior ornamentation of the House of Worship and its landscaping so that it could be dedicated in 1953; the establishment of National Spiritual Assemblies in South America, Central America, and Canada; and the reestablishment of the Bahá’í Faith in war-torn Europe.[31] American pioneers soon brought the Bahá’í Faith to eleven European countries. The number of local spiritual assemblies in the continental United States continued to rise. The first National Spiritual Assembly of Canada was elected in 1948; one each for Central America and South America followed in 1951.[32] In 1950 Shoghi Effendi announced a supplemental Two Year Plan to open parts of Africa to the Faith.[33]
[Page 17]
In 1953 the second Seven Year Plan was successfully concluded. Shoghi
Effendi designated it a Holy Year, as it was the centenary of the beginning
of Bahá’u’lláh’s mission.[34] The year 1953 also marked the beginning of the
Ten Year Crusade, an international plan to take the Bahá’í Faith to the
remaining nations and major territories on the planet. The United States
Bahá’ís were given a major share of the goals. During the first six months of
the plan five of the nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly resigned
to go pioneering; hundreds of America’s active Bahá’ís spent all or part of the
next decade in distant lands. Despite the unexpected death of Shoghi Effendi
in 1957, by the conclusion of the Ten Year Crusade there was a four-fold
increase in the number of localities worldwide where Bahá’ís resided, the
number of languages in which Bahá’í literature was translated had more than
trippled, and the number of National Spiritual Assemblies worldwide increased
from twelve to fifty-six.[35] American Bahá’ís were responsible for perhaps a third
of the goals of the plan.
Growth in America also continued between the years 1953 and 1963. The number of Bahá’ís in the United States had grown to almost 7,000 by 1956. By 1957 the number of Bahá’ís in Alaska had increased enough to allow the establishment of a separate National Spiritual Assembly for that state. By 1963 membership in the forty-eight contiguous states and the Hawaiian Islands exceeded 10,000, and enrollments were increasing by at least 1,200 per year. A third of the new enrollments were youth ages fifteen to twenty.[36] In 1964 a National Spiritual Assembly was established in the Hawaiian Islands.
1964-1994
IN 1963, at the close of the Ten Year Crusade, the Universal House of Justice,
the international governing and legislative body of the Bahá’í Faith, was first
elected, following the guidelines laid down by the Will and Testament of
‘Abdu’l-Bahá. In 1964 the Universal House of Justice announced an international
Nine Year Plan. The United States was asked to form local and national
spiritual assemblies in various Caribbean island groups and to assist twenty-six
national Bahá’í communities all over the world by providing traveling
teachers or helping them acquire properties. In the United States the number
of local spiritual assemblies was to be raised from 333 to 600, with at least
two in every state, and the number of localities where Bahá’ís resided was
to grow from 1,650 to 3,000. Particular efforts to reach Americans of Japanese,
[Page 18] Chinese, and Hispanic backgrounds, as well as African-Americans and Native
Americans, were called for.[37]
All of the domestic goals of the Nine Year Plan were exceeded, perhaps by the largest margin in American Bahá’í history. In 1973, at the conclusion of the Nine Year Plan, the United States had 822 local spiritual assemblies, and Bahá’ís resided in 4,809 localities.[38] Bahá’í teaching efforts in the United States had received an unexpected boost from the turbulence of the 1960s, which caused many individuals to search for solutions and new alternatives to the world’s problems. The atmosphere, fostered by the rapidly growing civil rights movement of the late fifties and early sixties, was perhaps a major cause for the 10 to 15 percent annual membership growth rate experienced by the U.S. Bahá’í community in the early 1960s; by 1969 the number of Bahá’ís in the United States had grown to 13,000. The late sixties and early seventies, however, saw both the greatest social unrest and the most rapid Bahá’í growth. Following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the bloody Tet offensive in Vietnam, and the race riots across the United States— all in the first half of 1968—the youth culture turned to a wider range of alternative ideologies than previously. A comparatively small number of those searching youth became Bahá’ís, but the number had an enormous impact on the Bahá’í community. From 13,000 in 1969, the U.S. Bahá’í community grew to 18,000 in 1970; to 31,000 in 1971; 40,000 in 1972; and 60,000 by 1974.[39] Bahá’í revenues jumped, and the increased demand on services provided by the Bahá’í National Center, the national offices of the National Spiritual Assembly, necessitated an increase in its staff from a handful to over a hundred in a few years. The Bahá’í Publishing Trust, the publishing house of the National Spiritual Assembly, also expanded as the demand for Bahá’í literature increased. Several large Bahá’í youth conferences were held.
However, sudden growth also had its negative effects. The vast majority
of the new Bahá’ís knew little about the teachings of their new religion; hence
many of the newly formed local spiritual assemblies had difficulty functioning.
Withdrawal rates also jumped; perhaps one-third to one-half of the new
believers did not remain Bahá’ís. Since the withdrawals occurred over many
years, subsequent Bahá’í membership growth appeared to be less than it really
was; for example, by 1979 the American Bahá’í membership had grown to
seventy-five thousand, only fifteen thousand more than in 1974, but the
increase reflected a much stronger enrollment rate than the net growth suggested.
To complicate matters, some new Bahá’ís did not remain active but
[Page 19] never notified the National Spiritual Assembly that they no longer considered
themselves Bahá’ís. As a result, the percentage of the American Bahá’í membership
with known addresses decreased. Nevertheless, the American Bahá’í
community had grown significantly in size.
Not all of the expansion of the membership was caused by conversions from the youth culture. The Nine Year Plan was also the time when the American Bahá’í community first used techniques of teaching the Bahá’í Faith to large numbers of people. In the rural south, particularly in South Carolina, the African-American population proved particularly receptive and enrolled in the Faith by the thousands. Consolidation of the new Bahá’ís proved more difficult and occurred at a slower pace. In South Carolina, the Louis G. Gregory Institute was established in 1972 to educate the local Bahá’ís. Hispanic and native American populations also were attracted to the Bahá’í Faith, particularly in the Southwest.
The Five Year Plan, which spanned the years between 1974 and 1979, saw a significant expansion in the number of local spiritual assemblies in the United States—from 822 to 1,489, 89 more than called for in the plan.[40] Diversification of the community also continued. The number of Bahá’í communities on Indian reservations with local spiritual assemblies exceeded twenty-five. After 1975, Southeast Asian refugees became part of the American Bahá’í community. Some had been Bahá’ís in Vietnam and Cambodia, more had converted in Asian refugee camps around the world, and others became Bahá’ís in the United States.[41] After the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1978, Iranian Bahá’í refugees also began to enter the United States; eventually about ten thousand settled.[42]
One goal of the Five Year Plan—expanding the use of radio and television
for Bahá’í broadcasts aimed at the proclamation of the Faith to greater numbers
of listeners, as well as deepening the faith of Bahá’ís, especially in rural
areas—proved of great importance when the persecution of the Iranian Bahá’í
community began in 1978. The American Bahá’ís had developed contacts with
the media and, to some extent, with government officials. That experience
proved useful in creating awareness of the plight of the Bahá’ís in Iran.
Throughout the Seven Year Plan (1979-86) and the Six Year Plan (1986-92),
press coverage of the Iranian Bahá’ís was considerable, articles about the
American Bahá’í community steadily increased, and the consequent awareness
[Page 20] of the existence of the Bahá’í religion in the mind of the public steadily
improved. In 1984 the Universal House of Justice declared that the Bahá’í
Faith was emerging from obscurity, a long-sought goal of the Bahá’ís.[43]
The thirteen year period covered by the Seven and Six Year plans, however, saw relatively slow membership growth in the United States. The number of local spiritual assemblies climbed to about 1,700, then declined to 1,400; total membership grew to a 110,000, a statistic that included approximately 10,000 children not previously counted. Membership growth averaged 2 to 4 percent per year, largely caused by the influx of Persians and Southeast Asians and the conversion of minorities. Growth among the white and black middle class was relatively small. During the 1980s, when American society became socially conservative and individualistic, few Americans were interested in a non-Christian religion with a strong emphasis on obedience to moral laws and community participation. “Entry by troops”—the great increase in Bahá’í membership promised by Shoghi Effendi—remained an elusive goal.
The years between 1979 to 1992, however, did see a significant consolidation of the Bahá’í membership. The youth who enrolled in the late sixties and early seventies completed their education, married, and began families. A significant number of Bahá’í marriages were between European- and African-Americans or between newly arrived Persians and members of either group. A small number of Bahá’ís from among the “baby boomer” generation (1945-1964) became interested in Bahá’í history, Islamic studies, comparative religion, Arabic and Persian literature, and other fields in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, Bahá’í studies, which had virtually ceased to exist between the 1920s and the 1960s, was reestablished. In 1974 the Association for Bahá’í Studies, dedicated to scholarly examination of Bahá’í issues, was established.[44] Contacts with the media and government became sufficiently important and numerous to necessitate the creation of a Bahá’í Office of External Affairs in 1984.
In 1982 Native American converts were assisted by the establishment of
the Native American Bahá’í Institute located on the Navajo Reservation in
Arizona. That same year a Bahá’í radio station (WLGI, 90.9 FM) was established
in South Carolina to consolidate the rural African-American population.
That same year a Bahá’í Refugee Office was established in Wilmette to
[Page 21] help Persian and Southeast Asian Bahá’ís. The 1980s also saw significant
interest in the Bahá’í Faith among Haitians and Chinese residing in the United
States. In the late 1980s the United States received goals from the Universal
House of Justice to expand the Bahá’í Faith to the Soviet Union and eastern
Europe.
Distinctive Contributions to the Bahá’í World
THE BAHÁ’Í community in the United States has, for a number of reasons, exerted more influence on the Bahá’í world than any other community with the exception of that in Iran. The Bahá’í Faith expanded much more quickly in America than in Europe and was much less affected by the social unrest and wars that disrupted much of the twentieth-century world. Moreover, the Bahá’í Faith in the United States was free to grow and express itself without the legal limitations and periodic persecutions that hampered the older and larger Iranian Bahá’í community. In addition, the large, educated, prosperous, and relatively receptive population of the United States provided a milieu in which a relatively large Bahá’í community could establish itself and in which the community could produce leaders and provide financial resources unavailable to the Bahá’í Faith elsewhere.
The American National Spiritual Assembly has served as an organizational model for much of the Bahá’í world; its creation and development, closely monitored by Shoghi Effendi, served as a laboratory for the creation of the Bahá’í Administrative Order. The bylaws of the National Spiritual Assembly became the model for Bahá’í bylaws worldwide, and its organization, committee structure, and policies are emulated by many other assemblies. The Bahá’í Publishing Trust’s editions of the Bahá’í scriptures, many translated by Shoghi Effendi, have served as the base text for translations into many other languages. American Bahá’ís pioneers, coordinated by a number of committees, helped to establish the Faith in Latin America, the Pacific, Australasia, East Asia, parts of Africa, much of Europe, and many republics of the former Soviet Uniton.[45] Consequently, America was instrumental in the formation of eighty National Spiritual Assemblies, more than half of the world’s total.
Of the approximately forty-nine individuals who have been appointed
Hands of the Cause of God, at least fourteen were Americans;[46] Seven of the
[Page 22] sixteen persons who have served on the Universal House of Justice were either
American by birth or had been members of the National Spiritual Assembly
of the Bahá’ís of the United States. Green Acre, the first American Bahá’í
summer school, became a model for similar facilities around the world.
Impact on American Culture and Society
THE BAHÁ’Í community in the United States has grown considerably since its establishment in 1894, but it remains very small in comparison with the country’s total population, about one-twentieth of one percent of its people. Its impact on American society and culture, in turn, has been minor. Individual Bahá’ís have made important contributions to American art and music: Robert Hayden, a prominent African-American poet; Mark Tobey, an abstract painter; John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, a jazz musician; Jimmy Seals and “Dash” Crofts, “England Dan” Seals, and John Ford Coley, all popular musicians; Charles Wolcott, MGM’s musical director in the 1950s; film star Carol Lombard, and others.
More important has been the Bahá’í contribution to the peace movement. In the early twentieth-century, prominent leaders of the peace movement such as Benjamin Trueblood knew Bahá’ís, and a few early Bahá’ís were active in the peace movement.[47] The reemergence of a peace movement in the 1970s and 1980s received active Bahá’í support, particularly after 1985 when the Universal House of Justice—in anticipation of the United Nations 1986 International Year of Peace—issued a statement entitled The Promise of World Peace.[48] The Peace Statement so impressed officials at the University of Maryland that a Bahá’í Chair for World Peace was established in 1990, the first Bahá’í faculty position at an American university.
The greatest impact of the American Bahá’í community has been in the
field of race relations. Among the recognized public advocates of civil rights
are three Bahá’ís: Alain Locke, Robert Abbott, and Nina Gomer DuBois, the
wife of W. E. B. DuBois. Louis G. Gregory, an early African-American Bahá’í
who was posthumously named a Hand of the Cause of God, was in touch
with nearly every prominent African-American between the years 1910 and
1940 and influenced the thinking of some of them.[49] The support that Bahá’ís
lent to African-American organizations illustrates the Bahá’í commitment to
[Page 23] racial unity. In 1991 a public statement written by the National Spiritual
Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, The Vision of Race Unity: America’s
Most Challenging Issue, focused on America’s race problems and relevant Bahá’í
principles.[50]
Conclusion
IT IS significant to note that the two areas where the Bahá’í Faith has had the greatest impact on America have been the peace movement and the effort to eliminate racial and ethnic prejudice. These are two of the areas—“the oneness of humanity” and “the Most Great Peace”—that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá emphasized were the necessary and distinct contributions America had to make to the world.
The membership of the American Bahá’í community continues to grow, although at a rate strongly influenced by social trends. The ability of the Bahá’ís to articulate the teachings of their religion in the language of American public discourse has been improving, and as a result the relevance of the Bahá’í principles to the needs of American society has become more apparent. The American Bahá’í community is highly diverse—far more diverse than American society as a whole—and may prove a valuable laboratory for the creation of values essential to an increasingly pluralistic society. As the Bahá’í community’s size and diversity increase and its roots sink deeper into American culture and society, its role in helping to reestablish and promote the fundamental spiritual principles upon which this nation was founded will assure an ever greater importance in shaping that destiny to which the Bahá’í writings so eloquently refer.
- ↑ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablets of the Divine Plan consider “America” to be the forty-eight contiguous states of the United States and Canada; they do not include Alaska or the Hawaiian Islands. By 1901 there were Bahá’ís in the forty-eight contiguous continental states, the Hawaiian Islands, and Canada, and they interacted more or less as a single unit. A Bahá’í community gradually formed in Alaska in the teens and twenties. In 1948 Canada became a separate Bahá’í community; Alaska elected its own national Bahá’í governing body in 1957; the Hawaiian Islands, in 1964. This essay includes Canada, Alaska, and the Hawaiian Islands as part of “America” up until the time they elected their own national governing bodies.
- ↑ Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, rev. ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974) 329.
- ↑ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace: Talks Delivered by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá during His Visit to the United States and Canada in 1912, comp. Howard MacNutt, 2d ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982) 104.
- ↑ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, in Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’í Prayers: A Selection of Prayers Revealed by Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, new ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1991) 25.
- ↑ Moojan Momen, ed., The Bábí and Bahá’í Religions, 1844-1944: Some Contemporary Western Accounts (Oxford: George Ronald, 1981) 265.
- ↑ Bahá’u’lláh, The Kitáb-i-Aqdas: The Most Holy Book (Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1993) ¶88.
- ↑ See Robert H. Stockman, The Bahá’í Faith in America: Origins 1892-1900 (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985), and Richard Hollinger, “Ibrahim George Kheiralla and the Bahá’í Faith in America,” in Juan R. Cole and Moojan Momen, eds., Studies in Bábí and Bahá’í History, Volume Two: From Iran East and West (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1984) 95-134.
- ↑ For a summary of the demography of the early American Bahá’ís, see Robert H. Stockman, “The Bahá’í Faith and American Protestantism,” diss., Harvard U, 1990, 18-50.
- ↑ For more information on Kheiralla’s pilgrimage and his subsequent disaffection, see Stockman, The Bahá’í Faith in America: Origins 136-84. For the accomplishments of the Persian teachers in the United States, see Robert H. Stockman, The Bahá’í Faith in America: Early Expansion 1900-12, forthcoming.
- ↑ For more details, see Stockman, The Bahá’í Faith in America: Early Expansion.
- ↑ For a summary of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s visit to North America, see Allan L. Ward, 239 Days: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Journey in America (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1979).
- ↑ Stockman, The Bahá’í Faith in America: Early Expansion, Chapters 24-25. One of the three persons expelled was later readmitted into the Bahá’í community.
- ↑ See Peter Smith, “The American Bahá’í Community, 1894-1917: A Preliminary Survey,” in Moojan Momen, ed., Studies in Bábí and Bahá’í History, Volume One (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1982) 85-223.
- ↑ Peter Smith, “Reality Magazine: Editorship and Ownership of a Bahá’í Periodical,” in Cole and Momen, eds., Studies 2: 135-56.
- ↑ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan: Revealed by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to the North American Bahá’ís, pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1993).
- ↑ The six local governing bodies were located in Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; Kenosha, Wisconsin; New York; and Washington, D.C. Boards had existed briefly in Racine, Wisconsin; Hudson County, New Jersey; Los Angeles and Oakland, California; and Spokane, Washington.
- ↑ The Bahá’í Centenary, 1844-1944: A Record of America’s Response to Bahá’u’lláh’s Call to the Realization of the Oneness of Mankind, comp. The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1944) 144.
- ↑ Bruce W. Whitmore, The Dawning Place: The Building of a Temple, the Forging of the North American Bahá’í Community (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1984) 87-100.
- ↑ The author has assembled a database containing vital statistics of approximately four thousand North Americans who became Bahá’ís between 1894 and 1936. Ethnic and religious background information given in this article comes from that database.
- ↑ See Shoghi Effendi and Lady Blomfield, “The Passing of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá,” in World Order 6.1 (Fall 1971), 6-18.
- ↑ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1944). In His will ‘Abdu’l-Bahá established the institution of the Guardianship (víláyat). After ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith was the sole authorized interpreter of the Bahá’í scriptures and a member of the Universal House of Justice. Each Guardian was to choose a successor according to the detailed criteria specified by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
- ↑ Shoghi Effendi, Bahá’í Administration: Selected Messages 1922-1932, 7th ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974) 20-24. For a description of the process of creating the Administrative Order, see Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Some Aspects of the Development of the Bahá’í Administrative Order in America, 1922-1936,” in Momen, ed., Studies 1: 255-300.
- ↑ Eunice Braun, From Strength to Strength: The First Half Century of the Formative Age of the Bahá’í Era (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1978) 7.
- ↑ The Bahá’í World (Formerly Bahá’í Year Book): A Biennial International Record, Volume II, 1926-1928, comp. National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (New York: Bahá’í Publishing Committee, 1928) 183-84. While the number of local Bahá’í consultative bodies in North America at the time of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s passing is not known, it was probably between four and eight.
- ↑ Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh: Selected Letters, pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1991); Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990).
- ↑ United States Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1936. Volume II, Part I: Denominations, A to J. Statistics, History, Doctrine, Organization, and Work (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1941) 76-82.
- ↑ The Bahá’í World: A Biennial International Record, Volume VII: 1936-1938, comp. National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1939) 565-66. Two Canadian spiritual assemblies are not included in these statistics, but two assemblies in the Hawaiian Islands are.
- ↑ The author has assembled a master chart of the number of Bahá’ís in the United States from 1894 to the present and the number of enrollments per year, using data from archival sources, Bahá’í News, and information supplied by Roger Dahl, archivist at the National Bahá’í Archives, and Paul Lample, a former member of the National Teaching Committee Office.
- ↑ Eunice Braun, From Strength to Strength 25.
- ↑ Eunice Braun, From Strength to Strength 29; The Bahá’í World: A Biennial International Record, Volume XI, 1946-1950, comp. National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1952) 566, 67.
- ↑ Braun, From Strength to Strength 34-35.
- ↑ Braun, From Strength to Strength 35, 36.
- ↑ Braun, From Strength to Strength 39.
- ↑ Braun, From Strength to Strength 43-44.
- ↑ The Bahá’í World: An International Record, Volume XIII, 1954-1963 (Haifa: Universal House of Justice, 1970) 468-69.
- ↑ These numbers come from the author’s table of statistics.
- ↑ “The Launching of the Nine Year Plan,” in The Bahá’í World: An International Record, Vol. XIV 1963-68 (Haifa: Universal House of Justice, 1974) 101-40.
- ↑ “NSA Highlights U.S. Tasks During Next Nine Years,” Bahá’í News, no. 401 (Aug. 1964): 1-2.
- ↑ These numbers come from the author’s table of membership statistics.
- ↑ The Bahá’í World: An International Record, Volume XVII, 1976-1979 (Haifa: Bahá’í World Centre, 1981) 165.
- ↑ For a history of the Southeast Asian Bahá’í refugees, see Eunice Braun, From Vision to Victory: Thirty Years of the Universal House of Justice (Oxford: George Ronald, 1993) 102-03.
- ↑ For the most complete and up-to-date summary of the situation of the Bahá’ís in Iran, see Bahá’í International Community, The Bahá’í Question: Iran’s Secret Blueprint for the Destruction of a Religious Community (New York: Bahá’í International Community, 1993).
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, A Wider Horizon: Selected Messages of the Universal House of Justice 1983-1992, (Riviera Beach, Fla.: Palabra Publications, 1992) 17-18. A useful compilation of passages from messages of the House of Justice about emergence from obscurity may be found on pages 119-27.
- ↑ The Association for Bahá’í Studies was originally named the Canadian Association for Studies on the Bahá’í Faith (CASBF); it changed its name to Association for Bahá’í Studies in 1981 when its mandate was expanded from Canada to include all of North America. For a summary of the history of the Association for Bahá’í Studies, see Braun, From Vision to Victory 23-25.
- ↑ A pioneer is a Bahá’í who moves to a new locality for the purpose of establishing a Bahá’í community. Pioneers usually must find their own houses and employment in their new location; generally they are not paid by the Bahá’í Faith, and they do not occupy a special clerical function in the Bahá’í community.
- ↑ “Hand of the Cause of God” is a designation that was given to an individual by Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, or Shoghi Effendi. It denotes the highest rank an individual can attain in the Bahá’í community and carries certain responsibilities for advising and nurturing the Bahá’ís, both individually and collectively.
- ↑ Richard Hollinger, “Bahá’ís and American Peace Movements,” ed. Anthony A. Lee, Circle of Peace: Reflections on the Bahá’í Teachings (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1985) 3-19.
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace: To the Peoples of the World (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985).
- ↑ For a biography of Louis Gregory, see Gayle Morrison, To Move the World: Louis G. Gregory and the Advancement of Racial Unity in America (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1982). The Bahá’í involvement of Nina Gomer DuBois is mentioned on page 27; Alain Locke’s and Robert Abbott’s, on page 28.
- ↑ The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1991). The National Spiritual Assembly has also produced a compilation of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the Báb, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi, and the Universal House of Justice on race unity entitled The Power of Unity: Beyond Prejudice and Racism, comp. Bonnie J. Taylor et. al. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1986).
I find the United States of America an exceedingly progressive nation,
the government just, the people in a state of readiness
and the principle of equality establisbed to an extraordinary degree.
Therefore, it is my bope that, inasmuch as the standard of international
peace must be upraised, it may be upraised upon this continent,
for this nation is more deserving and has greater capacity for such
an initial step than any other. If other nations should attempt
to do this, the motive would be misunderstood.
For instance, if Great Britain should declare for international peace,
it would be said that it has been done to ensure the safety
of her colonies. If France should hoist the standard,
other nations would declare some hidden diplomatic policy underlies
the action; Russia would be suspected of national designs if the first step
were taken by that people, and so on with all the European
and eastern governments. But the United States of America could not be
accused of any such selfish interest. Your government has,
strictly speaking, no colonies to protect. You are not endeavoring
to extend your domain, nor have you need of territorial expansion.
Therefore, if America takes the first step toward the establishing
of world peace, it is certain to be ascribed to unselfishness and altruism.
The world will say, “There is no other motive than altruism and service
to humanity in this action by the United States.”
Therefore, it is my hope that you may stand forth as the first herald
of peace and hoist this banner, for this banner will be hoisted.
Raise it aloft, for you are the most qualified and deserving of nations.
—‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ
Speaking to America in the 1990s
BY TARAZ SAMANDARI
Copyright © 1994 by Taraz Samandari
IT WAS a warm autumn evening when Sarah
B. was brought to the emergency room
at University Hospital. I was a member of
the psychiatric team on call that night. Sarah
was a sixteen-year-old girl who, we were told,
had attempted suicide. She was the unmarried
mother of a three-month-old child. One
year earlier her first pregnancy had resulted
in a spontaneous abortion. In both of these
cases the boyfriends had abandoned her. Her
current boyfriend, a gang member, was apparently
not interested in the welfare of her
or her daughter. Sarah had quit high school
and continued to live with her mother and
two sisters. Her mother was single, and, we
thought, a responsible employed woman.
Then, in searching for any possible records
on Sarah, we were surprised to find an old
file on her mother indicating that she had
been treated at our emergency room a few
months earlier for an acute cocaine seizure.
Eventually, we were able to assess that Sarah’s
“suicide attempt” was more of a suicide gesture.
She was trying to gain the sympathy of
her current boyfriend, who had flagrantly
jilted her the night before. At this point
Sarah was not suicidal or homicidal and was
in control of her thoughts and actions—in
fact, she seemed rather embarrassed. Her
mother was with her and appeared supportive.
Because hospitalization for her mental
health was not warranted, we released her.
But we were deeply concerned.
What were the prospects of Sarah’s receiving adequate family and social support? What were her chances of returning to and graduating from high school or of getting a stable job? Would she take steps to avoid bearing future children who would complicate her already difficult life? Would she avoid poor choices in boyfriends? Would she avoid drugs and alcohol? Would she attempt suicide again—this time as more than a gesture?
Sarah B.’s problems are not isolated. Such cases are endemic in large segments of our society. The nation is painfully aware of terrible and growing social decay. But does anyone know what to do? Sarah’s caretakers were a group of intelligent, educated, and caring individuals; yet there was a mood of despair among us that evening. There is good reason for despair.
As one assesses the condition of the United
States today, one cannot fail to sense a nation
in decline. Americans have enormous energy
and enthusiasm as a people, and they continue
to enjoy the wealthiest economy in the
world. Yet there are deep chasms in our
humanity. The family structure is collapsing,
for the bonds that once held families together
no longer do—within many families chaos
reigns, while in others a commitment to the
labor of life is absent. Divorce continues to
increase, and single parents—many of them
unwilling parents—are a rapidly growing segment
of society. The deadly AIDS virus and
other increasingly refractory sexually transmitted
diseases continue to spread. The
education and edification of children—the
future of every society—is largely neglected.
American youth are preoccupied with meaningless
diversions, slaves to a popular culture
[Page 28] wherein they seek to be free. A resurgence of
racism shows that this evil is still prevalent
in American society and may worsen considerably
if economic conditions deteriorate.
Scandals on Wall Street, in the commodity
exchange, and in the savings and banking
system increase the price of goods, adding to
the tax burden of the ordinary citizen and
threatening to undermine the trust of honest
investors.[1] With the highest incarceration rate
in the Western world, with one million people
in jail, American prisons are overcrowded
and expensive to maintain.[2] In large cities
many police officers have become ambivalent
about the effectiveness of their increasingly
dangerous work. The pernicious influence of
alcohol destroys homes, kills the innocent,
and leaves its mark on one out of every six
families. A variety of illegal drugs numbs the
minds and despoils the aspirations of countless
Americans and sustains a vicious and
violent underworld. Mistrust in humanity
has led to an increase in the electronic surveillance
of individuals’ activities. Corruption
in politics has steadily eroded the public
trust; large, disillusioned sectors of our society
are apathetic toward the need for reform,
while others are more likely to be aroused
to oppose actions of government rather than
offer new solutions.
All the ailments afflicting the Unites States arise from human actions—actions that Americans may or may not choose to commit. Choice arises from the strength of conviction of what is appropriate and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. Thus the social crisis stems from a crisis in values. Various attempts at remedying these fundamental ailments, such as the prohibition of alcohol, the illegalization of narcotics, and the increases made in police forces, have hitherto remained ineffective; they have been palliative in nature and have not addressed the true requirements of the age.[3] Udo Schaefer, a contemporary German thinker, reflects on a process that has affected all modern Western democracies:
- The extent to which public spirit and morality are vanishing is shown by the state’s need to govern according to an ever-growing body of regulations. It is compelled to intervene more and more in the affairs of its peoples, creating more rules, ordinances and prohibitions, whereas in the past the sense of moral good and public spirit was ingrained in society so that the citizen knew without any external directive how he should behave. The flood of laws which now becomes necessary because of the lack of consensus is one of the reasons why the administrative machine has become so inflated, why democracy is suffocating under the pressure of bureaucracy and people are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the state.[4]
America is in crisis. A new vision for a better society, a source of transformation that will inspire and sustain the building of that society, is needed. But what are the roots of America’s ailments? Where should Americans turn? What path should they take?
[Page 29]
Why Values Have Declined
SOME MAY ARGUE that corruption and vice have always been a part of society and that they are no more rampant now than they ever have been. Others disagree. Consider an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ interview with Barbara Tuchman, an expert in American history and a specialist in the American Revolution:
- MOYERS: . . . what’s happened to the America of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson? . . .
- TUCHMAN: What’s happened is the disappearance of a positive goal. . . .
- But something more . . . is the loss of a moral sense, of knowing the difference between right and wrong, and of being governed by it.
- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- . . . somehow people don’t take wrongdoing seriously. Perhaps there’s just too much of it. We’re not surprised any more. . . .
- MOYERS: But how different is that from any period of history? . . . couldn’t it be that what you characterize as the evils of the modern age are just endemic in every age?
- TUCHMAN: I think they are. But when they become prevailing, that makes the difference. And where is the outrage? It’s absent because the exercise of this kind of crime is prevailing.[5]
Tom Wolfe, a prominent journalist and the author of The Bonfire of the Vanities, speaks of the loss of a moral sense as “freedom from the internal monitor, freedom from religion.”[6]
Not everyone must be unethical all of the time for an atmosphere of despair to develop. According to Schaefer, “Man experiences himself and behaves to a large extent according to the image he has of himself and of the society he lives in”: these images are largely determined by books, films, and the news.[7] Sometimes in fascinating and flamboyant leaps, but more often in myriad errant steps, the sense of solid values that should guide American society has steadily eroded.
The reasons for the decline in ethical values may be generalized into two categories, both of which Tuchman and Wolfe touch upon. First, American society is afflicted by an excessive materialism that dominates daily endeavors. The sense of what is right and wrong has been traded for immediate personal gain. This gain is aimed at achieving the wealth to which Americans believe they are entitled—“a piece of the American pie.” Second, the old values of an old America have, indeed, become increasingly irrelevant. Much to their credit, Americans have discarded the institution of slavery and, to a fair extent, the oppression of women. However, although the founding fathers separated religion from the state with good reason, they did not anticipate that America would also depart from the basic Christian ethic. With no new principles or values to replace the old, Americans are confused, adrift in an ethical vacuum.
Reasons for Optimism
IT IS EASY to feel a sense of hopelessness about the decline in American values and its corresponding effect on society. Is this, one may ask, a Rome destined to collapse? The condition in America is, indeed, overwhelming, but one may maintain that it is not without hope if one steps back to consider the processes that have been at work.
In the forty thousand years or so since the
species homo sapiens has been in existence, it
[Page 30] has changed not biologically but culturally.
Compared with biological evolution, social
evolution has been occurring at a far more
rapid pace.[8] In the context of discussing
whether humans are inherently warlike and
aggressive, Richard Leakey, an eminent anthropologist,
dismisses the notion of humans
as the “killer ape” and makes the following
points:
- Because of our seemingly limitless inventiveness and our vast capacity for learning, there is an endless potential for difference among human cultures, as indeed may be witnessed throughout the world. An essential element of culture, however, consists of those central values that make up an ideology. It is social and political ideologies, and the tolerance or lack of it between them, that bring human nations to bloody conflict. . . .
- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- One supreme biological irony underlies the entire issue of organized war in modern societies—the cooperative nature of human beings. . .. there must have been extreme selective pressures in favor of our ability to cooperate as a group. . . .[9]
In the context of humanity’s cooperative nature, it is clear how humans have extended the spheres of cooperation from the family, to the tribe, to the city-state, and to the nation. These developments did not happen easily or quickly, neither did they necessarily take place through a conscious process—the exigencies of a new era forced the adoption of a new perspective. In more recent history the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women can be seen as important milestones—indicators that humanity can break with ancient institutions and assert new principles. Such radical changes are not easy and require heroic effort, but the fact that such changes have been achieved in the past indicates that humanity has the capacity to adapt. The Universal House of Justice, the supreme governing and legislating body of the Bahá’í Faith, has written that “in a world subject to the immutable law of change and decay” human culture continues to evolve.[10] If humanity does not adapt to the new circumstances, it will prolong its agony.
Currently, a process of awakening has begun. There are still those who are lured by vain and elusive solutions aimed at soothing the superficial problems rather than addressing the real needs, and others who go for the quick fix, following the artful politician or glitzy preacher. But sincere individuals, while not claiming to have all the answers, are attempting to make contributions to aid in understanding humanity’s current predicament.
What We Cannot Do
AMERICANS cannot return to the comfort of
an over-idealized, familiar past. The social
landscape has changed so greatly that the
values of old no longer apply. America has
been transformed into a multicultural society.[11]
[Page 31] Cultures that were suppressed in the
past, such as those of the Native American,
Hispanic, Japanese, Chinese, and African
American populations, are beginning to
emerge from the silence of domination.
Women are playing an increasingly important
role in society. Americans today have
espoused a large variety of religious beliefs,
and some have no belief. The isolationist
principle that once guided America’s foreign
policy is no longer applicable because America’s
destiny is now inextricably interwoven with
that of the rest of the world. In short, although
at one time Anglo-Saxon, Protestant,
eighteenth-century values served successfully
to guide America, they cannot sustain American
society any longer. What some cherish
about that era is the sense of security that
came with knowing what to expect from
society, what each individual’s role was within
that society, what was appropriate and what
was not. Is it possible to gain a new set of
values appropriate for this new era?
While a reactionary approach is impossible, a new socialism is no solution either. There are examples all over the world of the failures of a variety of forms of the socialist ideal. Although the removal of industrial enslavement is a remarkable achievement, the long-term problems of a socialist principle include the decline of the work ethic, a pervasive central government, and the disappearance of the sense of community and mutual assistance as dependence on the State grows. The greatest flaw in socialist ideology is that it is materialistic: if wealth is more fairly distributed, our problems will go away. Addressing the needs of the poor is only a part of the solution.
Some hail increasing democratization as a means of engaging Americans and transforming society. While universal suffrage has been a historic achievement of America, a more effective means of transformation lies in creating an educated, intelligent, and socially aware citizenry. Only when a nation is guided by lofty values will it be able to aspire to lofty goals. Robert Bellah, a noted sociologist, warns:
- Democratic politics is dangerous precisely because it leaves the decision to the people. . . . If people don’t have either common sense or public virtue, then they can easily be seduced into very bad things. After all, in a German democracy in 1932, the Nazis won the biggest vote. . . . People have to be educated to be good, and that’s a big task.[12]
Historically, political revolution has attempted to transform society by taking power away from the powerful and putting it into new hands. Although the freedoms gained in the American Revolution were, without a doubt, important, they did not create the “new man” anticipated by the philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment. These thinkers believed that if men were given all the freedoms denied by tyranny, a new and noble man would arise. Tuchman, when asked “if Crèvecoeur came again to ask his famous question, ‘What is this new man—this American?’—what would he find?” replied:
- Crèvecoeur would not find the free and liberated man that he expected, although such men did exist in certain spots. He thought, as many Frenchmen did, that the American Revolution was a great adventure that would create a new man. But revolutions have not succeeded in doing that. The French believed they would create a new man from liberty, equality, and [Page 32]
fraternity. They didn’t. And the Chinese thought their Communist revolution would create a new man who would serve the people rather than himself.[13]
Political machinations followed by benevolent truths being dictated to the masses can never effect positive social change. The founding fathers had no intention of having America ruled by the mob—a pure democracy.[14] Although each land-owning white male was accorded the right to vote, it was the sagacious members of Congress who would truly guide the nation. Today, however, enabled by technology, it has become possible for a great many more people to express their will. An unfortunate side effect of this is that politicians have begun taking polls and voting according to popular opinion to ensure their future election. If America’s true destiny is to be assured, public opinion must be expressed by a sufficiently educated and socially conscious citizenry.
Looking to technology for solutions to America’s problems is a common mistake. Certainly there are many situations that can best be addressed by technological innovation; however, as Bellah states:
- Americans have come to believe that somehow modern technology will solve all our problems without preventing the individual from doing whatever he or she wants to do. . . . technological advance is real and has very positive implications, but without any guidance or any set of priorities, technological advance can create all kinds of severe problems. . . .[15]
Or, in the words of Schaefer:
- Science, which enables us to land on the moon, proves to be remarkably ineffective in the realm of man’s social activity. The belief that science can cure all evils is, according to the Swiss sociologist Theodor Leuenberger, a ‘superstition.’ Science is almost powerless against the irrational forces that are increasingly menacing mankind.[16]
What We Can Do
SOCIETY is still in denial. Those who point to problems are ignored and unpopular. Many are ambivalent about what values should become part of America’s shared culture or even whether Americans should adopt any values as a community. This attitude is divisive. Americans possess several laudable characteristics. They include a high intelligence, a youthfulness, and an unbounded sense of initiative and enterprise that must surely be utilized to begin the process of transformation.[17]
People of good will who desire a better America must examine their own lives. “What are my priorities in life?” “Am I falling into the trap of merely becoming a consumer, merely increasing my wealth, simply seeking greater diversions?” Erich Fromm, the American psychoanalyst, writes of two forms of existence battling within the soul of humankind:
- the mode of having, which is concentrated on material possessions, on greed, power [Page 33]
and aggression, causing avarice, envy and violence; and the mode of being which is based upon love, the readiness to share, and creative activity.[18]
Solutions must be found to address the issues facing America. While simplistic solutions will undoubtedly be ineffective, neither should a lifetime be wasted searching for a satisfactory approach. The need is too great, and the time is too short. As Bahá’u’lláh, the Founder of the Bahá’í Faith, wrote, “Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age ye live in, and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements.”[19]
It is important for individuals to develop a sense of service to society so that a feeling of community emerges rather than a sense of being linked together merely by a common system of taxation. This sense of community does not arise simply by singing patriotic songs or by enjoying a baseball game together; it comes about when people genuinely care about each other and are willing to serve one another. In pursuit of this service, it is vital that efforts be made by real action to cross the boundaries of class, ethnicity, race, and religion, for America is a diverse society seeking greater bonds of unity.
Americans have a strong sense of individualism that Bellah has commented upon:
- In many ways, individualism is a positive feature of the American character and culture. But it also has destructive potential.
- In the past, its dark side was constrained by society’s institutions, like the small town where people knew and helped each other. But because of the enormous social changes that have taken place in the last 100 years, there are now fewer restraints on individualism. In a sense, it has been allowed to run rampant.[20]
However, individualism has also led to the demand for rights without the concomitant aspect of fulfilling responsibilities.
Perhaps as a consequence of individualism, confrontation is often the chosen means of arriving at a decision in a group. Particularly in the political arena, the approach is to stir rancorous debate and emphasize the ineptitude, shallowness, and corruption of the opposition. This sort of dialogue only continues to foster the suspicions of an already disillusioned electorate. This ill communication and group decision-making affects professional and family settings as well. Consultation, rather than confrontation, should be the preferred means of reaching a decision. Consultation can be defined as making group decisions in an atmosphere of openness, mutual love, and respect in which the thoughts of all involved are solicited. Rather than clinging to one’s own contribution, each person offers up ideas to the group for consideration; the process by which a decision is arrived at is done with the betterment of the whole in mind rather than quarreling over each individual interest; unity should be striven for in the decision—with an attempt for consensus and if this be unsuccessful a decision by the majority may be obtained. “‘Consultation’,” Bahá’u’lláh states, “‘bestows greater awareness and transmutes conjecture into certitude.’”[21]
Educating the public about the concerns
and affairs of American society is of great
importance, for, as the Universal House of
Justice makes clear, “ignorance is indisputably
[Page 34] the principal reason for the decline and
fall of peoples.”[22] Problems must be defined,
solutions sought, and the ideas of various
thinkers and workers—not just those who
have a materialistic outlook but also those
who have a spiritual perspective—offered.
The most effective and powerful form of
education is the education of children. When
taught at a young age, children can adopt
values that will enable them to contribute to
the solution rather than to the problem. Family
time is of utmost importance. This time, if
filled with meaningful conversation about
the purpose of life, matters of trust, honesty,
justice, and mercy, can provide a system of
values for children. By being truthful, honest,
just, and forgiving, parents transmit ethics
and values to children.
It must be recognized that the process of transformation is, by its nature, a slow one. In the past, change often came about through the force and influence of a powerful clan, party, or leader; today the honest and sincere efforts of many individuals are required to effect such a transformation. Although there may be great turmoil before real change comes about, individuals should labor steadily for the betterment of society. While the destructive tendencies may be swift and alarming, a constructive process is also at work. The greater the degree to which people of good will contribute to being part of the solution, the shorter will be the duration of the birth pangs of change.
New Values for a New Era
WHAT NEW values should guide America in the social sphere? As humanity and human society have evolved, several ideals have emerged as the requisites of a new society. Hence most people are somewhat aware of such principles, but they are not yet firmly embedded within the American conscience. These ideals must not remain vaguely held but must become firm convictions.
An Unfettered Investigation of Truth. Each individual must examine his or her purpose, habits, and practices as well as the needs of the nation. This examination must be free from the constraints of blind tradition and from mere imitation of parents, preachers, peers, and popular culture. This principle— the independent investigation of the truth— while essential does not signify the automatic rejection of everything from the past. Modern Western culture has been overenthusiastic in casting off the perceived restrictive values of the past. Certainly, some of the old values hold no merit today, but the core values essential to the workings of society have also been eliminated without supplanting them with new ones. Bellah states that “Criticism for the sake of criticism doesn’t create a good society. It has to be balanced with positive moral concern.”[23] Schaefer writes of how cultural disintegration has come about in part from “an attitude which does not allow anything to have validity unless it can be established by empirical reason”:
- This form of thinking, which has proved its worth in the field of science and technology and which ensures our material requirements, becomes problematic when applied to cultural values and norms. . . .
- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- . . . a form of education which describes itself as ‘anti-authoritarian’ teaches profound skepticism towards traditional values, and permanent mistrust of society . . . However, the result of all this is insecurity, lack of orientation, destruction of values, arrogance on the part of those so educated.[24]
Therefore, an unfettered investigation of truth
[Page 35] is truly a balance between critically examining
the undesirable aspects of past and current
practices while retaining the essential
aspects of that which causes civilization to
flourish.
The Essential Harmony of Science and Religion. A great deal of harm has come to humanity in the name of religion. That the institutions of religion were corrupted into serving the greed of various powers is undisputed. Arnold Toynbee, the renowned English historian, commented:
- The rising gale of scientific discovery has blown away the chaff of traditional religion, and in doing this it has done mankind a service; but it has blown so hard that it has blown away the grain with the husk; and this has been a disservice, since neither science nor the [modern] ideologies have grain of their own to offer as a substitute.[25]
The barrier created between faith and reason, between religion and science, is artificial. They are both powerful and essential aspects of human beings, who are creatures of belief. Even the claim that humans are nothing more than biological machines with no ultimate purpose in life is a statement of belief—science cannot test such a hypothesis.[26] Schaefer refers to Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, who writes:
- religion is something that is as universal among men as language; it is ‘a constitutive part of man’s consciousness’, the ‘primordial need’ both of the individual and of society.
Quoting Max Scheler, Bell contests the belief that
- there is such thing as a human being ‘without belief’: ‘Every finite spirit believes either in God or in idols’—an attitude which is also shared by the historian Arnold Toynbee: ‘Since man cannot live without a religion of some kind or other, the recession of Christianity in the West has been followed there by the rise of substitute religions in the shape of the post-Christian ideologies—Nationalism, Individualism, and Communism.’[27]
Religion without science leads to ignorance and superstition, while science without a guiding moral force leads to anarchy.
The Oneness of Humanity. The principle of the oneness of humanity is the hallmark of the age in which we live; the unity of humankind is the world’s destiny. Although at first it may seem an issue more relevant to foreign affairs than to American society, it is clear that racism and nationalism continue to afflict this nation. According to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, the national governing body of the Bahá’ís of America:
- Racism is the most challenging issue confronting America. A nation whose ancestry includes every people on earth, whose motto is E pluribus unum, whose ideals of freedom under law have inspired millions throughout the world, cannot continue to harbor prejudice against any racial or ethnic group without betraying itself. Racism is an affront to human dignity, a cause of [Page 36]
hatred and division, a disease that devastates society.[28]
Racism and nationalism not only degrade those to whom they are directed but also impose a corrupting influence upon those who perpetrate them. This corruption then influences every aspect of the lives of all concerned. The principle of the oneness of humankind must be adopted as a basic truth rather than something done purely to fill quotas, improve the economy, or silence the unwanted noises made by an otherwise invisible underclass.[29] “Unbridled nationalism, as distinguished from a sane and legitimate patriotism,” the Universal House of Justice writes, “must give way to a wider loyalty, to the love of humanity as a whole.”[30] The flame of nationalism—the vaunting of one nation over another—not only glorifies the warring spirit that leads to destructive tendencies but also consumes a large portion of America’s intellectual and economic wealth in the preparation for war.[31]
Equal Rights and Privileges for Women and Men. While much progress has been made in America regarding equal rights for women and men, much remains undone. The issue is not what has been written on paper and in laws, but rather the persistent attitudes that prevent women from being paid equally for equivalent work, deny them mobility into the higher echelons of management and politics, and view them as sexual objects rather than as human beings of equal intelligence and capacity. The Universal House of Justice maintains that “The denial of such equality . . . promotes in men harmful attitudes and habits that are carried from the family to the workplace, to political life, and ultimately to international relations.”[32] As women begin to play a more significant role in society, the qualities of the male gender will be complemented and balanced so that more effective and complete decisions can be made.
A Spiritual Solution to the Economic Problem.
Certainly the capitalist system of economy
is the only one that has ever really succeeded;
the more one exerts oneself to improve one’s
economic condition, the greater should be
the reward. But the excesses and rampant
greed exhibited in recent decades damage the
future of America and have a profoundly
retarding effect upon the development of other
nations as well. Bellah points out that “A
deep part of our individualism is a strong
belief in the open, competitive system that
the market economy generates. But the notion
that pure selfishness results in the common
good just isn’t so.”[33] The trust an investor
places in financial institutions and corporations,
[Page 37] the consumer’s confidence in a financially
secure future, the individual’s good
faith in those with whom he deals, and
society’s belief in the integrity and stability
of its governmental agencies are the essentials
of a thriving economy no matter how
hard the material evidence for abundant resources
and the potential for economic prosperity.
The cost borne by individuals, taxpayers,
and corporations to thwart burglary,
shoplifting, and vandalism; to pay for the
unwise decisions of savings and loans companies;
and to pay off dishonest insurance
subscribers exacts a toll that cannot be
indefinitely sustained. Bahá’u’lláh writes that
“Trustworthiness is the greatest portal leading
unto the tranquillity and security of the
people. . . . All the domains of power, of
grandeur and of wealth are illumined by its
light.”[34] It is the integrity of the individual—
the honesty of the “inner man”—that sustains
economies.[35] The extent of this integrity
—and hence the extent of faith in the
economy—depends upon the degree to which
the individual has developed spiritually.
Spirituality: The Source of
Social Transformation
IF HUMAN BEINGS were no more than intelligent animals, one would think that having all physical requirements and desires met would be sufficient to create a perfectly contented population. It is ironic that in the modern welfare state the second leading cause of death among youth is suicide.[36] Is this fact an indicator of the deeper issue that lies at the heart of all social ills—the purposelessness of our lives? Addressing the question of the purpose of human life is essential. Are we to expend our energies on the pursuit of wealth, power, and pleasures? Is there no redeeming and transcending goal in our fleeting, mortal existence?
In every aspect of social and personal life, it is important to recognize that there is a need for an internal change within every individual. No number of laws written or enforced can prevent the drug dealer from selling drugs or the insider trader from stealing information. The exasperation of our legislatures and police forces is adequate demonstration of the futility of this approach. Immoral acts can be prevented only if the “internal monitor” is alert and awakened. In addressing this issue, Bellah argues:
- social scientists have managed to call into question the very beliefs on which our public life rests. We’ve said that people don’t operate out of morality but out of psychic drives or power needs. That’s intellectually wrong and has serious social consequences.[37]
Michael Josephson, an ethicist, develops this theme:
- History, theology, and philosophy will show that every enlightened civilization has had a sense of right and wrong and a need to try to distinguish them. . . . The things that are right are the things that help people [Page 38]
and society. They are things like compassion, honesty, fairness, accountability. Those are absolute, universal, ethical values.
- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- . . . Ethics has a practical dimension. . . . But it also has a spiritual dimension. People have an inner and inherent sense of right and wrong. That’s why they feel guilt and shame.[38]
It is the transcendent quality within humans that allows them to manifest values or spiritual principles. By strengthening this dimension, the desire to play a responsible role in society increases, and the urge to struggle for greater possessions, positions, and pleasures decreases. There is nothing inherently wrong with the comforts of life or its legitimate pleasures; but making such materialistic comforts and pleasures the principal goal of life threatens the very foundation of true civilization. In the modern secular age most men and women have removed the Divine from their hearts and have replaced it with self and gods of their own making. It can be said that this lack of reverence for any greater power has led us to a lack of reverence toward other races, nations, and creatures and even toward the earth itself. Schaefer reflects on some of Nietzche’s work regarding the “abdication of transcendence”:
- The expression ‘God is dead,’ which has since developed into a catch-phrase, originated from him [Nietzsche]. He describes the ‘madman’ looking for God with a lantern in broad daylight: “Where is God gone?” he called out. “I mean to tell you! We have killed him,—you and I!” He proclaims the death of God and celebrates a requiem for him in churches, which in his view have become nothing other than tombs and sepulchers for this God. . . .
- Man wishes to live without restrictions and even exercise control over the eternity which is attributed to heaven. He strives to become godlike himself, to attain the ‘superman’ ideal, and wishes therefore to depose God. . . .
- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- . . . The supreme values of the Christian ethic such as love, humility, generosity, submission and compassion are cast down and replaced by the new values of domination and the will to power.[39]
How can this transcendent quality, this spiritual nature of the human being, be defined? According to the Universal House of Justice,
- The endowments which distinguish the human race from all other forms of life are summed up in what is known as the human spirit; the mind is its essential quality. These endowments have enabled humanity to build civilizations and to prosper materially. But such accomplishments alone have never satisfied the human spirit, whose mysterious nature inclines it towards transcendence, a reaching towards an invisible realm, towards the ultimate reality, that unknowable essence of essences called God. The religions brought to mankind by a succession of spiritual luminaries have been the primary link between humanity and that ultimate reality, and have galvanized and refined mankind’s capacity to achieve spiritual success together with social progress.[40]
Misconceptions, most perpetuated by religious
institutions themselves, about Who
this Essence of Essences is have led many to
expect that, should God exist, He should
directly intervene in the affairs of men, preventing
or creating disasters and suffering—
like mythical deities of an ancient past. What
modern human beings must understand is
[Page 39] that this Creator has made Himself known
to humankind not by direct intervention but
through a sequence of Divine Teachers
throughout history Whose teachings advance
according to the capacity of an ever-evolving
humanity. The chief purpose of these Educators
has been to edify humanity. No culture
exists that has not been influenced by
the Divine Will. The Divine Teachers are the
agents for transmitting the values and ethics
upon which civilizations may be built.[41] Some
of these past values may seem primitive, outdated,
and irrelevant today, but each had a
proper place and time in the course of human
development. Although some argue that
the “social contract” was the means by which
human communities were built, an examination
of any of the civilizations of the world
reveals that they were all animated by the
philosophies of religions such as Hinduism,
Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity,
or Islam.[42] Even modern American
society is based on the remnants of those
priceless truths once propounded by a
Nazarene nearly two thousand years ago. More
than any social contract, the transcendental
basis of social organization has exerted the
most powerful influence upon human civilization.
It has been at the hands of selfish men that religions have fallen into decline. The cruelty and suffering brought about in the name of religion runs counter to the very teachings they embody. The Universal House of Justice points out that
- from a fair-minded examination of the actual utterances of the Founders of the great religions, and of the social milieus in which they were obliged to carry out their missions, there is nothing to support the contentions and prejudices deranging the religious communities of mankind. . . .
- The teaching that we should treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated [has been] an ethic variously repeated in all the great religions. . . .
- . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
- The resurgence of fanatical religious fervor occurring in many lands cannot be regarded as more than a dying convulsion. . . . Indeed, one of the strangest and saddest features of the current outbreak of religious fanaticism is the extent to which, in each case, it is undermining not only the spiritual values which are conducive to the unity of mankind but also those unique moral victories won by the particular religion it purports to serve.[43]
Unfortunately, followers of various religions
have clung to an exclusivist perspective.
The following statement of Jesus indicates
the evolutionary rather than the static
view of religion: “I have yet many things to
say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.
Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is
come, he will guide you into all truth . . .”[44]
[Page 40] Similar statements may be found in other
world faiths as well. For example, in the
Hindu scriptures one finds the following
verses:
- I am the birthless, the deathless,
- Lord of all that breathes. . . .
- When goodness grows weak,
- When evil increases,
- I make myself a body.
- In every age I come back
- To deliver the holy,
- To destroy the sin of the sinner,
- To establish righteousness.[45]
Such verses have a direct relevance to the present age. Members of the Bahá’í Faith, the world’s youngest independent religion, believe that the process of Divine Revelation has taken place once more.[46] Bahá’ís are followers of Bahá’u’lláh, Whom they believe to be the most recent of God’s Messengers in the succession of Divine Teachers. They believe that a process of progressive revelation has provided spiritual impulses that have inspired humanity, provided society with a new set of values for each age, and gradually led humankind to greater spheres of social unity. This process of Divine Revelation, the Bahá’í writings say, will continue. Bahá’u’lláh, Who shared His message during the latter half of the nineteenth century, brought the social teachings described above, the chief principle of this age being the unity of humankind. Bahá’ís do not have any priesthood; each member has a responsibility to serve the community in spiritual, administrative, and material spheres. Bahá’u’lláh also wrote many volumes on the issue of the spiritualization of humankind so that the “potentialities inherent in the station of man” might be released and that “the full measure of his destiny on earth, the innate excellence of his reality” might emerge. The purpose of Bahá’u’lláh,
- far from belittling the station of the Prophets gone before Him or of whittling down their teachings, is to restate the basic truths which these teachings enshrine in a manner that would conform to the needs, and be in consonance with the capacity, and be applicable to the problems, the ills, and perplexities, of the age in which we live. His mission is to proclaim that the ages of the infancy and of the childhood of the human race are past, that the convulsions associated with the present stage of its adolescence are slowly and painfully preparing it to attain the stage of manhood, and are heralding the approach of that Age of Ages when swords will be beaten into plowshares, when the Kingdom promised by Jesus Christ will have been established,[47] and the peace of the planet definitely and permanently ensured.[48]
True civilization does not arise from mere
material progress; true civilization is founded
upon the transcendent values that hold society
together. America has led and continues
to lead humanity in many ways. Many
of the social ills from which she suffers also
afflict other nations of the world. Will America
embrace the virtues that will cast illumination
throughout the world? The world is
[Page 41] darkened by the forces of racism, greed, and
war. Will America become a standard bearer
of the oneness of humankind and of universal
peace? Its current system is showing signs
of grave distress, and deep shadows of pessimism
abound. Americans have been given
the bright spark of hope that has the power
to transform their souls. Will America fulfill
its true destiny?
The choice is before the nation.
- ↑ In 1989 the economic situation in America was such that the national debt was $3.123 trillion, the interest on which costs $8,000 per second. See Ron Scherer, “Interest on US Debt: $8,000 Per Second,” Christian Science Monitor 24 Nov. 1989: 8.
- ↑ “Prisons: There must be a better way,” The Economist 22 Apr 1989: 29. Since jails are so overcrowded, prisoners are being released earlier on parole. There are now some three million Americans on parole. It costs $20,000 a year to keep a person in prison and about $50,000 to build a new cell (“Prisons” 30).
- ↑ For example, Prohibition did not stop the drinking of alcohol. Increased rates of incarceration, longer sentences, and larger police forces have not slowed down crime. The War on Drugs has not stopped the American appetite for illegal drugs.
- ↑ Udo Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion: The Bahá’í Faith and the Future of Mankind, trans. Janet Rawling-Keitel et. al., 2d rev. ed. (Oxford: George Ronald, 1983) 58.
- ↑ “Barbara Tuchman, Historian,” in Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women About American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future, ed. Betty Sue Flowers (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 5-6.
- ↑ “Tom Wolfe, Writer,” in Moyers, A World of Ideas 63.
- ↑ Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion 60.
- ↑ Richard Dawkins makes this point in the new edition of his book The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990). He had previously argued that “we, and all other animals, are machines created by our genes,” “that a predominant quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless selfishness,” and that “This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behaviour” (p. 2). He now acknowledges that this perspective leads to hopelessness and admits that a nonbiological process has been at work in humans; he claims that cultural evolution is advanced by “memes,” which are units of cultural replication transmitted from brain to brain. “We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism. . . .” (pp. 200-01).
- ↑ Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins: What New Discoveries Reveal About the Emergence of Our Species and Its Possible Future (New York: Dutton, 1982) 208-09.
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace: To the Peoples of the World (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1985) 22.
- ↑ The 1990 census revealed that “three out of four Americans are non-Hispanic whites” and that, if present trends continue, “the United States will become a nation with no racial or ethnic majority during the 21st century”—perhaps “as early as 2060.” See Martha Farnsworth Riche, “We’re All Minorities Now,” American Demographics (Oct. 1991): 26, 29.
- ↑ “Robert Bellah, Sociologist,” in Moyers, A World of Ideas 281.
- ↑ “Barbara Tuchman, Historian,” in Moyers, A World of Ideas 12-13.
- ↑ For examples, see “Joseph Heller, Novelist” and “Noam Chomsky, Linguist,” in Moyers, A World of Ideas 31-32, 40.
- ↑ “Robert Bellah, Sociologist,” in Moyers, A World of Ideas 279-80. Arthur Koestler, the three-time Nobel Prize nominee, makes the astonishing statement that “somewhere along the line something has gone seriously wrong with the evolution of the nervous system of homo sapiens,” resulting in “the paranoid streak running through human history.” Concerned that “Nature has let us down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out,” Koestler suggests that, before we “genosuicide,” we must “hope for salvation to be synthesized in the laboratory” to develop a “Pill” that will cure the schizophrenic human brain (The Ghost in the Machine [London: Arkana, 1989] 239, 296, 339, 322, 337).
- ↑ Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion 32.
- ↑ Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, new ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1984) 20.
- ↑ Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harper, 1976) 7-8, 19, 165, 123-24, quoted in Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion 90.
- ↑ Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, trans. Shoghi Effendi, 1st pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1983) 213.
- ↑ Quoted in Alvin P. Sanoff, “Individualism Has Been Allowed to Run Rampant,” U.S. News & World Report 98 (27 May 1985): 69.
- ↑ Bahá’u’lláh, quoted in The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace 32.
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace 27.
- ↑ Quoted in Sanoff, “Individualism Has Been Allowed to Run Rampant” 70.
- ↑ Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion 33, 37.
- ↑ Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History: Volume XII Reconsiderations (London: Oxford UP, 1961) 533.
- ↑ Anthropologist Joseph Campbell describes religious beliefs as myths. Societies around the globe transmitted to each succeeding generation the beliefs that gave various peoples the psychological wherewithal to face the challenges of living as individuals and as members of a society. Speaking about our modern youth, Campbell states that they have lost faith in the religions taught them since “The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe.” The consequences he describes as a mess: “all you have to do is read the newspaper” (Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, ed. Betty Sue Flowers [New York: Doubleday, 1988] 12-13).
- ↑ Max Bell, The Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1976) 166, 169, quoted in Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion 88-89.
- ↑ The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States, The Vision of Race Unity: America’s Most Challenging Issue (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1991) 1.
- ↑ Martha Farnsworth Riche suggests that, “As the world’s first multicultural society, the United States is uniquely positioned to both understand and profit from the emerging global culture” and that its “business leaders could use a multicultural work force as a powerful competitive edge” (“We’re All Minorities Now” 34, 32).
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace 25.
- ↑ Many view with alarm the economic success of the Japanese in recent decades. Although other factors may play a role, various observers (for example, Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, [New York: Random, 1987]) have emphasized that the most important difference is that the Japanese government has invested in the commercial sector so that consumer goods sold abroad could be improved. On the contrary, not only does the American government not invest in commercial enterprises, but it has heavily invested in the military sector, which has very few financial returns; highly expensive weapons systems sitting in silos on the prairie or on an aircraft carrier do little more than provide a false sense of security. For a comprehensive delineation of the means for achieving universal peace, see the Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace.
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace 26.
- ↑ Quoted in Sanoff, “Individualism Has Been Allowed to Run Rampant” 69.
- ↑ Bahá’u’lláh, Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh Revealed after the Kitáb-i-Aqdas, comp. Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, trans. Habib Taherzadeh et al., 1st pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988) 37.
- ↑ Even Adam Smith, hailed as the father of laissez-faire capitalism, was primarily interested in what it was that enabled man to form moral judgments rather than being persuaded by passions of self-interest. His best known work, The Wealth of Nations, was preceded by The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he discussed the presence within each person of an “inner man” that approves or disapproves of his actions. See the Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1976.
- ↑ In the United States the suicide rate for teenagers has tripled between the 1950s to the 1980s; currently one teenager commits suicide every one and a half hours. The leading cause of death among teenagers is automobile accidents—the majority are alcohol related.
- ↑ Quoted in Sanoff, “Individualism Has Been Allowed to Run Rampant” 70.
- ↑ “Michael Josephson, Ethicist,” in Moyers, A World of Ideas 18.
- ↑ Schaefer, The Imperishable Dominion 6-7.
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace 17.
- ↑ Alan Bloom refers to Messengers of God as “the creators” “who formed horizons,” and “founders” of various world civilizations who had the “capacity to generate culture.” He argues that “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.” He writes that “There must be religion” and of the need in society for “Authentic values . . . by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts” (The Closing of the American Mind [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987] 201, 194, 196, 201).
- ↑ Some civilizations, such as the Roman, may seem superficially to be merely militaristic states. However, a closer examination of the Roman empire reveals that it too had a transcendental value system the disintegration of which led to its decline. Consider these verses of the Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65): “In every individual among good men ‘a god—what god is unknown—has his dwelling” and that “a holy spirit dwells in us, the watcher and the guardian of evil and of good in our life; and as he has been treated by us, so does he himself treat us” (quoted in Ancient Writers: Greece and Rome, ed. T. James Luce [New York: Scribner’s, 1982] 2: 827).
- ↑ The Universal House of Justice, The Promise of World Peace 18-19.
- ↑ John 16:12-13.
- ↑ The Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita, trans. Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (New York: New American Library, 1972) 50.
- ↑ The Bahá’í Faith is the second most widespread religion in the world. See “World Religious Statistics,” 1988 Britannica Book of the Year.
- ↑ Bahá’u’lláh claims to fulfill the millennial expectations of Hindus (the Tenth Avatar), Jews (the Lord of Hosts), Buddhists (Buddha-Maitreye Amitabha), Zoroastrians (Shah-Bahram), Christians (the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter) and Muslims (the Great Announcement). See Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, (Wilmette, Ill: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974) 94-96.
- ↑ Shoghi Effendi, Guidance for Today and Tomorrow: A Selection from the Writings of Shoghi Effendi, the Late Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith (London, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1973) 3.
When love is realized and the ideal spiritual bonds unite
the hearts of men, the whole human race will he uplifted,
the world will continually grow more spiritual and radiant
and the happiness and tranquillity of mankind be immeasurably
increased. Warfare and strife will he uprooted, disagreement
and dissension pass away and universal peace unite the nations and
peoples of the world. All mankind will dwell together as one family,
blend as the waves of one sea, shine as stars of one firmament
and appear as fruits of the same tree. This is the happiness
and felicity of humankind. This is the illumination of man,
the eternal glory and everlasting life; this is the divine bestowal.
I desire this station for you, and I pray God that the people
of America may achieve this great end in order that the virtue
of this democracy may he ensured and their names
be glorified eternally.
—‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ
It is my fond and fervent hope through the favor of God
that this present meeting may be instrumental
in ushering in the day when the standard of the oneness
of the world of humanity shall be held aloft in America.
May it be the first real foundation of international peace,
having for its object universal service to man.
May it be divine philanthropy without distinctions
or differentiations in humankind.
May you consider all religions the instruments of God
and regard all races as channels of divine manifestation.
May you view mankind as the sheep of God
and know for a certainty tbat He is the real Shepherd.
—‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ
The Emancipation of the Iranian
Bahá’í Community:
A Concurrent Resolution
On 17 November 1993 the United States
Senate, by unanimous consent, adopted a
concurrent resolution on “The Emancipation
of the Iranian Bahá’í Community.”
Whereas previous resolutions of the Senate
and the House of Representatives had protested
the persecution of the Bahá’ís in Iran,
this resolution unequivocally called upon the
Government of the Islamic Republic to extend
legal recognition to the Iranian Bahá’í
community, that nation’s largest religious
minority and the only one not recognized in
the Iranian Constitution, and to grant it the
right to “organize, elect its leaders, educate
its youth, and conduct the normal activities
of a law-abiding religious community.”
The concurrent resolution appeared in the Senate Congressional Record on 17 June 1993, Vol. 139, No. 86. At press time an identical resolution was before the House of Representatives. —ED.
SENATE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
31—CONCERNING THE EMANCIPATION OF THE IRANIAN BAHA’I
COMMUNITY
Mr. DODD (for himself, Mr. PELL, Mr. MCCAIN, Mrs. KASSEBAUM, Mr. KENNEDY, Mr. ROCKEFELLER, Mr. D’AMATO, Mr. MATTHEWS, Mr. DECONCINI, Mr. DORGAN, Mr. SARBANES, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. DOLE, Mr. CAMPBELL, Mrs. FEINSTEIN, Mr. MOYNIHAN, Mr. PRESSLER, Mr. INOUYE, Mr. WOFFORD, Mr. CRAIG, Mr. LUGAR, Mr. SIMON, Mr. HATFIELD, Mr. MITCHELL, Mr. HATCH, Mr. HEFLIN, Mr. GRAHAM, Mr. ROBB, Mr. GLENN, Mr. KERRY, Mr. DURENBERGER, Mr. DASCHLE, Mrs. BOXER, Mr. SASSER, Mr. LIEBERMAN, Ms. MOSELEY-BRAUN, Mr. WARNER, Mr. CONRAD, Mr. BIDEN, Mr. FEINGOLD, Mr. SIMPSON, Mr. MURKOWSKI, Mr. RIEGLE, Mr. HOLLINGS, Ms. MIKULSKI, Mr. KOHL, Mr. JEFFORDS, Mr. COHEN, Mr. BRADLEY, Mr. METZENBAUM, Mr. EXON, AND Mr. CHAFEE) submitted the following concurrent resolution; which was referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations:
S. CON. RES. 31
Whereas in 1982, 1984, 1988, 1990, and 1992, the Congress, by concurrent resolution, declared that it holds the Government of Iran responsible for upholding the rights of all its nationals, including members of the Baha’i Faith, Iran’s largest religious minority;
Whereas in such resolutions and in numerous other appeals, the Congress condemned the Government of Iran’s religious persecution of the Baha’i community, including the execution of more than 200 Baha’is, the imprisonment of additional thousands, and other repressive and discriminatory actions against Baha’is based solely upon their religious beliefs;
Whereas in 1992, the Government of Iran summarily executed a leading member of the Baha’i community, arrested and imprisoned several other Baha’is, condemned two Baha’i prisoners to death on account of their religion, and confiscated individual Baha’is’ homes and personal properties in several cities;
[Page 45]
Whereas the Government of Iran continues
to deny the Baha’i community the right
to organize, to elect its leaders, to hold community
property for worship or assembly, to
operate religious schools and to conduct other
normal religious community activities; and
Whereas on February 22, 1993, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights published a formerly confidential Iranian government document constituting a blueprint for the destruction of the Baha’i community, which document reveals that these repressive actions are the result of a deliberate policy designed and approved by the highest officials of the Government of Iran: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), That the Congress—
(1) continues to hold the Government of Iran responsible for upholding the rights of all its nationals, including members of the Baha’i community, in a manner consistent with Iran’s obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international agreements guaranteeing the civil and political rights of its citizens;
(2) condemns the repressive anti-Baha’i policy adopted by the Government of Iran, as set forth in a confidential official document which explicitly states that Baha’is shall be denied access to education and employment, and that the government’s policy is to deal with Baha’is “in such a way that their progress and development are blocked”;
(3) expresses concern that individual Baha’is continue to suffer from severely repressive and discriminatory government actions, solely on account of their religion; and that the Baha’i community continues to be denied legal recognition and the basic rights to organize, elect its leaders, educate its youth, and conduct the normal activities of a law-abiding religious community;
(4) urges the Government of Iran to extend to the Baha’i community the rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international covenants on human rights, including the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and equal protection of the law; and
(5) calls upon the President to continue—
(A) to emphasize that the United States regards the human rights practices of the Government of Iran, particularly its treatment of the Baha’i community and other religious minorities, as a significant factor in the development of the United States Government’s relations with the Government of Iran;
(B) to urge the Government of Iran to emancipate the Baha’i community by granting those rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the international covenants on human rights; and
(C) to encourage other governments to continue to appeal to the Government of Iran, and to cooperate with other governments and international organizations, including the United Nations and its agencies, in efforts to protect the religious rights of the Baha’is and other minorities through joint appeals to the Government of Iran and through other appropriate actions.
SEC. 2 The Secretary of the Senate shall transmit a copy of this concurrent resolution to the President.
Mashriqu’l-Adhkár
(“Mother Temple” of the West)
- In majestic splendor
- Against the Wilmette sky,
- The “Mother Temple” of the West
- Emerges through the light.
- Her filigree of rich designs
- Adorn nine-sided walls
- That reach beyond unto a dome—
- A beacon in the night;
- Where once inside the worshipers,
- Who traveled near and far,
- Now humbly sit and meditate
- Upon this gift from God.
- Their eyes turn east towards Israel,
- The Holy Land of all,
- While sunken gardens radiate;
- And voices sing with praise.
- For here upon this Holy Site,
- Bahá’u’lláh is near.
—M. Riesa Clark
Copyright © 1994 by M. Riesa Clark
Lakota Hoop Dancer
for Kevin Locke
- The five singers begin their drumming,
- and he begins to dance, hopping and
- stepping in time, spinning the two bright
- yellow hoops, one on each arm.
- They are the Sun, he has told us, and
- they will bring a new life to the earth,
- for his dance is the coming of spring,
- both to the land and to the human
- heart. He approaches his two piles of
- hoops, taps one with his foot, and adds in
- those that stand—ringed hoops laddering up-
- wards, the new growth caused by Sun’s power.
- He shifts the rings around and over
- his body, always keeping in step,
- never losing the drumbeat, always
- hearing the singers’ high-pitched voices.
- Then he spreads his arms, and the hoops fanned
- across them and his back have made him
- a bird: He flits, glides, soars, swoops—spring’s joy
- pumping his heart, stretching his feathers,
- sending life to his wings. He adds hoops,
- rings thighs, knees, and arms, shifts them,
- and he’s become a flower, budded,
- opened, full-blooming. He shifts again
- and he is a star. The drumbeat pounds
- and he is carried on the voices
- of the singers, his feet keeping their
- intricate steps. He adds hoops and drops
- them off, moves hoops over his head and
- down and off his legs. And now, look, here
- is the rainbow: span of interlinked
- hoops, black, red, yellow, and white—colors
- of the four directions and the four
- races of man. He threads himself in
- and out of the hoops, adds several
- by tapping the pile with a toe, one
- or two by striking quick with a hoop.
- He dances, dances, hoops encircling
- neck, arms, legs, and waist, dances, dances.
- The hoops shift, move, interlock and he
- has become the eagle, ascending,
- soaring, holding all the world in his
- sight, in his knowledge. And he has told
- us the eagle is each of us, each
- of our souls, ascending, ascending
- in this new springtime. And now he has
- all of the bright hoops—all twenty-eight!—
- and he is building a sphere around
- his body, building it of the four
- colors. And the drumbeat is rising,
- the singers’ voices rising. The sphere
- is complete, its each hoop in place, and
- he is lifting it up over his
- head and placing it tenderly on
- the floor. His dance is finished: sphere of
- unity made, spring come for us all.
—Clif Mason
Copyright © 1994 by Clif Mason
Two Heroines of the American
Bahá’í Community
REVIEWS OF DOROTHY FREEMAN’S From Copper to Gold: The Life of Dorothy Baker (OXFORD: GEORGE RONALD, 1984), XII + 320 PAGES, EPILOGUE, NOTES, INDEX OF NAMES, and NATHAN RUTSTEIN’S Corinne True: Faithful Handmaid of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (OXFORD: GEORGE RONALD, 1987), XI + 228 PAGES, PUBLISHED SOURCES, NOTES AND REFERENCES
BY JAMES D. STOKES
Copyright © 1994 by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.
IN COMMENTING on the contribution by
women to the development of the Bahá’í
Faith, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá says that one of the unique
features, indeed one of the “miracles,” of the
Bahá’í Era is the fact that “women have evinced
a greater boldness than men when enlisted
in the ranks of the [Bahá’í] Faith.”[1] Nowhere
is the truth of His observation more apparent
than in the history of the Bahá’í Faith in
North America. During the dark global tumult
of World War I, when ‘Abdu’l-Bahá summoned
the small North American Bahá’í
community to carry the Faith to the entire
world, it was mainly women, in the initial
stages, who responded to His epic challenge.
In reading the Tablets of the Divine Plan, the
series of letters written by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá to
the Bahá’ís of the United States and Canada,
which constitute the charter document and
plan for disseminating the Faith throughout
the world, one is struck by the fact that all
those mentioned are women—Marion Jack,
Agnes Alexander, Fanny Knobloch, and May
Maxwell—individuals who introduced the
Faith to entire continents and geographic
regions. One also calls to mind Martha Root,
Emogene Hoagg, and other women who
responded immediately to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s call.
‘Abdu’l-Bahá went so far as to liken such self-sacrificing
teachers to the Apostles of Christ,
specifically comparing the women among
them to Mary Magdalene and Mary, the
mother of John. Indeed, He used the imagery
of birth to describe the process of becoming
a teacher of that magnitude: just as one
must be born from the womb of the mother
into the world, so must a spiritual teacher be
born from the world of nature, with its defects,
into a transcendent vision of what that world
can become. If, as Bahá’ís believe, these early
teachers and their successors were toiling on
behalf of a Faith that is destined to regenerate
the planet and to inspire the creation
of a universal commonwealth, their historical
significance cannot be overestimated. One
can only be grateful that biographies of two
of these women have appeared during the
last decade and doubly grateful that they
were written while some of the people who
knew the principals were still alive to augment
the written source materials with their
own recollections.
[Page 52]
From Copper to Gold is the biography of
Dorothy Baker, a member of a well-known
American family that included Harriet Beecher
Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. Baker devoted
her entire adult life to serving the
Bahá’í Faith before dying at the age of fifty-five
in a tragic plane crash near the Italian
island of Elba in 1954. Due to her tireless
and distinguished service, her eloquence, her
profound dedication to Shoghi Effendi, the
Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, and, unfortunately,
her untimely death, Dorothy Baker
has become a legendary figure to many Bahá’ís.
The book was written by her granddaughter,
Dorothy Freeman, from a wealth of family
materials and personal reminiscences contributed
by many people who knew her. For
Freeman the book was “a voyage of discovery:
‘I wanted to know my grandmother.”
The book is 320 pages long and includes an introduction, prologue, twenty chapters, an epilogue, three brief pages of footnotes, and an index of people who are mentioned in the book. The chapters are generally short, ranging from five to thirty-four pages, tending to increase in number of pages in the second half of the book. This is partly because those chapters extract more fully from Baker’s letters and other writings and from many personal reminiscences by people who knew her, including family, friends, Bahá’í dignitaries, and other acquaintances. The book also contains fifty-five poignant and historic photographs.
Freeman’s purpose was not to write a chronicle that could be grafted onto a family’s genealogical tree but rather to tell the story of Baker’s emergence and fulfillment as a Bahá’í teacher. Thus, as the title suggests, the book is a story of growth that falls naturally into two parts: the “copper” years, in which her abilities were essentially nascent, and the “gold” years, marked by contribution and service to the Faith she loved. Her transformation is the life-long process of growth initiated by her meeting with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1912, one that culminated in her appointment as a Hand of the Cause of God in 1951 and her final years of global service.[2]
Like its subject, the book becomes more compelling and effective as it develops. The first nine chapters take us from her meeting with ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in New York in 1912 (and her letter asking to be permitted to serve Him) through her schooling and the early years of her marriage. This section, unfortunately, relies heavily on reconstructed events and imagined dialogue, a technique discussed further below. Three important points emerge from these chapters: the pervasive guiding influence of her grandmother, Ellen Beecher, who shaped Dorothy’s Bahá’í identity as she had been instructed to do by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá; Dorothy’s loss of a stepchild; and her own brushes with death from illnesses. All of these events seem to have contributed to the spiritual quickening that took place during this period.
Chapters 9 through 14 cover the 1930s,
which saw the emergence of Baker’s remarkable
abilities and her service in building the
Bahá’í community of Lima, Ohio; traveling
on behalf of the Faith; serving on the National
Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of
the United States and Canada; and teaching
at Davison Bahá’í School (now Louhelen) in
Michigan. Also emerging were her skill as a
speaker and writer, her universalized sensibility,
her deep attachment to Shoghi Effendi,
and her wish to serve him. These chapters are
much more effective than the earlier ones as
they are better documented and convey the
excitement, engagement, achievement, and
[Page 53] growing eloquence that were a part of Baker’s
life during this period.
Chapters 15 through 20 take the reader through the 1940s to the time of Baker’s death in 1954 while on a teaching mission to India, twice extended at the request of the Guardian. These chapters are filled with anecdotes and testimonials to her wit, intelligence, passionate dedication, and extraordinary service. They describe her many invitations to speak at university campuses, her international teaching trips, her appointment as a Hand of the Cause of God, and her contributions as national leader and administrator within the American Bahá’í community.
From Copper to Gold creates two distinct and contrasting impressions. On one level it is immensely moving and engaging to read, particularly because of Dorothy Baker herself; her life story is one of greatness. But another reason is the author’s innate dramatic sensibility. Freeman’s use of the metaphor of transformation causes her to highlight decisive and critical moments—doubts followed by insight; resistance followed by teaching achievements in Ohio; difficult episodes of consultation in the National Bahá’í Assembly followed by vindication and appointment as a Hand of the Cause—all of which give the book the qualities of heroic narrative. In addition, the book’s focus on Baker’s tireless service, her mystical attachment to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, and her tragic death at sea, which stunned the Bahá’í world and plunged it into its own sea of mourning, also give the book the qualities of a hagiography and a sacrificial tragedy. As the Hand of the Cause of God ‘Alí-Akbar Furútan is quoted in the book as saying of Baker’s death: “‘For several months after I couldn’t come to myself.’”
But other aspects of the book are troubling. Freeman wanted to avoid writing the kind of history that presents “exact chronologies where every known fact is recorded” but in the process loses the “reality” of the person. She wanted to “discover connections between Dorothy Baker as legend and Dorothy Baker the striving, struggling child of God.” To that end, she chose to blend factual materials with intuitively reconstructed hypothetical scenes, fictionalized dialogue, and soliloquies, while leaving “future scholars to compile a strictly documentary biography of Dorothy Baker.” In a typical imagined scene, Baker’s mother, Luella, is described as sitting in a “too-warm drawing room staring absently at the newspaper in her lap” and feeling “the unease that sometimes accompanied thoughts” of her and her husband’s “union and its effects on her life.”
The effect of the technique of blending fact and fiction is unfortunate. The fictional scenes are captivating, but they tend to undermine the actuality of other important events that really did occur. In matters of religion, facts have a special luminescence. Biblical scholars would give anything for a single, verifiable contemporary description of Christ, or of one of his Apostles—what was worn, what was said, even what they looked like. One assumes that in days to come the scholars of the world will cherish the same passionate wish for factual validation of the events of the first Bahá’í century. One might argue that Bahá’í scholars should cultivate a deep, loving sense of special obligation to those historians of the future who will look back to our time for facts and methods that verify, or undermine, the greatness of those days. In that context, one might suggest that the most important thing about a book such as From Copper to Gold is that it records the fact that the spiritual potency of the Faith was so great in the early and mid-twentieth century that it could inspire service of such proportions as that offered by Dorothy Baker.
One final suggestion on behalf of future
scholars. The author clearly worked from a
wealth of family and archival records. It would
be a great service to scholarship if she could
[Page 54] annotate a copy of her book for a Bahá’í
archive, identifying her sources by name of
repository, location, document number (if
any), date, and kind of document, because
her book itself is destined to become a source
for the future documentary historians to whom
she refers.
Corinne True: Faithful Handmaid of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, by Nathan Rutstein, is similar to From Copper to Gold—a biography of a great early Bahá’í who devoted her life to serving the Bahá’í Faith. Yet, like their respective subjects; the two books are strikingly different. While Dorothy Baker came from an influential northern family, Corinne True was descended from Kentuckians who owned a plantation and kept slaves. While Baker was known for her natural eloquence and peripatetic teaching, True emerged only gradually as an inspiring speaker and was a fixed spiritual anchor forever associated with the building of the first Bahá’í House of Worship in North America and the development of the Chicago-area Bahá’í community. Baker lived but fifty-five years while True lived almost one hundred. The biography of Baker was written by a family member, while the author of Corinne True had no thought of writing such a book until asked to do so by True’s daughter Edna in 1983. Yet together the two books present a complementary portrait of the two principal activities of the Faith during its first half-century in America— teaching and consolidation.
As Rutstein’s book makes clear, Corinne True’s life has a certain epic quality to it. She was born on 1 November 1861 and died nearly a hundred years later on 3 April 1961. At the time of her birth, Bahá’u’lláh had not yet publicly declared His mission, and the United States was a young nation struggling with civil war; by the year of her death the Faith was firmly established throughout the world, the Bahá’í House of Worship had been erected on the shores of Lake Michigan —in no small measure, through her efforts—and America itself had emerged as a global superpower that housed the headquarters of the United Nations. During the course of her life she received fifty tablets from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and more than seventy letters from Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith. The sweep of her life has an almost unbelievable scope: as a small child she watched Union soldiers plunder her family’s plantation; at the age of ninety-one she was elevated to the rank of Hand of the Cause of God.
The book itself is relatively short, with only 228 pages and twenty-one chapters, a 2-page bibliography, and 12 pages of endnotes. In addition, it has thirty-nine photographs provided by the True family and the Audio-Visual Department of the Bahá’í World Center. Corinne True is a compact, readable book that tells the story of Corinne True’s life in a straightforward, chronological way. It is less dramatic but more contextual than the biography of Dorothy Baker.
The first four chapters take us from True’s childhood in Kentucky through her early days in Chicago. Chapters 5 through 13 cover the years from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s call for the building of the temple to His death in 1921. They show ‘Abdu’l-Bahá taking the American community from a condition of utter dependence on His personal intervention to an ability to solve problems on its own through its administrative bodies. His last message to True, a cablegram in response to her questions concerning problems with the temple project, said “ALL AFFAIRS CONCERNING UNIVERSAL TEMPLE REFERRED GENERAL CONVENTION. I CANNOT INTERFERE. SUBMIT EVERYTHING CONVENTION.”
The remainder of the book covers the
second half of True’s life under the care and
guidance of Shoghi Effendi, taking us through
the completion of the temple project, the full
emergence of the administrative order in
America, and True’s own continued growth.
The book quotes from a letter to her in
[Page 55] which Shoghi Effendi emphasizes “the importance
of taking issues and problems to the
administrative institutions.” The final chapters
also convey the Guardian’s respect and
deep affection for her, culminating in her
appointment in 1952 as a Hand of the Cause
of God. As the book points out, although
she never left America or the Midwest Shoghi
Effendi referred to her as “the most venerable
figure among the pioneers of the Faith of
Bahá’u’lláh in the West.”
Like the Baker book, Corinne True blends journalistic style and scholarly method in a way that suggests some uncertainty about how to present, interpret, and document historical evidence when writing a Bahá’í biography. For the facts and most interpretations of her life, Mr. Rutstein relies on thirteen hours of taped interviews and numerous phone conversations with Edna True, the distinguished daughter of Corinne True. Except for a brief comment in his preface, Rutstein presents these materials in reportorial fashion as undocumented fact. They have the ring of authenticity because they appear to reflect the true perceptions of a woman who lived through the events with her mother. But one wishes for at least a blanket citation in the first chapter, explaining his source and method. In a few cases (it is impossible to know how many), the author tries “to surmise what Corinne True’s thoughts might have been about certain incidents” by creating paraphrases of her thoughts and feelings to help “the reader to obtain an awareness of her true spirit.” For example, in a passage about the death of True’s nine-year-old daughter in a fall, Rutstein wrote: “Why would God take such a tender being away, Corinne wondered. Her child had done nothing to warrant such a fate. But maybe the child’s mother had to be punished?” At the very least, such comments should be written unequivocally as hypothetical reconstructions. However, the two other main elements of Rutstein’s research—extracts from letters and tablets to Corinne True by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi, and published secondary Bahá’í sources—are documented more fully and used effectively to provide historical context.
Inconsistencies of method aside, Corinne True effectively highlights the three great achievements for which True is remembered. The first is the inestimably important role she played in the construction of the House of Worship in Wilmette, which began with a tablet she received from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in 1903 and continued with His subsequent instructions to her during her first pilgrimage to Akka in 1906, when He advised her to stay in Chicago and put her energies into the temple project, a task that became her life’s work. The book chronicles her unswerving efforts through two world wars, a series of personal tragedies, and successive financial crises within the American Bahá’í community to build the House of Worship, which was dedicated fifty years later on 2 May 1953. As the book develops, one comes to realize that the efforts to build the temple paralleled those being made to complete the Shrine of the Báb on Mount Carmel. The connection between the two was clearly present in the mind of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá when He placed two pictures of the temple within the Shrine of the Báb.
The book also highlights True’s contribution
to the establishment of the Bahá’í administrative
order in America. Drawing on
published sources, Rutstein describes the tensions
that arose as American Bahá’ís sought
to understand the Bahá’í Faith and to develop
its administrative structures. The book
takes us through conflicts between the men’s
House of Spirituality and the women’s Assembly
of Teaching, the resentments some
Bahá’ís had in the face of True’s unbending
drive to see the temple built, and the communications
“from both ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and
Shoghi Effendi advising True that the Chicago
Bahá’ís had to rely on consultation and
[Page 56] decision-making through the administrative
institutions rather than sending problems to
the Bahá’í World Center for a solution.
The third contribution that emerges is True’s rock-like firmness in the Covenant— an unswerving faith and singleness of vision in the face of personal loss, global chaos, and the growing pains of the Bahá’í community. The book effectively quotes tablets sent to her by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, which obviously helped to develop her certitude and clarity of purpose.
Perhaps the most striking chapter of the book is Chapter 20, in which Rutstein summarizes the profound historical significance of the life of Corinne True, pointing out that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá “chose a woman to spearhead the development of the most important single project in the first fifty years of the Faith in America”; that He “used her to break down the psychological barriers against women in the American Bahá’í community” in order to open the way for the growth of the administrative order; and that hers was a granite-like firmness in the Covenant.
Together From Copper to Gold and Corinne True provide a fascinating examination of two of the dedicated women who contributed to the growth of the Faith in the first Bahá’í century. One can only hope that the two authors’ efforts encourage additional biographies of other women and men who gave such luminous and sacrificial service, as well as further discussion of the nature, purpose, and methods of Bahá’í scholarship.
- ↑ Quoted in Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, first pocket-size ed. (Wilmette, Ill.: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990) 69.
- ↑ “Hand of the Cause of God” is an exalted spiritual title that was bestowed by Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, or Shoghi Effendi upon individuals who were asked to fulfill special duties in promoting and protecting the Bahá’í Faith or upon those who earned the distinction through their own heroic efforts to serve the Faith.
Ascending Poem
continue
the way you are, and then
a whole crowd of people why you are
easier and much luckier than telling
flight was a natural human right,
if you really believed that
from some suitable hill
into the air
yourself
you would launch
just the way
a poem
Start
—Sen McGlinn
Copyright © 1994 by Sen McGlinn
Wise Man
- “The midnight oil you have burned,
- Riches and honors you have earned,
- Your way the world’s heads have turned,
- Tell me,” I asked the Wise Man,
- “What is it that you have learned?”
- “That it all means nothing,” he replied,
- “Lest you love and are loved in return.”
—Arnold Harris
Copyright © 1994 by Arnold Harris
Reconsidering Religion’s
Role in Society
A REVIEW OF STEPHEN L. CARTER’S The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (NEW YORK: BASIC BOOKS, 1993), VIII + 277 PAGES, BIBLIOGRAPHY, INDEX
BY MONIREH KAZEMZADEH
Copyright © 1994 by Monireh Kazemzadeh.
RECENTLY a woman from Texas named
Loraine Menking appeared at a public
school in Florence, South Carolina, playing
the role of the “peace queen.” Menking, who
developed the character of the peace queen
as a way to teach children the basic values
of peace, harmony, unity, and understanding,
volunteers her time to schools who invite
her to speak as the peace queen to students.
The children and teachers of Royall Elementary
School in Florence were reportedly thrilled
with the peace queen; it seemed as if everyone
found her visit a success. Everyone, that
is, except one incensed citizen who, upon
reading in the local newspaper of the peace
queen’s visit, discovered that Menking was a
Bahá’í and that the values she espoused in
her program at the school are found among
the basic teachings of the Bahá’í Faith. The
disgruntled citizen, in a scathing letter to the
local newspaper, expressed his displeasure that
a representative of an organized religion was
permitted into a public school to teach her
beliefs to children. The writer did not, apparently,
express any objection to the idea of
peace; he was merely outraged at the motivation
behind the peace queen’s message.
A reporter from the local paper had been present at the peace queen’s presentation at the Royall Elementary School. In response to the angry letter, the reporter affirmed, in an editorial, that the peace queen was guilty as charged; the values of peace, love, and happiness that Menking presented to the children were, indeed, central tenets of the Bahá’í Faith. However, the reporter noted that the peace queen never mentioned the word “Bahá’í” during her presentation and that she merely asked the children to be “ambassadors for peace.” He then asked his readers to consider whether this really was such a bad thing.
Although the peace queen incident occurred after the publication of Stephen L. Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion, the issues it raises are central to his insightful and timely book. As Mr. Carter, a professor at the Yale Law School and a practicing Episcopalian, explains at the outset, his book is about “the attitude that we as a political society hold toward religion. . . . It is an effort to . . . figure out why it is that religion is seen as worse than other forces that mold people’s minds, and to try to discover whether there might be a way to preserve the separation of church and state without trivializing faith as we do today.”
[Page 60]
In America today, Carter observes, religion
is treated as a fringe element of our
culture. At best, it is a “hobby”; at worst, it
is a sinister force of political, usually right-wing,
extremism. The faithful are made to
feel that they should conceal their beliefs or
apologize for them. They are told to “pray if
you like, worship if you must, but whatever
you do, do not on any account take your
religion seriously.” Politicians and public figures
especially are expected to make only
passing reference to religion, as in the now
almost secular “God bless America.” Worse
yet, views that might otherwise be acceptable
become impermissible if they are perceived
to be motivated by religious belief, as in the
peace queen incident. The problem with this
approach, Carter argues, is that it denies the
individual the right to exercise religion freely
in all spheres of life and, at the same time,
deprives our political culture of the beneficial
effects of religious example and influence.
“How,” he asks, “did we reach this disturbing
pass, when our culture teaches that religion
is not to be taken seriously, even by those
who profess to believe in it?”
One reason why religion is increasingly pushed out of the “public square,” defined by Carter as “the arena in which our public moral and political battles are fought,” is that many people today see religion as the exclusive weapon of the extreme right, a constraint against liberalism, a necessarily conservative force. Such people point to organizations such as the now-defunct Moral Majority, Inc., or the thriving Christian Coalition led by Pat Robertson, both of which use religion as justification for their efforts to oppose abortion, reintroduce school prayer, discourage women from working outside the home, and so on. They cite the threats by certain Catholic bishops to excommunicate any Catholic politicians who support legalized abortion. But for those of us with short memories or who are too young to remember, Carter points out that the equation of religious devotion with extreme right-wing conservatism is actually a new development. As recently as the 1960s, religion—principally through the intervention of Christian ministers—played an important and much lauded role in advancing the civil rights movement and in ending legal segregation of blacks and whites. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most celebrated figure of the movement, was, not coincidentally, a preacher, and his speeches were full of unapologetically religious appeals. Ironically, the very people who today express outrage over the Catholic church’s stand on abortion—or, more precisely, at the church’s introduction of its views into the public square—were those who probably supported the Catholic bishops in the South when they threatened to excommunicate any Catholics who supported legal segregation. Carter’s point, then, is that views expressed in the public square should be judged on the basis of their content without regard to the expounder’s motivation—religious, philosophical, or personal—for holding that view.
Perhaps the most popular argument to
keep religion out of the public square is that
the First Amendment guarantees its exclusion.
Many people no doubt think that the
words “separation of church and state” are
embodied in the “religion clauses” of the
First Amendment; in fact, the first clause,
known as the “Establishment Clause,” reads
that “Congress shall make no law respecting
the establishment of religion”; the second
clause, the “Free Exercise Clause,” reads “or
prohibit the free exercise thereof.” The original
purpose of these religion clauses of the
First Amendment was to ensure that Congress
could not establish any religion as the
official religion of the nation and to guarantee
citizens the right to exercise the religion
of their choice. In other words, the First
Amendment was intended to protect religion
from government, not vice-versa: “to secure
religious liberty, which Thomas Jefferson
[Page 61] called ‘the most inalienable and sacred of all
human rights.’”[1] Thus the metaphorical wall
between church and state was constructed
and constitutionally established in the United
States to ensure that the government could
not adopt any one religion over any other or
interfere with the religious beliefs and practices
of its citizens.
Over the years the courts have elaborated considerably on the premise of the separation of church and state. With respect to the Establishment Clause, the Supreme Court’s test of the acceptability of government action was defined in Lemon v. Kurtzman, which involved a state program to reimburse all schools, including parochial schools, for expenses of textbooks, materials, and salaries of teachers teaching nonreligious subjects. The Supreme Court struck down the statute that established the program, ruling that it violated the Establishment Clause. By establishing the so-called Lemon test, the court requires a statute to meet three criteria: “First, the statute must have a secular legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; finally, the statute must not foster ‘an excessive entanglement with religion.’” As Carter points out, such a test is awkward and essentially unworkable: How does one determine “excessive” entanglement? When exactly is religion “advanced”? Worse yet, why must government action have a purely secular purpose? If one applied the first part of the Lemon test strictly, one would have to invalidate much of the civil rights legislation (which was admittedly motivated by religious belief), most anti-abortion laws and restrictions on abortion, and, Carter maintains, quite a number of other laws, as some 90 percent of the members of Congress have stated that they are influenced in their decision-making by their religious beliefs. In fact, the lower courts have struggled with the Lemon test and have not always applied it consistently.
Cases under the Free Exercise Clause generally
arise when an individual believer or a
group of believers ask for an exemption from
a law of general application.[2] Occasionally
the Supreme Court has recognized such an
exemption—for example, when it allowed
the Amish to take their children out of school
after the eighth grade. For the most part,
however, the Court has been unwilling to
make exemptions: a Jewish Air Force officer
was not granted the right to wear a yarmulke
as it violated Air Force regulations about
headgear; a Seventh Day Adventist in Connecticut
could not sue her employer who refused
to let her out of work on Saturday, her
Sabbath day; Native Americans in one state
were unsuccessful in attempts to gain exemption
from anti-drug laws for their ritual use
of peyote; Native Americans in another state
were unable to prevent government seizure of
their holy burial grounds to build a road.
The Supreme Court justified its actions in
this last case by observing that “government
simply could not operate’ if forced to ‘satisfy
every citizen’s religious needs and desires.’”
Carter does not argue that any or all of these
decisions are necessarily wrong, although he
does seem to disagree with the outcomes.
What is surely wrong, Carter argues, is that
the Court considered the “inconvenience” to
government caused by the requests for exemption
without weighing the harm done to
the individual citizens. To be constitutional,
a statute needs to be deemed to have only an
[Page 62] incidental or accidental effect of interfering
with religion, and the state need show only
that a law is neutral or does not specifically
discriminate against any one religion. Carter
argues that the state should be held to a
higher standard; in matters of religious accommodation,
the state should be required
to show that it has a “compelling interest”
in refusing to accommodate a religious need.
The First Amendment should preserve and
nurture religious freedom, not merely tolerate
it. The religion clauses “must be interpreted
to do more than protect the religions
against explicit discrimination.”
Carter does not, however, advocate the conflation of church and state. He believes, for example, that prayer should not be allowed in public classrooms, although a “moment of silence” may be permissible. Nor does he feel that religious displays (such as crèches) should be allowed on public property. In fact, Carter believes that religions should not involve themselves too deeply in secular politics because in doing so they lose the moral authority and the ability to discover important truths that come from being an external critic to an established order. He goes on to say that the “abandonment of the role of external moral critic and alternative source of values and meaning will make sense when the Second Coming is at hand, but not before.”[3] Meanwhile, Carter argues, not only must our democracy protect the free exercise of religion, it would also benefit from the influence of religions in at least two ways: “First, they can serve” in a democracy as “the sources of moral understanding without which any majoritarian system can deteriorate into simple tyranny, and, second, they can mediate between the citizen and the apparatus of government, providing an independent moral voice.”
The Culture of Disbelief is a thoughtful, extremely well-written, and, perhaps most rare and important of all, wise book. Throughout, Carter offers comprehensible examples to clarify his points, discussing such current moral dilemmas as euthanasia, abortion, and the death penalty. It is a book that should be read by everyone concerned about the state of our society, the moral and social upheavals of our times, and the role that religion can and should play in our political system.
- ↑ Although Carter does not delve deeply into the history of the American Constitution, it is noteworthy to remember that its framers were greatly influenced by the fact that in England the Church of England was “established,” meaning that only that church was officially legitimate.
- ↑ The rights to meet, worship, and proclaim one’s religion are protected by the more general First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly and thus do not usually pose questions under the religion clauses.
- ↑ Presumably at that time the distinction between religion and government/politics will cease and, therefore, the conflict between the two will end.
The American continent gives signs and evidences
of very great advancement; its future is even more promising,
for its influence and illumination are far-reaching,
and it will lead all nations spiritually.
The flag of freedom and banner of liberty have been unfurled here,
but the prosperity and advancement of a city,
the happiness and greatness of a country
depend upon its hearing and obeying the call of God.
The light of reality must shine therein
and divine civilization be founded;
then the radiance of the Kingdom will be diffused
and heavenly influences surround.
Material civilization is likened to the body,
whereas divine civilization is the spirit in that body.
—‘ABDU’L-BAHÁ
Authors & Artists
M. RIESA CLARK, a poet and writer
whose work has appeared in such literary
journals and anthologies as Bitterroot,
Parnassus Literary Journal, Poetpourri,
and Poetry Peddler, is a self
employed nutrition distributor.
ARNOLD HARRIS, a high school English
teacher and author of articles published
in The Third Decade and The Miami
Herald, makes his first appearance in
World Order.
MONIREH KAZEMZADEH, who holds a
J.D from the Law School of the University
of California at Los Angeles,
concentrates mainly on international
business transactions. As a representative
to the United Nations for the Bahá’ís
of the United States, she organized the
American Bahá’í’ participation in such
United Nations sponsored events as the
Youth Tree Planting campaign. In 1985
she participated in the NGO Forum of
the United Nations Conference for the
end of the Decade for Women in
Nairobi, Kenya.
SEN MCGLINN was born in New Zealand,
where he studied English literature
and theology. An editor and publications
consultant for the United
Nations University and other institutions
in Maastricht, The Netherlands,
he has published three volumes of poetry,
Dawndreams, Feeding Harbour, and New
Vessels. His review of Roger White’s Notes
Postmarked The Mountain of God appeared
in the Winter 1993-94 issue of
World Order.
CLIF MASON, a professor of English and
a former Fulbright Fellow to Rwanda,
has published poetry, literary criticism,
and book reviews in such journals as
Hellas, North Dakota Quarterly, Kansas
Quarterly, Western American Literature,
Arizona Quarterly, Emvoi, and Iota.
TARAz SAMANDARI, who holds a Ph.D
[Page 65] in Biochemistry and a M.D. from the
University of Colorado Health Science
Center, is a resident physician at the
Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Born and raised in Africa, Dr. Samandari
is interested in ethics and human values
and the achievement of international
peace.
ROBERT H. STOCKMAN, who holds a
Th.D in the history of religion in the
United States from Harvard University,
is the Director of the Research Office
at the Bahá’í National Center and an
instructor of religion at DePaul University
in Chicago. He is the author of The
Bahá’í Faith in America: Origins,
1892-1900 and The Bahá’í Faith in
America, Volume Two: Early Expansion,
1900-1912 (forthcoming). He is a frequent
contributor to World Order.
JAMES D. STOKES is a professor of medieval
English and drama at the University
of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.
He has edited the forthcoming Dramatic
Records of Somerset for the University
of Toronto Press and is currently
writing books on the dramatic records
of Lincolnshire and on the effects of the
Reformation on traditional culture in
Somerset. His review of David Hofman’s
Bahá’u’lláh, The Prince of Peace: A Portrait
appeared in World Order’s Fall 1993
issue.
ART CREDITS: Cover design by John Solarz; cover photograph, Mark Sadan; p. 1, photograph, Hans J. Knospe; p. 4, photograph, Charlotte Hockings; p. 7, photograph, Brad G. Burch; p. 8, photograph, courtesy Bahá’í Media Services; p. 24, photograph, Charlotte Hockings; p. 26, photograph, Steve Garrigues; p. 42, photograph, Steve Garrigues; p. 46, photograph, Feng Bin; p. 50, photograph, Steve Garrigues; p. 56, photograph, Nat Daniels; p. 58, photograph, Steve Garrigues.