Leaving the Baháʼí Faith

1. Building, not being, a community

For many Baháʼís, my distinction between building and being a community is meaningless given the Faith’s mission to establish a future divine civilization. They will also point out that community life is alive with all sorts of activities, and that many Baháʼís are, as it were, just being: they are friends and family with each other, having fun and supporting each other. Finally, they will note that “of course” there are many simply not in a position to directly contribute to the processes of growth because of their life situations.

I think these points are certainly right, but the problem is subtle. Even those parts of Baháʼí community life seemingly not connected to building are ultimately still framed in its terms. The issue is not whether Baháʼí community life is actually cycloptically focused on building, but rather that conceptually it is, and this inevitably influences the communal dynamic — although to also be clear, what I and others have personally experienced is an actual cycloptic focus on building, in which the Core Activities and accounting take priority over everything else. My point here is that ultimately the only way to be authentically a Baháʼí is to build, or at least contribute to the building; just being is fine, but only ever as a pause.

Yet, even pausing seems to be problematized. To my knowledge, never in its messages has the Universal House of Justice indicated that a time is coming when the international community will slow down its pursuit of growth for a few years to take stock, consolidate what has been achieved, and breathe and enjoy. If such a time is coming, it does not feel like it will come in my lifetime. Why is this detail important? As the infallible ruling authority of the Baháʼí world, the House establishes the norms of our communities, and Haifa’s focus has been squarely on growth.

Before it seems like I am about to do what other former Baháʼís have done and accuse the House of fundamentalism, I want to point out two things. First, I have directly experienced their efforts, as well as the efforts of the Counselors, precisely to combat fanaticism, especially when zealous Spiritual Assemblies begin violating Baháʼís’ private lives. Second and more importantly, the fervent quest to build is not their opinion or whim, but a command explicitly and repeatedly given in the Writings.

Sometimes the accusation of fundamentalism is really intended to be an accusation of literalism. There are two points to be made here. The first is that as an exegetical strategy, literalism gets an unfair bad reputation. It is true that unsophisticated literalism easily descends into cherry-picking and worse, but there are sophisticated forms of literalism that recognize and wrangle with the many paradoxes and difficulties of performing such an exegesis well — and I believe the House is sincerely striving to do it well. Moreover, no text can be read entirely metaphorically, least of all scriptures. Sooner or later, we all must be literalists at least some of the time.

The other point is this: the fact of the matter is that the Writings do actually stipulate that they must be read more or less literally by those not authorized to interpret them, and those individuals have long passed on. More precisely, the Writings permit individual Baháʼís to have their own personal interpretations, so long as they are properly evidenced in the scriptural text. However, what the community believes as a whole must be arrived at through literalist readings of the scripture framed by what the authorized interpreters have left behind. The House is permitted some latitude, but as I understand it, almost exclusively in the domain of implementation: their purpose is not to think about what should be believed in the Faith, but to think about how to institute what has already been established as the belief system.

Other times, the accusation of fundamentalism is really intended to be an accusation of dogmatism, and this is an accusation with which I am sympathetic. However, the dogmatism has not just fallen from the sky and landed on the Baháʼís: it is a direct result of the kind of mentality that the Writings, intentionally or unintentionally, end up cultivating. This will become more clear when I discuss the conception of the self in the next subsection.

Realizing all of this has put me in an unpleasant position. The House’s decision to devote all Baháʼís to the goal of achieving “entry by troops” is fully justified by the Writings. Moreover, the Writings put forward a fairly thought-through policy with respect to how to interpret them, which the House is dutifully abiding by. I therefore do not see a case to be made that the House is cherry-picking or engaging in some other exegetical duplicity or perversion — and yet, I remain deeply troubled by their overriding focus on entry by troops. So, what is going on here? To return to my distinction between the sociological and the scriptural, the problem I have been seeing is not with the Baháʼí leadership, but in the very foundations of the Baháʼí Faith itself.

Let me back up for a moment. Earlier I distinguished between what actually happens in Baháʼí community life versus what is conceptually really called for by the Writings. Even earlier, I indicated that some traditions Christianity are not only subject to this same distinction, but have been wise to embrace it, and that perhaps one day the Baháʼís will do the same. The truth is, I doubt the latter will happen. That is because, as I also already noted, the nature of Christian and Baháʼí scriptures are quite different, the attempts of many Christians to force univocality onto the Bible notwithstanding. To put it bluntly, it is far more possible for the Christian to be less beholden to the literal word and consider its spirit, or to take a more textually critical approach, than it is for a Baháʼí.

Moreover, a spirit of temperance, humility and realism may be inherent to Christianity overall, not just some traditions of it. Why? Potentially what ultimately matters most in the Christian faith is not its editorially complicated scripture, but the Sermon on the Mount and the mythology of the life, miracles, death and resurrection of Christ. The Baháʼí mythology is different in its content, with scripture, which is upheld as a literal charter for a future world order, taking center stage in it. And to be very clear, the Writings will not be a charter like, say, the constitution of the United States, which can be amended by the citizens of that country through their elected representatives. No, the Writings will be an inerrant charter that must be accepted more or less wholesale by all those who declare themselves to be Baháʼís, and because Shoghi Effendi has made very clear that the Faith is supposed to be the state religion of the future civilization, non-Baháʼís must somehow reconcile themselves to it.

Returning to the main topic here, some Baháʼís do acknowledge the distinction between building and being, but they see it as just the lot of our particular historical moment, as after all, the civilization — which is presumably when Baháʼís, and humanity as a whole, can finally just be — is still being built. I have always been sympathetic to this idea. However, when we really read the Writings’ vision for the future, it is hard not to come away with the feeling that human unity will just lead to more work. Again, I come to scripture as the source of the problem I am seeing: there simply does not seem to be any rest in the Baháʼí future, much less any enjoyment of the great gift of our existence, just ceaseless labor. The labor is supposed to be blissful, yes, but I expect it would instead prove grinding.

I want to be very careful in what I am trying to say here, so three nuances are in order. First, non- Baháʼís may be shocked that I am focusing on this theme of ceaseless labor as the problem of the Baháʼí community and not the fact that what Baháʼís seem to be striving to establish is a planetary theocracy. The reason I am not ringing the alarm bell on this is that there may not be a bell worthy of ringing. Yes, I am worried a planetary theocracy might be the goal, but many of the Friends I have known have actually been very wary to describe the future as theocratic, not because they know that will sound terrible to secular ears, but because they genuinely believe and hope that the political categories of the future will be so unimaginably different from the political categories of today that concepts like “theocracy” and “secularism” will simply stop making sense. Considering how many of our political categories today would be utterly incomprehensible to our ancestors, this is a very fair point. Anyone, even a spiritually illuminated person like Shoghi Effendi, would have profound difficulty imagining an unimaginable future.

Second, although I have come to have problems with the specific form of global unity the Writings seem to envision — an absolute and enduring unity of purpose and attention — I still believe in unity. My problems with the specific Baháʼí conception of unity would be worthy of an essay of its own, so I will not delve into it here; let it suffice that on this score I am, so to speak, a federalist, not a unitarian, or as the Unitarian Universalists might put it, I believe in a covenantal union, not a creedal one. Nevertheless, Baháʼu’lláh is truly prophetic in His basic insight that union is both necessary and inevitable for our species and our planet.

Third, of course it is not as though the more desirable future is some kind of stasis. Once again, the problem is subtle: it is not that labor will still need to be done in the future, it is that, as far as I can see, there will only be labor.

All this being said, was not building a civilization what I signed up for in 2009? It was indeed. The Baháʼís have never once dissimulated about the immense spiritual significance they ascribe to the House’s growth plans. Some non-Baháʼís have suggested that I simply have “buyer’s regret”, or that my “old soul” is not really fit for participating in a religion as youthfully ambitious as the Baháʼí Faith. I know myself — a problematic claim from the Baháʼí perspective, as I will try to explain further below — so I know these diagnoses are not true for me, but the point does still stand that the Baháʼís have not at all misrepresented themselves in this respect.

Still, I have recently seen Friends leave the Faith precisely because of the lack of conceptual authenticity afforded to the choice and need to just be. Worse, they have left with bitterness, even rage, as though something sacred about themselves had been violated. And I have seen how the Friends respond to those who leave on these grounds, and it is unfriendly: it is those who leave who are fault, not the Faith. Here is where I come to my second core problem and reason for leaving.