Comments About Race, In Morality and Money

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Comments about

"Race, Immorality and Money in the American Bah'Community:Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly"

Robert H. Stockman[1]

Originally published in Religion Vol. 30, No. 2, April 2000, 133-139

An article about racial and ethnic diversity in a new religious movement, about thatcommunity's capacity to attract converts from various backgrounds, and its ability to

deal with internal crises resulting from its diversity, holds the potential to illuminate ourcollective understanding of topics in the sociology of religion that have becomeincreasingly significant in the last decade. When the article deals with race, immorality,money, and impeachment as well it even promises to be an entertaining read. But acareful examination of Juan R. I. Cole's "Race, Immorality, and Money in the AmericanBah' Community: Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly" raises importantquestions about its methodology, structure, and content.

The article is based on "unpublished interviews and drafts done by anonymousreporters for the short-lived Bah' magazine, dialogue, which was forbidden to publishthese materials by the NSA, as well as upon follow-up interviewing with members of

the Los Angeles Bah' community" (p. 3). What sort of drafts and interviews werethey? Was the work scholarly, journalistic, or amateurish? Did the authors have anytraining, and was the work analytical? Is all the research ten years old, or has any beenconducted since dialogue closed its doors in 1989? Is it possible that the magazine was"forbidden" to publish the material because of its uneven or poor quality? A lack ofdescription of the materials and how they have been used leaves the reader wonderingabout the reliability of the information on which the article is built. The fact that many

paragraphs have no footnotes at all is methodologically suspect. While the author refersto "one of my interviewees" (p. 28) there are no footnoted interviews by him.

Furthermore, when one considers that the minutes of the National Spiritual

Assembly of the Bah's of the United States and of the Los Angeles Spiritual Assemblyare unavailable because they are, by law, confidential (because Assemblies exercise a

Submitted by and posted with permission ofauthor. This material has been published inReligion Vol. 30, No. 2, April 2000, pp. 133-139,the only definitive repository of the content thathas been certified and accepted after peer review.Copyright and all rights therein are retained by

Academic Press. This material may not be copiedor reposted without explicit permission. For a fulltable of contents to this issue, see the InternationalDigital Electronic Access Library.

Juan Cole's article to which this piece responds is available online at the H-Baha'i site,www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/bahai/2000/dialala2.htm.
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pastoral function and thus their minutes contain information about the conduct ofindividuals that it would not be ethical to disclose), one realizes that two significantsources of information are unavailable and inevitably the article must be incomplete.This requires caution when drawing conclusions about the motivations of Bah'institutions and their officers; even if solid evidence can be provided, inferences of

motive remain inferences.

When one examines the reasons the article gives for disbanding the Los AngelesSpiritual Assembly, one sees the difficulties that are caused by the available sources.[2]Official reasons for the disbanding are imperfectly represented in the materials andinformation about institutional reasoning is completely absent, while the possibleambiguities in and confusions about the official pronouncements are amplydocumented. Perhaps the reasons for the Assembly's disbanding were clear to themajority of the Los Angeles Bah' community and the materials oversampled theconcerns and complaints of a minority; but without surveys it is impossible to know atthis late date. It is surprising that only a few phrases and portions of sentences arequoted from the National Spiritual Assembly's lengthy July 21, 1986 letter to the LosAngeles Bah's stating the official reasons for the disbanding, a letter that wassubsequently published in the August 1986 issue ofThe American Bah', the nationalBah' newspaper.[3]1: But if any confusion remains at this late date, an effort couldhave been made to interview or e-mail members of the National Spiritual Assembly forclarifying comments.

Complicating the difficulties caused by the sources is a structural problem: thearticle presents short summaries of official statements about the reason the Los AngelesAssembly was disbanded with so many caveats and questions from the archivalmaterials that one is left wondering exactly what was going on. Obviously, for reasonsof space, one cannot publish the full transcripts of the various Bah' business meetingsthat occurred, and the reader must rely on the author to be selective in summarizingthose meetings, but one is left with a concern that possibly more effort could have beenmade to reconstruct the official reasons for disbanding the Los Angeles Assembly.

The article makes no distinction between scholarly discourse--where in hindsightpoints must be argued completely and backed with evidence--and the sort of give andtake conversation--which is informal and often requires discretion--that occurs in Bah'community business meetings where difficult decisions are discussed and debated. Itwould not be reasonable to expect members of the National Spiritual Assembly to

present an academic case for their decisions in the latter environment, nor would it bereasonable to expect that they would present all the possible reasons for their decisions

while some matters were still being resolved. Thus, for example, the article notes thatDr. Robert Henderson, in a talk on March 14, 1987, stressed as a reason the LosAngeles Assembly was disbanded the problem caused by the financial losses of the LosAngeles Bah' bookstore, but comments that he did not mention the problems that ledto a lawsuit against the Assembly by a renter of its facilities, or the allegations that theAssembly may have made a loan to one of its members (p. 15). [4]But it would not beunusual to remain silent about lawsuits while they are proceeding in order not to

jeopardize their results, and there is no way to know whether the issue of the loan hadbeen resolved at that point, and if so, how it was resolved.

Elsewhere the article notes that Henderson stated that "we don't know about the

process of building a Bah' community in a metropolitan environment" and concludesthat this is a reference by Henderson to "a general Bah' bias against cities" (p. 25). In
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the 1950s, an urgent need to disseminate the Bah' Faith widely led to a call that largeurban Bah' communities reduce their size through voluntary outmigration to placeslacking Bah' communities, and while calls for dispersion of urban Bah's have beenmade since 1963, they have not held a prominent place in plans to spread the Bah'Faith. It seems more likely that the comment refers to the fact that because of

international guidelines for setting the jurisdictional boundaries of local Bah'communities, most Bah' communities in North America have 9-15 adult members;few have more than 100 adult members, and therefore the Bah' Faith has not yetacquired experience in managing larger communities.[5]

In spite of the difficulties of sources and structure, if one reads between the lines onecan construct a picture of what happened. For several years before the Los AngelesAssembly was disbanded in July 1986, it had serious problems of financing andconstructing a new Bah' Center and had ceased to devise plans to integrate its variousminority groups (p. 17); the National Spiritual Assembly appointed an executivecommittee to work with the Assembly to resolve its problems as early as 1983 (p. 9);over a three-year period the Assembly was unable to resolve its financial difficulties ordiminish ethnic tensions that are natural in any racially and ethnically integrated groupand may have been unusually great in Los Angeles; the Los Angeles community wouldhave gone bankrupt if drastic action had not been taken (p. 10); at least two membersresigned from the Assembly, one out of frustration (p. 7) and one feeling the Assemblyshould have been dissolved a year before it was (p. 6); the Assembly "appeared to have

been unequal to the challenge" of financing and staffing the center (p. 13-14); theAssembly had ceased to act when Bah' laws were violated by Bah's (p. 21); theAssembly ceased to keep minutes, indicating a serious level of administrative

breakdown (p. 9); and the Bah's in one region of the city became so concerned theyproposed a plan to resolve the problems (p. 31).[6] This lengthy list appears to flesh outquite well the National Spiritual Assembly's official and "major reason" (p. 6) fordissolving the Assembly, namely, "the inability of the Spiritual Assembly to cope withthe demands of the administration of the community's spiritual and operational affairs"(p. 6).[7] What additional reasons would the National Spiritual Assembly need todisband the Los Angeles Assembly when it already had so many? The article,surprisingly, only hints at the possible problem of cost overruns in converting a former

bowling alley into the new Los Angeles Bah' Center, a potentially significant reasonfor the National Spiritual Assembly to act.[8] The article even notes that the NationalSpiritual Assembly as a body met with the Los Angeles Assembly to discuss disbandingit before making the move public (p. 6), an act showing respect for that institution.[9]

The article's problems of sources and structure continue in discussion of the twenty-

one months before the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly was re-established in April1988. The National Spiritual Assembly appointed a six-member administrative councilconsisting of Bah's living outside the city to run the community and a "Council of

Nineteen" consisting of Los Angeles Bah's to oversee teaching, consolidation, andpublicity efforts. The article says it rotated the membership of the Council of Nineteen"to create a wider base of administrative experience" (p. 7-8). All of this, presumably,was done to give the Los Angeles Bah's the maximum freedom to elect a newSpiritual Assembly. Had the National Spiritual Assembly wished to signal which nine

people it wanted the Los Angeles Bah's to elect to the new Spiritual Assembly in1988, the best way to do so would have been to appoint a single administrativecommittee consisting of nine Los Angelenos, rather than giving the significant

responsibility to six people living outside the city limits (and therefore ineligible forelection to the Assembly) and creating an advisory body of at least nineteen Bah's
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from within the city (thereby diluting the power of incumbency).

A month after the Council of Nineteen was appointed--and twenty months beforethe eventual election of a new Spiritual Assembly--a photograph of the new body was

published on the cover of theLos Angeles Bah' Journal. One is puzzled why the

article construes the event as the "spread" of a "tactic" of "subtle campaigning" that had"long been mastered by several members of the NSA" (p. 8). Is it not natural that theLos Angeles Bah's would want to see a picture of the advisory body helping to runtheir community? Would not such a photograph help confer both legitimacy andhumanity to the body? Is there evidence that the decision to publish the picture wasmade by the National Spiritual Assembly rather than independently by the editor of the

Journalor by the six-member administrative committee? Is there evidence the picturewas published in order to "subtly campaign"? Surely the picture would have been moreeffective as a campaign poster if it had appeared twenty months closer to the election.[10]

One also wishes the article explained how the disbanding was a "failure" and how itcan assert that the "NSA had become convinced of the failure of their highlyinterventionist experiment" (p. 23).[11]In the twenty-one months between thedisbanding of the old Assembly and the election of the new one, the article asserts, thecommunity's debts were paid off (p. 24) and the teaching work had picked up, resultingin 50 declarations in 1986 (p. 24), an increase over the 39 declarations in 1985 (p. 39).[12] The article is silent about additional problems faced by Persians and blacks, henceone can infer the issue of integration was being managed acceptably. Elections forBah' Spiritual Assemblies are normally held on April 21 each year; April 21, 1987,was only nine months after the old Assembly was disbanded and possibly was too soonto elect a new Assembly; April 21, 1989, would have been thirty-three months after thedisbanding, a long time for a community to wait without electing an Assembly; the

National Spiritual Assembly could not have abolished the Los Angeles SpiritualAssembly permanently because it is not the business of a national body to administer alocal community permanently; why not re-elect the Assembly in 1988?

One also wonders why the election of "three or four former members" to the newassembly was seen "as a vindication of the body that had been dissolved" (p. 28).[13]According to the conventions of mathematics, this means five or six of the original ninemembers were not re-elected; the turnover was far greater than would normally happenin an election (p. 31) and produced a substantially different body. It would be especiallyvaluable to know how many of the new members had served on the Council of Nineteenand what the racial and ethnic makeup of the new spiritual assembly was.

Based on the preceding reconstruction of the disbanding and reelection of the LosAngeles Assembly, it is difficult to know what to make of the last four pages of thearticle, which offer as a thesis statement "I believe these considerations [disbanding theAssembly because of issues of immorality and race] were subsidiary to power andmoney" (p. 28). Surprisingly, the thesis is argued without footnoting a single fact orallegation that is made. Citations would have been particularly useful in the paragraphstating that Robert Henderson, the secretary-general of the American Bah' community,"in the hardline Bah' political culture of top administrators," had to "demonstrate anability to impose his will on the national community" (p. 29). The article gives asevidence the fact that he dissolved "a number of local assemblies early in his

administration" and made "threats to others" in order to "assert and consolidate nationalcontrol" (p. 29). It even describes the disbanding of local assemblies as "routine" (p. 1).
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But the article fails to mention a single assembly that was disbanded by the NationalSpiritual Assembly other than Los Angeles.[14] When I spoke to six or seven personsknowledgeable about national Bah' affairs only three disbandings of spiritualassemblies in the last twenty years could be recalled; one in 1982 or 1983, beforeHenderson was Secretary-General; the disbanding of the Los Angeles Assembly in

1986; and one in 1997.[15] Furthermore, none of the assemblies were disbanded"because their members have flagrantly violated Bah' law" or were deemed "morallycorrupt" or even "insufficiently loyal" (pp. 1, 4), reasons the article cites whyAssemblies "usually" are disbanded (p. 1). The fact that the Los Angeles Assembly'sdisbanding was indeed almost "unprecedented" (p. 1) explains why some LosAngelenos were so startled or dismayed by it.[16]

The arguments about monetary motivations of the National Spiritual Assembly alsorequire examination. The article notes that at one point only 125 of the 1200 adultBah's in Los Angeles were giving to the local Bah' fund and this "reduced the NSA'sreceipts from the Los Angeles community to almost nothing" (p. 30). But the articledoes not consider the fact that Bah's are encouraged to contribute directly to all Bah'funds (local, national, continental, and international). Many of the wealthiest Bah'shave an understandable concern that their contributions are spent well--most of themhave money because they know how to manage it--and some of them will shift part oftheir charitable giving to the national Bah' fund if the local Bah' fund appears to bemismanaged. Without access to information from the national Bah' treasurer's officeabout the volume of direct contributions from Los Angeles Bah's, the assumption thatthe Los Angeles community had ceased to be a "profit center" (p. 11, 30; a particularlyinvidious term) is questionable. To add undocumented speculation that the members ofthe National Spiritual Assembly acted out of fear that their compensation was indanger--which amounts to only a small fraction of the total national Bah' budget--seems unwarranted.[17]

Finally, one must return to the promising hints about an examination of theproblems of a multiethnic, multiracial, globalized new religious movement with whichthe article began. Beside the problems of sources and structure that haunt theexamination of the integration of Persian Bah's into the American Bah' community--almost all the information comes from a manuscript "The Persian Bah's of LosAngeles" of unknown authorship, length, approach, and quality--one never gains a senseof what the Los Angeles Bah's sought to achieve, what they accomplished, how thiscompared to other Bah' communities in the United States, and what it might tell usabout globalized new religious movements.[18] A study of the integration challengesfaced by a diverse new religious movement requires a long timeframe, not just three or

four years of impressionistic information mostly focusing on a particular institutionalcrisis. A solid piece of sociological research on the subject could have been of great useto the academic community. Instead, we have an article that asserts that the Bah's havea history of forgetting what they sought to do and why they sought to do it.

Bibliography

National Spiritual Assembly.National Spiritual Assembly of the Bah's of the United States to the Bah's of LosAngeles, July 21, 1986, quoted in The American Bah', vol. 17, no. 8 [August 1986], p.28.

National Spiritual Assembly.
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Annual Report of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bah's of the United States,1986-87, p. 12).

Stockman, Robert H."United States Bah' Membership and Enrollment Statistics, 1894-1993," unpublished

paper.

Notes

[1] For the sake of professional ethics, the author wishes to disclose that in addition to his position as an

instructor in the Religious Studies Department at DePaul University, he is also director of the Research

Office of the Bah' National Center, Wilmette, Illinois; that he is employed by the National Spiritual

Assembly of the Bah's of the United States; and that he has neither sought nor used confidential

information available through his position in composing the article. Furthermore, he feels it should be

stated that he was recommended to the journal to reply to "Race, Immorality, and Money," by the author

of that article.

[2] One wonders why the disbanding is referred to as an impeachment in the article's title. "Impeachment"popularly means "to accuse of treason or other high crime or misdemeanor." It can also mean "to

prosecute," "to bring a charge or accusation against; to accuse of, charge with" (Oxford English

Dictionary). Since it is not clear what "charges" were leveled against the Los Angeles Assembly, and the

article describes no formal procedure against the Assembly, the word seems misleading.

[3] The letter is described as written to the Los Angeles Bah's by Robert C. Henderson, but it is in fact

from the entire National Spiritual Assembly and constitutes an official communication about the

disbanding.

[4] Robert C. Henderson is the current secretary-general of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bah's

of the United States, and therefore is chief executive officer of the American Bah' community. The

article states he was "mysteriously elected to the NSA (in a way filling a slot vacated by his mother,Wilma Ellis)" (p. 14), but Henderson was elected to the Assembly in December 1982 (just a year and a

half after his mother had been elected in May 1981), and she continued to serve on the Assembly until

November 1985. Henderson served as a member and chairperson of the National Teaching Committee

from 1973 to 1980, a position of considerable importance that probably made him well known to the

delegates who elect the National Spiritual Assembly.

[5] It is not clear to what "a general Bah' bias against cities" refers. Most likely it refers to the same idea

as the statement "many traditionalist Bah's believe cities are in imminent danger of evaporation" (p. 19).

There are indeed a few Bah's who believe this, but no one has conducted a survey to determine the

percentage (which, in my opinion, is quite small; perhaps a few percent). To assert it is a "general bias"

against cities requires documentation; to assert, further, that it is a value held by "many traditionalist

Bah's" requires some definition of what the term "traditionalist" means, how it differs from

"conservative," and what values it encompasses. Further, one would like to know what a "conservative

Bah'" is (the term is not defined) and would like to understand some statements about them, such as

why they are said to have "despised" the youth culture of the 1960s (p. 13) and how it is known to be the

case.

[6] This action of a Bah' neighborhood Feast district calls into question various statements in the paper

that Bah's must have "unswerving obedience" to their Assembly (p. 31) and that they are "forbidden to

utter any public criticism of their religious bodies' policies or decisions" (p. 2). On the contrary, Bah's

are encouraged to offer their ideas and opinions to Assemblies frankly and freely. What is forbidden,

however, is to allow the discourse to break down into wrangling and dissention; before that happens

Bah's should take their concerns to a higher administrative institution, such as the national spiritualassembly in the case of problems with the local spiritual assembly.
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[7] The full text reads "the inability of the Spiritual Assembly to cope with the demands of the

administration of the community's spiritual and operational affairs and the resulting deterioration of

conditions in the community" (National Spiritual Assembly 1986, p. 28).

[8] I have no documentation that there were cost overruns and mismanagement of the effort to reconstruct

the Bah' Center, but when I met members of the Los Angeles Bah' Community in the mid 1980s this

was the major reason they mentioned to me for the disbanding of the Los Angeles Assembly. The article

asserts that because of the costs of building the new Center, it was "disliked by some NSA members" (p.

13), but no evidence for such an attitude is presented.

[9] The fact that the National Spiritual Assembly as a body met with the Los Angeles Spiritual Assembly

also clearly indicates that, contrary to inferences in the article that Secretary-General Henderson was

acting unilaterally, the disbanding of the Los Angeles Assembly was a collective decision of the National

Assembly.

[10] The issue of electioneering was also raised on page 20, where the article states that the "NSA appears

to have been worried that the large influx of Iranian Bah's would create a new voting bloc" and theywould get voted out of office, consequently "in response" they "acted behind the scenes to close down

regular scripture study sessions hosted by popular Iranian immigrant lay preachers." No names are given,

of course, to protect reputations. My discussions with six or seven knowledgeable people have revealed

only one possible case of an "Iranian immigrant lay preacher," not a group of them and certainly not a

pattern of repression, as the article claims; furthermore the claim that "regular scripture study sessions"

were shut down as a way of preventing subtle campaigning is an inference that may ignore contrary

evidence. Rather than assert that a "campaign" has successfully prevented election of recent Iranian

immigrants to the American National Spiritual Assembly (p. 20-21), it might be useful to probe the

sociology of the community and the dynamics of elections to locate possible cultural causes.

[11] I should add that in the various conversations I have had about the disbanding of the Los Angeles

Assembly, no one has ever raised the question of whether the disbanding was successful; they allassumed that the Assembly was disbanded because of various administrative problems, and since the

administrative problems did not recur with the election of a new Assembly, the effort was in some sense

successful.

[12] The article compares the 50 enrollments in 1987 with much larger numbers in the 1970s, but fails to

note that the Bah' Faith grew throughout the United States--indeed, in Canada, Australia, and western

Europe as well--at a much more rapid rate in the 1970s than it has ever since. If Los Angeles had 1,200

Bah's in 1987 (p. 1), then 50 new Bah's per year represent an annual growth rate of 4.2%, which was

almost double the growth rate of the entire American Bah' community that year (2,630 declarations in

1987 for an overall membership of 107,088; see Stockman)

[13] One wonders why research was not done to determine exactly how many former members were re-

elected, since assembly membership is a matter of public record and the information should be readily

available.

[14] It should be noted that while the article states the secretary-general disbanded assemblies, in fact the

secretary-general has no authority to do so. Only the full National Spiritual Assembly has the authority to

decide whether local assemblies should be disbanded.

[15] The article also alludes to the threat to disband assemblies and gives San Francisco as an example (p.

14). Discussion with various prominent Bah's led me to discover only one possible example of a local

spiritual assembly that came close to being disbanded, and it was not San Francisco. Charlene Maghzi

(personal communication, October 7, 1999), a member of the San Francisco Assembly from 1975, had norecollection of any event that could be construed as a threat to disband the San Francisco Assembly, and

noted that the National Spiritual Assembly trusted the San Francisco so much it gave that body principal
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responsibility for organizing the International Bah' Peace Conference in August 1986, an event attended

by 8,000-9,000 people. A Bah' researcher who wishes to remain anonymous (personal communication,

September 29, 1999) informed me that in the mid 1980s he investigated a rumor that the San Francisco

Assembly was threatened with dissolution and found it to be untrue.

More seriously, the article gives the disbanding of numerous unnamed assemblies and threats to

disband numerous other unnamed assemblies as the only evidence that "authoritarian older members of

the national assembly" were concerned to "assert the authority of the NSA over local bodies" (p. 14).

[16] Several times the article hints that the Los Angeles Bah's regarded the administrative committee

and the council of nineteen as "illegitimate" (p. 23) but in reality the bylaws of the National Spiritual

Assembly give it clear authority to act as it did and most Bah's, presumably, were aware of this.

[17] The national Bah' budget in fiscal 1986-87 was $7,645,000 (National Spiritual Assembly 1987, p.

12). The article notes that there is a "lack of reporting requirements on the precise use of funds in the

budget" (p. 31), but local assemblies are required to maintain a budget and make reports to the local

community about it, and are also required to carry out an annual audit of their treasury. The National

Spiritual Assembly provides a lengthy financial statement in its published annual report and providesdelegates to the annual national convention access to extensive financial printouts. It also hires a

professional accounting firm to audit its books annually.

[18] The article notes that "the question of whether assimilation was even a good goal seems not to have

arisen in official Bah' discourse" (p. 17) but this assumes that a total assimilation was intended. The

National Spiritual Assembly's continued support for study of the Persian language and for a society to

promote Persian arts and culture, and its creation of a four-person department in the national headquarters

to handle Persian-American affairs suggests a long-term commitment to Persian Americans as a distinct

group within the American Bah' community. Because of the Bah' Faith's stress on unity, ethnically

based Bah' communities have never been created; rather, local Bah' communities are supposed to be

ethnically and racially integrated, and thus must deal with the resulting challenges diversity brings. It is

difficult to imagine how a situation would arise whereby an ethnically-based subgroup of Bah's wouldorganize their own community and be "shunned" as a result (p. 18).

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Comments About Race, In Morality and Money