Bibliography: #9D2REAK3

key	9D2REAK3
title	The Baha'i Faith in America
author	Garlington, William
authority control	William Garlington
item type	Book
publication year	2005
date	2005
abstract note	Garlington, a former Baha'i and critic of the Baha'i community and its institutions, sets out to accomplish two main goals. The first is to introduce to the American reading public a religion still largely unknown and misunderstood. The second is to trace the historical development of the American Baha'i community from its earliest beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century to the early 2000s. These chapters review major events and introduce leading personalities in American Baha'i history, themes and issues that have characterized the community over the decades, such as early Baha'i connections with American millenialism and metaphysical esotericism, to more recent associations with the Civil Rights Movement and the upheavals of the 1960s. The book's final chapters consider some of the more controversial issues including how propagation is carried out and issues that have been of concern to some Baha'i academics. The author reveals a tendency to favor certain ex-Baha'i critics, preferring to repeat unfounded accusations or analyses while rarely quoting from Baha'is or Baha'i institutions themselves. This work promises to be a neutral academic treatment, but is plagued with some questions about how that neutrality is achieved. While Dr. Garlington gives a good overview of the Baha'i Faith's progressive teachings and a useful history of American polemic against it, he gives disproportionate weight to the viewpoints of a handful of ex-Baha'i critics and disaffected Baha'is. Thus his later chapters on contemporary developments are deprived of the Baha'i community's and institutions' authentic and nuanced voice in the understanding of their own Faith. The critics, if not the author himself, tend to believe that "fundamentalism" is rampant in the Baha'i community. Thus the author quotes as fact one critic's false connections between right-wing Christianity in America and the membership of international Baha'i institutions. In reality, Baha'i institutions advise Baha'is that they should not seek to impose Baha'i requirements on those who are not Baha'is and a national Baha'i educational institution has held courses about how to ensure a spiritual, thinking, non-fundamentalist culture. When treating the controversies fomented by many of these critics, the author draws frequent unfounded conclusions, for example stating that large scale enrollments of African-Americans in the Baha'i Faith in the south around 1970 came to an end because Baha'i "leadership" was unwilling to cope with large numbers of poor and minority members. If this were true, would that same leadership have built a Baha'i institute and a radio station for those believers and continued to emphasize the importance of consolidating their membership? Though I (the reviewer) am a Baha'i, I am able to see from the outsider's viewpoint and understand how contemporary thinking raises some issues to prominence. However, I was personally involved in or observed most of the contemporary issues mentioned in the book. Garlington's informants did not give a complete picture of their interactions with the community and its institutions. The work frequently gives their viewpoints without a full accounting of the Baha'i understanding of the issue at hand, which might make for a richer picture of how the Baha'i tradition applies to daily life and practice. Unfortunately, the work too often characterizes as major crises, controversies that are largely unnoticed among the general Baha'i populace or that are being worked out within the framework of a developing community life.
volume	xxiii, 221 p.
publisher	Praeger Publishers
place	Westport, CT
language	English
manual tags	HISTORY; CONTROVERSIAL; UNITED STATES

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