WWUUD stream 
https://websites.umich.edu/~jrcole/bahai/1999/jssr/bhjssr.htm
[Part one]
Despite the large literature on American religious bodies, some groups remain curiously off-limits to careful investigation. In many instances, these largely unstudied contemporary faiths carefully cultivate public images that hide important facets of their outlook and internal workings. Thus, the collapse of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s Oregon commune surprised many observers. Some of these groups have developed control mechanisms that discourage adherents and often even apostates from writing about these workings. Scientology, for instance, employs techniques of harassment against critics. Others employ shunning which can be an extremely powerful deterrent, endangering a lifetime of friendships and even family relationships. The problem with strict internal controls for missionary religions, however, is that they are most often incompatible in Western societies with significant growth. One solution to this difficulty is to attempt to control what are thought of as key pressure points—vocal intellectuals, media, prominent institutions—and to give greater leeway to ordinary believers. This solution has the further advantage of making charges of repression less plausible to the rank and file, who have not personally experienced such constraints.
Here I wish to examine social control mechanisms in the American Baha’i community. These include mandatory pre-publication censorship of everything Baha'is publish about their religion, administrative expulsion, blackballing, shunning and threats of shunning. What are the ideological bases of these control mechanisms? How is power attained and managed in a lay community without a clergy? I wish to stress here that this article is not concerned with the essence or scriptures or theology of the religion, but with the actualities of its day-to-day technologies of control. Many of my remarks cannot be generalized to other national communities, and concern mainly the U.S.
Anyone familiar with the public relations literature produced by the movement will be surprised at the description of control mechanisms given above, since Baha’is are often grouped in the media with Unitarian-Universalists. Why should the Baha’i authorities wish to project an image more liberal than the reality? First, the movement’s scriptures are liberal in their orientation, and as a result even administratively conservative Baha'i leaders support the U.N. and race unity, and pay lip service to the rule of law. But when it comes to the internal governance of the religion, the same leaders wield these control mechanisms to enforce on prominent believers what might be thought of as “party discipline” in the Marxist sense. Second, Baha’i leaders are aware that if the U.S. press understood how their administration actually operates, journalists might be far less favorable to them than is now the case. Third, the Baha'i leadership and intellectual class includes some powerful liberals, and some of the contradictions between self-presentation and policy derive from conflicts among the leadership. Fourth, since the 1960s this non-Christian Iranian religion has not attracted many white evangelicals or working-class Catholics, whereas more pluralist college-educated persons have been much more open to it. Thus, an open insistence on a fundamentalist orthodoxy and a clear condemnation of human rights principles might deprive the religion of an important recruiting ground. Although antiliberals have captured the key posts, they shape the community’s ideology subtly, by controlling media and silencing liberals who begin to become prominent. Because of these techniques of dissimulation, power can remain in the hands of conservatives, while liberals can continue to be recruited at the local level, and often remain unaware of how marginalized they really are.
In the past, the paucity of anything but official literature formed a difficulty in studying the approximately 60,000 adult American Baha’is, but the emergence of Baha’i electronic mail forums in the 1990s has led to the airing of Baha’i individual opinions in public. I will outline some key control mechanisms employed in the U.S., based on published literature, following email debates, and participant observation. The author has been studying the Baha’i religion for a quarter of a century, and spent much of that time as an adherent. This movement originated as a messianic offshoot of Twelver Shi`ite Islam in nineteenth-century Iran. By the time it came to the United States, in the 1890s, it was already an established religion in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East (Smith 1987). It is now among the more widely-spread religious bodies in the world, and since the mid-1980s has officially claimed about five million adherents (Smith and Momen 1989)--a number that has remained stagnant since then and which was probably somewhat exaggerated even at the time. Let us begin with a brief historical overview.
Historical Background of the American Baha’i Community
The religion was founded in the Middle East in 1863 by the Iranian prophet Baha'u'llah (1817-1892), who taught the unity of the world religions and the unity of humankind from his place of exile in Palestine (Cole 1998). It came to the U.S. in the early 1890s, and was nurtured by the religion's second leader, `Abdu'l-Baha (d. 1921) (Stockman 1985-1995). From 1921 to 1957, the world community was headed by Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, Baha'u'llah's great-grandson, who died childless and without a successor as "Guardian" or interpreter of the religion. After a hiatus, the Universal House of Justice, consisting of nine men, was elected by the members of the National Spiritual Assemblies of the world in Haifa, Israel, in 1963, in the wake of a Baha’i world congress held in London (Smith 1987). This legislative body, which had been called for by Baha'u'llah but was now elected for the first time, quickly confirmed that no further Guardians could be appointed (Universal House of Justice 1973:11). The Universal House of Justice created a new appointive institution, the Continental Boards of Counselors, to carry out the functions of propagation and protection—that is, of encouraging proselytizing and imposing orthodoxy (they are assisted by regional “auxiliary board members” and their “assistants”). Some members of the Universal House of Justice were drawn from the ranks of Americans who had served on the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly, and for a time vacancies on the UHJ tended to be filled by former secretaries-general of the U.S. body. More recently vacancies have been filled by counselors appointed by the UHJ. The Universal House of Justice presided over a vast expansion of Baha’i numbers among peasants in the global South, especially India (Smith and Momen 1989). Growth remained slight in Europe.
In 1963, the American Baha’i community had about 10,000 adherents. Here, the religion felt the impact of the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the youth counterculture, and Watergate. The late 1960s and the 1970s were for many Americans a period of profound disillusionment with their social norms and government institutions (Bellah 1976; Wuthnow 1976). This dissatisfaction significantly raised the number of potential converts to less well known religious bodies. Suddenly, the Baha’is' proselytizing ("teaching") efforts, which had had only desultory results previously, reaped tens of thousands of converts. "From 13,000 in 1969, the U.S. Baha’i community grew to 18,000 in 1970; to 31,000 in 1971; 40,000 in 1972; and 60,000 by 1974" (Stockman 1994:18). (Note, however, that Stockman is reporting all the persons who ever registered as members without formally withdrawing, whereas Baha’i authorities soon lost track of about half of them; these persons are unlikely still to be Baha’is.). There were relatively few Baha’i youth (ages 15-21) in the community in 1968, but by the early 1970s there were some 19,000. The influx of youth created frictions with the older Baha’is. Some large proportion of the converts from the youth culture subsequently withdrew (cf. Caton in Hollinger 1992:264-271). Some of those who remained went on to obtain higher degrees, giving the community for the first time a significant number of intellectuals, though these remained poorly integrated into the Baha’i milieu. The Baha’i administration was to have increasing problems with these intellectuals’ “culture of critical discourse” (Gouldner, 1979) in subsequent years. By 1978, the Baha’i administration claimed 77,396 members, though it had confirmed addresses for only 48,357 of these, and the number of youth had fallen to only about 3,500 (National Spiritual Assembly of the U.S. 1979).
In the early 1970s, as a result of proselytizing by young people, thousands of rural African-Americans in South Carolina and northern Georgia adopted the Baha’i faith, attracted by its emphasis on the elimination of prejudice, though most of these converts did not give up their identification with their Christian churches (Hardesty 1993). The members of the U.S. National Spiritual Assembly (based in Wilmette, Ill.) had for the most part become adults in the 1940s and 1950s when the Baha’is numbered only five thousand or so and constituted a relatively closed club. They appear to have worried that the previously-existing community might be swamped by the newcomers. The rolls were becoming cluttered with many declarations of faith based on misunderstandings, and newcomers often had no conception of the rules of Baha'i administration. According to one eyewitness Firuz Kazemzadeh, a longstanding member of the N.S.A. and then a professor of Russian history at Yale, was worried that the community did not have the resources, financial or human, to manage a further influx of poor southern Blacks, and felt that resources should be put into absorbing the thousands that had already come in (personal communication, 16 May 1997). Other, less conservative N.S.A. members strongly argued for allowing the chain conversion to take its course, but these lost the debate. The N.S.A. then deliberately halted the teaching campaign in the South. This is corroborated by a number of sources, including a message posted to the Talisman listserv discussion group (which was run 1994-1996 by John Walbridge, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Indiana University), in which a correspondent reported that he was told by an older African-American Baha'i who had been prominent in teaching the South Carolinian converts more about their religion that
his study of 25 years of national elections led him to think that there would be very little variability in the ethnic makeup of the N.S.A. membership, that a specific ratio of racial diversity was carefully being maintained (sort of an enhanced tokenism?), and that there were lots of fears by the powers that be that if the mass teaching in the south had been allowed to go forward at full steam that a black N.S.A. majority would probably have been elected, so the mass teaching was stopped. (Talisman, April 1996)
Of course, this is only one opinion, and may be incorrect, but the quote shows that some African-American Baha’is entertained these doubts. It does seem clear that the U.S. Baha'i authorities (unlike their Indian counterparts) chose to impose the sort of controls that might risk stagnation rather than take a chance on vast but uncontrolled growth. An eyewitness told me that House of Justice member Ali Nakhjavani deplored the decision as having set back the U.S. Baha’i community “by a generation.” On the other hand, the N.S.A. did show concern to socialize the new Southern African-American converts to Baha'i values; admitted a representative of that community to the N.S.A.; and has done community service work, including setting up a radio station in South Carolina.
The next large-scale event involved the immigration to the U.S. from 1978 through the mid-1980s of some 12,000 Iranian Baha’is fleeing persecution at the hands of the Khomeinist government in Iran. The American rank and file responded to these events with active campaigns on behalf of their beleaguered Iranian co-religionists and enhanced monetary offerings. The House of Justice in Haifa, however, took a different approach. At first it was reluctant to abandon its quietism in order to protest the persecutions. Moreover, it offered no support to Iranian Baha’is attempting to flee, and even punished many who succeeded, on the grounds that they could only have gotten out by denying their faith. In many instances it refused to certify such Baha’is as members, preventing them from being granted asylum and thereby putting them in severe difficulty and sometimes even danger. The U.S. N.S.A. also took this hard line, refusing to welcome large numbers of the escapees into the U.S. community. House of Justice member Ali Nakhjavani vocally and sternly defended these policies on trips to the U.S. The House of Justice did come to support the U.S. N.S.A. in its policy of putting pressure on the Iranian government through cooperation with human rights organizations, though it sometimes continued to balk at certifying escapees as Baha’is.
The period after 1979 was a time of big changes in the U.S. The influx of Iranians, some of whom eventually were accepted into the community, was sufficiently geographically dispersed to require Baha’i communities to come to terms with a more multi-cultural ethos, and most Baha’i communities now included white, Iranian and African-American members. South Carolina and California are the two biggest population centers, but Baha’is have made strenuous efforts to build communities in every state, having by the mid-1990s some 1300 local spiritual assemblies throughout the country and a national annual budget of around $20 million (though contributions to the national fund in 1996 were only $11 million and were not keeping up with inflation). The N.S.A. claims 130,000 Baha’is in the late 1990s, but this is a vast exaggeration, even if one counts the children. The N.S.A.’s own survey of 300 communities showed that only a third of members regularly attended the nineteen-day feast (National Spiritual Assembly of U.S., 1997). Wilmette insiders give a figure closer to 60,000 for adults in good standing for whom the authorities still have a confirmed address, and probably only half of these could be considered “active” or committed. After all, converts can only be removed from the rolls by writing a formal letter to the National Spiritual Assembly explicitly renouncing belief in Baha’u’llah. Most of those who leave the religion do not bother to do so. One Baha'i tells the story of how an attempt was made in the 1980s to contact the Baha’is in Compton, California. Official records showed 22 Baha’is there for which the N.S.A. had addresses. But an exhaustive search turned up only two who still considered themselves Baha’is (personal communication, May, 1997). This case cannot be typical, but it is suggestive. It is sometimes argued that those converts of whom the authorities have lost track may not have entirely given up their allegiance to the religion. In 1990 CUNY conducted a poll of 110,000 U.S. households with regard to religion, and, only finding 24 adults who reported themselves as Baha’is, estimated the size of the community as 28,000 adults. These findings, while perhaps on the low side, confirm that there are not large numbers of lost Baha’is floating about in the general population (Kosmin and Lachman 1992:17, 151, 287).
[to be continued]
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