This is going out to those who expressed an interest in learning my take on the recent Baha'i election. If you do not have any prior knowledge of, or experience with, the Baha'i Faith, I strongly suggest that you first read my Baha'i 101 article (bit.ly/bahai-info) for background and terminology. I also suggest that you read the blog post at bahairants.com if you haven't already done so.
I apologize for the need to delve into the administration in detail, but without doing so, none of it makes any sense.
Recently, the news was posted that the international governing body of the Baha'i Faith, the Universal House of Justice, had conducted a by-election to replace two members who were retiring. To the surprise of nobody, two Counselors from the International Teaching Center (ITC) were elected.
I say "to the surprise of nobody" because this is merely the continuation of a trend which has been developing for some time. Since 2008, all the members of the Universal House of Justice (hereafter referred to as UHJ or House) have been elected from the ranks of the Counselors at the ITC. This is significant because it marks a shift in the leadership from the elected members of the various National Spiritual Assemblies (NSAs) to the appointed wing of the administration. For a religion which prides itself on the democratically-elected nature of its leadership, this is problematic and extremely significant.
Let me explain: the Baha'i administration, from the international level down to the local level, has two parallel tracks. The elected track begins at the bottom with the Local Spiritual Assembly, nine men and women elected at each locality to administer the affairs of the local community. There is no Baha'i clergy; Baha'is have invested their Assemblies with responsibility for both spiritual and temporal affairs, rather as if a Christian church fired the priest/minister and put the church board or parish council in charge. In the United States, the members of the LSA elect the members of the Regional Baha'i Councils, and the membership at large elects a delegate to go to a national convention, where the members of the National Spiritual Assembly are elected. The members of the various NSAs elect the UHJ.
In the appointed track, it is top-down rather than bottom-up (although the elected track, in practice, tends to operate in a top-down fashion as well). The UHJ appoints the Counselors for five-year terms; the Counselors appoint Auxiliary Boards; the Auxiliary Board members appoint assistants, who function at a local level, with responsibility for several communities. Each Auxiliary Board member appoints as many assistants as they feel are necessary, and each assistant is responsible for either the propagation of the faith or the protection of the faith. Assistants for propagation encourage the community in its teaching efforts; assistants for protection are the ideological watchdogs, monitoring the community for signs of deviation and keeping tabs on potential trouble spots.
It's understandable, to some degree, why the members of the various NSAs would elect ITC members to the UHJ (sorry about the alphabet soup; Baha'is get used to this eventually). Because the Baha'i community is a relatively small one, the members of the ITC are the ones who have the most contact with the national leadership groups throughout the world. Because of the nature of Baha'i elections, which forbid nominations and require a plurality of votes but not a majority, it does not take a lot of votes to win election to something. It works like this: each voter writes the names of the nine people (men, in the case of the UHJ) whom they think are the most qualified. The nine people with the most votes win. Speaking from personal experience, having served as a teller in Baha'i elections and having been elected to two local assemblies, even when you have several hundred voters people are often elected with no more than twenty or thirty votes out of the total cast. Democratic, it may be; majority rule it most certainly is not. Although it is strictly forbidden to take part in any electioneering or campaigning, there is a groupthink which tends to take hold among the leadership at all levels, and it is remarkable how often one can predict the outcome of an election by guessing whom the existing leadership would most like to see elected. As a friend of mine once said wryly, "God is never surprised when they announce the results of Baha'i elections." So when the Counselors are put in front of the various NSAs time and again, it's fairly predictable that they will be seen as having the stamp of approval of the House, and therefore as preferred candidates.
An unfortunate side effect of this wholesale shift of power to persons coming from the appointed wing of the administration is an increasing fundamentalism. Remember, this is the wing that has responsibility for ensuring ideological orthodoxy. This tendency is being exacerbated by conditions within the community, which is seeing stagnation, and in some cases shrinkage, in the membership. The natural inclination of any religious community to adverse circumstances is to exhort its members to increase their piety and to work harder in the pursuit of the common goals of the community, and the Baha'is are no exception. There have been attempts made to organize, orchestrate and regiment the process of study and the recruitment of new believers. While claims are made that this process is bearing fruit, there is scant evidence for it. The Baha'i emphasis on unity being a major tenet of the faith, Baha'is tend not to express dissident thoughts in public, but there is a lively underground of free-thinking Baha'is on the internet, and some of them have noted cynically that the current preferred study method (the "Ruhi" series of books) is published by a company owned by a member of the UHJ.
The regimentation of such activities may also be causing a backlash. Longtime Baha'is of my acquaintance locally are of mixed feelings, with a couple expressing their extreme dissatisfaction and distaste for the process. Talk to seasoned Baha'is who volunteer to go overseas as "pioneers" (essentially, missionaries) and time and again one hears the refrain of how different, and nice, it is to be in a developing community far from the center where there is more freedom of action. Newcomers often find themselves attracted by the undeniably liberal aspects of the Baha'i principles, only to find themselves subject to an increasingly rigid and stultifying administration once they enter the community. One person whose comment I read online said, "I was looking for spirituality, and they turned me into a bureaucrat." I know the feeling.
At this point, you may be wondering what the Baha'i obsession with administration is all about. It helps to understand that to Baha'is, work performed in a spirit of service is considered worship, and Baha'is believe that their administrative order is the prototype for the future world commonwealth. How better to serve mankind than to contribute to building the edifice of its unity? Despite their claims of modernity, Baha'is are some of the last people on Earth who still believe in the proposition, common in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, that you can plan, organize, and regulate progress. Such organization and planning is seen as de facto evidence of modernity. In fact, twenty years after the Soviet Union that invented them fell, the Baha'i Faith still organizes Five Year Plans.
The Baha'i administration takes itself so seriously that sometimes it reaches a level I can only describe as idolatry. In 2007, the House sent two Counselors from the ITC to the U.S. Baha'i National Convention to lay down the law to the US NSA, which had frankly admitted in the convention materials that things weren't going well, and perhaps a re-evaluation of priorities was in order. After the big guns from Haifa laid down the party line, the NSA submitted rather meekly, new materials were distributed to the delegates, and Counselor Rebequa Murphy made a speech which included the following gem:
We don’t want to be those people that want to see God with their own eyes or hear His melodies with their own ears. Because we’ve been given the gift of being able to see through the eyes of the House of Justice and listen through the ears of the House of Justice.
Or, in other words, ignore what your eyes, mind and heart are telling you and blindly obey. I hadn't yet resigned my membership, but had resigned my local offices and was well on my way out the door when this took place. It certainly helped push me the rest of the way.
There were other things that drove me out, of course, things that reflect the fundamentalist trend. There has been an increasing crackdown on academics, which is troublesome for a faith that proclaims as one of its tenets the independent investigation of truth. One in particular, Sen McGlinn, a Baha'i doing graduate work in the Netherlands, had his membership revoked for the crime of declaring himself to be a Baha'i theologian. According to the House, there can be no Baha'i theologians, because the interpretation of the sacred texts is the province of the Guardian (of which there can be no more) and the House. McGlinn was the most recent of several Baha'is who were deprived of their membership because of things that they said or wrote, under a process of "disenrollment," which is an innovation seemingly designed to get around the fact that they did not meet the requirements to be declared "covenant-breakers" (a designation normally used for those who align themselves with a schismatic group), and also to circumvent the Baha'i prohibition of takfir (declaring that someone is an unbeliever). And finally, while Baha'i law specifically prohibits proselytization, the House is encouraging people to go door-to-door to "teach." According to the House, it isn't proselytization because proselytization implies the use of force. I don't see that definition anywhere in the Oxford Dictionary.
I could go on and on (and perhaps you are thinking I already have), but this post is already far too long. To sum up, what we have currently in the Baha'i community is an increasingly fundamentalist administration slowly and inexorably tightening the reins. It's a reaction to stagnation, but one that all but guarantees further stagnation, and even losses. As more Baha'is realize they've been submitting to a leadership that is all too willing to fold, spindle and mutilate the truth, and to bend or even outright violate Baha'i law, I expect shrinkage to occur. Certainly, they will find recruitment of new believers more and more difficult, and retention of the ones they do attract problematic.
I can't end this without saying that the Baha'is I have known personally have, almost without exception, been fine and decent human beings who truly believe in what they are doing and honestly think they are making the world a better place. They are people whom I am glad to have known, even if I can no longer believe as they do and am glad to be out. But as is so often the case, the people and the leadership are of two different calibers. As I said when I left, the current leadership does not even appear to have the courage of its convictions.
