posted with permission of author;
reformatted by Gary Fuhrman
The Baha'i: The Religious Construction of a Global Identity
Author: Michael McMullen
Published by: Rutgers University Press, 2000
Review by Juan R. I. Cole, published in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 40, no. 3 (September, 2001): 555-556.
Remarkably few social scientists have studied the Baha'i faith in the
United States, given its age (established here in the 1890s), size, and
intrinsic interest or "exoticness." Peter L. Berger, Jane Wyman, Margit
Warburg, and Peter Smith have made important contributions to the social
scientific study of this New Religious Movement of Iranian provenance, but
they are a small cohort. A complex tradition, it resembles other esoteric
offshoots of Shi`ite Islam such as Ismailism or the Nusayris in having an
onion-like series of layers, with an outward one presented to outsiders.
Michael McMullen's fine book on the Atlanta Baha'i community of the 1990s
adds importantly to this growing literature. It is steeped in contemporary
American approaches to the sociology of religion. An adherent himself, he
combines participant observation, archival research, in-depth interviews,
and a survey questionnaire. He says that the Baha'is of Atlanta deal with
the problems of pluralism and globalization through both boundary-drawing
and tolerance, which he calls "situated universalism." Baha'is say they
believe in the unity and common origin of the major world religions, in the
unity of humankind, the need to eliminate racism, and the equality of women
and men. They also have global institutions. They elect local spiritual
assemblies and national spiritual assemblies, and the latter elect the
international "Universal House of Justice." The combination of this
globalist ideology and these world-wide institutions, he argues, contrasts
with anti-modernist or "fundamentalist" rejections of globalization.
Chapter 2 deals with the conversion process and the make-up of the Atlanta
Baha'i community, the precise size of which he never informs us. (Baha'i
communities in major U.S. cities seldom exceed a few hundred). He finds
that most Baha'is converted through friends or other personal contacts and
that they were predominantly Protestant in background, with only 11 percent
being Catholic. About a third of the community was raised Baha'i. A quarter
were African-American and 13 percent Iranian. McMullen seems to want to
generalize these findings to the whole country, but a 1987 internal poll
found that at that time, 15 percent of U.S. Baha'is were Iranian-Americans
and only ten percent were African-Americans. McMullen found that most
Atlanta Baha'is considered prayer and scripture study most satisfying, and
they were relatively little interested in the Baha'i administration.
Attending community worship or "Feast" was cited as their favorite Baha'i
pastime by only 4.6 percent of his respondents.
Chapters three and four sketch out the administrative structure of the
religion and its conceptions of authority, especially as these were viewed
by Atlantan Baha'is — including the belief that the Universal House of
Justice is infallible. Chapter 5 examines ritual. Chapter 6 treats the
grounds for inclusion in and exclusion from the community, especially the
practices of "removal of administrative rights" for moral lapses or
political participation, and shunning (for "schismatic" activities).
Chapter 7 treats local efforts to spread the religion or "teach the faith,"
and the disappointment that the promises by leaders that mass enrollments
are imminent have not been fulfilled. He also details conflicts over those
who wish to spread the religion by talking to friends and those who wish to
approach strangers in malls. His survey shows that only a fifth saw
"teaching the faith" as their most enjoyable Baha'i activity. Chapter 8,
among the more engrossing in the book, sketches the twentieth-century
history of Atlantan Baha'is' efforts at "race unity" across the divide of
whites and African-Americans. He recounts conflicts over the advisability
of mixed-race meetings in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s (Baha'i
integrationists largely won in Atlanta then, unlike in many other southern
Baha'i communities), and describes a 1947 white supremacist attack on an
integrated Baha'i feast. He is generally aware of the academic literature
on Baha'i Studies, but his bibliography has startling holes. He neglects
the series Studies in the Babi and Baha'i Religions, even though one of
these volumes collects U.S. urban histories. His chapter on Baha'i ritual
omits any mention of Denis MacEoin's book on that subject.
McMullen's book excels in giving a sense of what it is like to live in an
urban Baha'i community in the contemporary United States, one that most
U.S. Baha'is would recognize as accurate. His vindication of his thesis
about globalism and non-fundamentalist responses, however, seems to me to
depend on some crucial omissions. McMullen ignores the tensions between
Baha'i liberals and Baha'i fundamentalists, and does not seem to realize
that he has found the former when he reports that about a third of the
community says it would not abjure individual conscience to obey the House
of Justice. He is little interested in social control, and is oblivious to
how coercive shunning can be, or how large a shadow the practice casts. He
does not make it clear that Baha'is may not publicly criticize their
institutions. He does not study the members of the local assembly, keeping
power in the background. He never mentions that what Baha'is write about
their faith must be vetted by Baha'i authorities. He does not admit that
mainstream Baha'is hold to scriptural inerrancy even when it contradicts
science. He does not realize that his finding (pp. 105-107) that attitude
toward authority predicts involvement in community rituals and affairs
better than class, race or gender suggests that those authorities make such
participation a sine qua non of full de facto community membership. Fear of
ostracism is likely among the factors that flattens out the usual
disparities in participation among believers of unequal education, wealth
and status.
It is not clear, then, that he has proven his thesis. He admits that the
longer his subjects had been Baha'is, the less they were interested in
learning about or interacting with other religious groups. Although he
speaks of Baha'i interactions with the "global," these appear to be
experiences inside the religion, news reports of conversions in India,
pilgrimage to the Baha'i shrines in Haifa, Israel, and plans for a
theocratic Baha'i world government. Human rights abuses affecting
non-Baha'is in Burma or Guatemala do not galvanize these Baha'is. There is
no evidence in his book that they responded as a community to international
disasters, even on the small scale their numbers permitted, or that they do
any local philanthropy. Yet, an account of a Quaker or a Unitarian
Universalist community in the 1990s would have been full of reactions to
Bosnia, to disasters and to relief work.
McMullen's theory may work for the minority of liberal Baha'is in the
community. The conservative Baha'is, however, have simply colonized or
ghettoized the global. Rather than "situated universalism," they present us
with a fundamentalist particularism with a liberal-sounding veneer that
aims at the engorgement of the world. It is not clear how it differs from
the similar attitude toward global evangelism of groups such as the
Seventh-Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses, which also share
conservative Baha'is' corporate solidarity, authoritarianism and
anti-intellectualism, and some of which are more racially mixed. An outer
layer of the onion is described very well here, but the inner sanctums are
not penetrated.
JUAN R. I. COLE
Department of History
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109