Idol Chatter

We are all familiar with the “Jesus is coming” meme, and many of us are aware that Jesus isn’t the only savior on the way. Some religions are given to hopes of saviors in the future. It’s no surprise that many people hope to be saved, like a slumbering beauty longs for her Prince Charming, though that salvation may mean the destruction of the world. This desire has been expressed among Christians and Muslims for as long as Christians and Muslims have walked the earth.

In the 13^th Century, the Joachamites announced the Antichrist would appear in 1260, and Christ himself soon thereafter. Around 1750, one of the founders of the Shaker movement made the following announcement:

Repent. For the kingdom of God is at hand. The new heaven and new earth prophesied of old is about to come. The marriage of the Lamb, the first resurrection, the new Jerusalem descended from above, these are even now at the door. And when Christ appears again, and the true church rises in full and transcendent glory, then all anti-Christian denominations—the priests, the church, the pope—will be swept away.

History is littered with such millenarian outbursts. We need not enumerate them all here.

One such revival, commonly called the Second Great Awakening, featured characters like Joseph Smith and William Miller. Miller was a Baptist preacher who got out his notepad and his Bible and calculated the ETA of end of the world. Smith, the self-styled American Muhammad, brought his own Kingdom of Heaven down to Earth.

Pioneers in Persia

A surge of missionary activity seems to have accompanied this revival, and for Protestant Christians, the mission almost always involves the distribution of Bibles. This generally means printing Bibles in the local vernacular, so translation is a prerequisite.

Iran in 1808

The New Testament and Psalms were first translated into the Farsi (Persian) language in 1812. The task was completed in Shiraz, formerly the capital of Persia under Karim Khan and a city with an established Armenian Christian population, by an Anglican priest and a man from Shiraz. Not much later (1820), Shiraz was visited by the missionary Peter Gordon, who asserted that Shiraz was fertile ground for missionary work, and, of all cities in Persia, ought to be the focus of missionary attention. By 1825, the missionary Joseph Wolff established a Christian school for Armenian children in Shiraz.

These missionaries were not trying to convert Muslims, though they would have been happy to do so. Evangelizing to Muslims was a dangerous business, as it meant leading Muslims into apostasy, a capital offense. The missionaries were, rather,  after Jews and Christians of wayward denominations. But their activities, and presumably much of their message, may have been familiar to the Muslims of cities that were targets of missionary action. The revival itself, thanks in part to the missionaries, was spreading among the native Christians of the Middle East, and quite predictably, some Christians were heard to be expecting the imminent return of Christ.

Decline

Things had not gone well for Persia since the death of Karim Khan in 1779. The rise of the Qajars in 1794 was a particularly barbaric affair. In 1813 and 1828, Persia suffered military defeats and lost much territory to Russia, then a Christian empire. The Shah attacked the British Empire (Afghanistan) in 1837-38, but he was rebuffed by the British. Western influence began to increase steadily across Persia. This, no doubt, emboldened Christian missionaries, just as it surely wounded Persian honor.

By 1822, William Miller had completed his calculations and began to preach about the nearness of the Second Coming. He began with general pronouncements, but eventually coughed up the details:

My principles in brief, are, that Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844.

As is well known, Christ missed his date with destiny. Miller then selected an alternative Jewish calendar that would permit Jesus to arrive by April 18 without the risk of being deemed rude. The revised deadline also passed without incident.

I can almost hear the missionaries declaring “the end is nigh” and Persians thinking, “what have we got to lose?” in reply. They could have used a messiah at least as much as any missionary, but a Persian messiah would have to be a Muslim messiah, a mahdi.

The Shaykhis

Sometime after 1826, a Persian named Sayyid Kazim turned his Shayki following in a distinctly millenarian direction [1]. Kazim preached that the Muslim Mahdi, whom he identified as the Christian Messiah, was somewhere in the world, waiting to be discovered. Kazim stated quite clearly that he had not met this messiah. When Kazim died in 1843, he left his followers searching across the land for the Mahdi.

Sayyid Kazim had appointed a successor, Haji Karim Khan Kirmani, who would steer the Shaykhis away from Kazim’s millenarianism and back toward the movement’s less radical roots, but Persia was ripe for a savior, and the new Shayki leader couldn’t steer the ship of faith quickly enough to stop violence from breaking out across Persia.

Among Kazim’s disciples (and Karim Khan’s flock) was a young merchant from Shiraz whom Kazim had instructed at length and presumably sent back to Fars to seek the Messiah. Soon after Kazim died, and shortly after William Miller’s final calculations fell through, the young Shaykhi declared himself to be the Messiah. He was a little late to be Jesus (according to Miller’s reckoning), but better late than never. The young messiah inspired a jihad throughout Persia, and was duly executed in 1850. The rebellion raged on for years, but was put down. Ultimately, the movement renounced violence and was rebranded “the Baha’i Faith.” They continued to endure violent royal reprisals, and they are persecuted in Iran to this very day.

Notes

[1] It’s doubtful that the Shaykhis existed as a millenarian sect before Kazim took over, but even if it had, it wouldn’t have been so before about 1824.

“the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example.”
—Christopher Hitchens

I wasn’t brought up Christian, but I was brought up to believe in a holy trinity of sorts. I was taught that a certain few men were perfect images of God; that these men, though not God in essence, were perfect reflections of God in the “material world,” and thus they were effectively God so far as mankind is concerned. As images of God in the material realm (i.e., idols), they could be regarded as God incarnate. Hence Bahá’u'lláh, the founder of my parents’ religion wrote, “I am God.”

The metaphor I was given was made of three parts: the sun, the light of the sun, and a mirror. The sun represented God, the sunlight the Holy Spirit, and lastly, the mirror took the place of the incarnation, or as Bahá’ís say, the “manifestation,” a term which spiritualists have long equated with “materialization.” It is effectively equivalent to incarnation.

This theological model implied infallibility on the part of the manifestation, as a “perfect reflection” of God. Though infallibility was implicit, it was made quite explicit by Bahá’u'lláh’s writings. This model of perfect deification of individuals was extended, as it turned out, to various successors of Bahá’u'lláh, though nuance was applied to the notion of infallibility applied to the successors.

The doctrine of infallible succession, entitled “the Covenant,” is considered by Bahá’ís to be an unprecedented, eternal mandate from God that keeps the Bahá’í authorities “free from error.” This covenant that God keeps with Bahá’ís can be stated thus: so long as a Bahá’í is faithful to the authoritative succession, God will provide that Bahá’í with unerring guidance by means of that authority.

The doctrine was first established in Bahá’u’lláh’s last will and testament, entitled “the Book of the Covenant,” wherein he directed his followers to be faithful to his sons. This command was used by the prophet’s eldest son to claim himself to be an infallible exemplar for all Bahá’ís, just as Muhammad is regarded as a perfect example by most Muslims.

Like an abusive husband thrives on the inferiority of a submissive wife, religion often undermines humanity as a means to justifying its own existence. Christianity sees humans as hopeless sinners. Islám sees humans as powerless slaves. The Bahá’í Faith established its mandate upon an image of humans as blind sheep in need of continuous guidance. This the Bahá’í Faith did to an unprecedented degree, inasmuch as its “Covenant” is promised to continue to be manifested in this world in a much more thorough sense than in the case of the Catholic Papacy or the Shí’a Imamate.

I gave up on such divine authoritarianism long ago, chiefly because I found that it stifles independent thought and undermines human dignity; yet, as I look back at the history of the Bahá’í religion, I sometimes wonder whether it might have been originally conceived with more enlightened intentions. This is not to suggest that the Bahá’í religion can be redeemed in its current state of depravity, or even that Bahá’u’lláh was without fault.

Bahá’u’lláh had several of the markings of a reluctant messiah. He was 45 years old and living in exile when he finally declared himself the “promised one of all ages.” He’d recently disappeared for two years, apparently overwhelmed by the infighting amid his religious community. At the time, he claimed that he had been aware that he was a “manifestation” for over a decade. Perhaps he had been waiting for the right timing, perhaps to transform the passage of some number of years into a retroactive prophecy. It’s hard to even guess what might have been going on in his mind.

Bahá’u’lláh claimed to have become aware of his divine station while imprisoned in the “Black Pit” of Tehran at age 35, probably wondering whether he was about to be executed. He said he’d had a divine vision under the unbearable conditions of that former subterranean reservoir.  It should surprise no one that this man saw something remarkable while bent under the weight of heavy chains in a dark, damp, cave. What interests me is how long Bahá’u’lláh’s memory of that experience had to distill before he ever brought it to the attention of his religious community. Bahá’u’lláh’s Black Pit would make a fine analog to Muhammad’s Cave of Hira. The key difference for Bahá’u’lláh was that he was in mortal danger at the time and that he let the memory brew for a decade.

Did Bahá’u’lláh immediately come to believe that he was the world-Messiah? It doesn’t appear to be likely, but I don’t doubt that he convinced himself of it over time. He may have schemed consciously to some degree, but I think it likely that the subconscious mind ultimately took over. Yes, I believe he deluded himself, not that this would have been out of the ordinary. Men commonly delude themselves. It’s the nature of the beast. We may even look upon ourselves as naught but the delusions we craft for ourselves. We are quite adept at self-deception. We craft memories to develop narratives of our pasts. We rationalize. We forget when remembering is inconvenient. This is how the human mind operates.

I don’t think that Bahá’u’lláh’s delusion of grandeur was entirely malignant. There are signs that Bahá’u’lláh might have been something of a Bourgeois humanitarian, and his delusion might have saved a faltering messianic movement from itself and set it upon a progressive course. It’s not a great stretch to suggest that his writings emphasized human harmony, and why not advocate social change through religious revolution? There was perhaps no better forum for social change in the 19th Century Middle East than religion.

Even at his most tyrannical, Bahá’u’lláh often left us hints of a pragmatic purpose. When he spoke of the importance of fearing God, he directed his reasoning toward those whom he regarded as the shameless mass of men. When he wrote his very Muslim, retrograde “Book of Laws,” he said that he did so to satisfy certain elements among his following. He did say that men should be regarded as sheep, but I think he may have left room for exceptions, for the statement is not necessarily false if taken as a statement of sociological fact. Is it not true that most people prefer to live as sheep?

I often criticize Bahá’u’lláh for his undignified depiction of humanity, but perhaps pessimism about human vision is a forgivable failure. I consider this failure of faith in humanity to be the Achilles heel of Bahá’u’lláh‘s cause, but that crippling shortcoming does not necessarily render his efforts meaningless or in vain. Taken in the context of his time and place, we may yet be able to see Bahá’u’lláh as a progressive reformer—though no hero, saint, or messiah—in a religious milieu that was and remains in desperate need of reform.

Dear Mr. Ayatollah,

Some time ago, a close Bahá’í relation of mine insinuated that I had encouraged you to persecute her fellow believers in Iran. This, I suppose, she did because I have often criticized her religion, having once been a Bahá’í myself. I was very troubled by this assertion of hers. I would hate to think that I had ever encouraged you to persecute anyone, so I am presently writing you to make certain that you have not misunderstood my statements on the subject.

Iran: Ethnicities and Sects

To be frank, I consider your treatment of the Bahá’ís of Iran inhumane, unjust, and thoroughly detrimental to the social welfare of the people of Iran. I consider it divisive and counterproductive.

Now I know the Bahá’ís have sometimes been their own worst enemy when it comes to public relations. They believe that they have received a new revelation from God, which they believe is destined to prevail over the earth. They speak of world government, a kingdom of God on earth, and as if that weren’t enough, they’ve gone and put their world headquarters in a place that has come to be known by the name “Israel.” I can see how some people might feel threatened by the ambitions of the Bahá’ís, but let us get a better look at them.

The Bahá’ís of Iran are not so different from their fellow countrymen. In many respects, they still cling to their Shi’ah heritage. They revere Muhammad, the Imams, and the angels. They too have guardians whom they consider divinely-guided and free from error. They are not as harsh as you in punishment, but they, like you, do not drink wine; like you they believe that men and women should have different roles in society; like you they do not approve of homosexuality; and they, like you, are very proud of their Iranian and Islamic heritage. But they are also proud of their particular sect, perhaps a little too proud.

Having heard Bahá’ís speak of their great destiny of spiritual conquest, you might feel justified in considering them an existential threat to your theocratic reign, but hear me out, because I think that you would be mistaken to fear them: the Bahá’ís, in spite of their lofty ambitions and triumphalistic rhetoric, are utterly impotent and harmless.

The Bahá’ís are harmless, but not merely because of they aspire to be non-violent and non-political. The Bahá’í religion is harmless because it has grown bureaucratic and stagnant with age, while its adherents have grown complacent and apathetic. Their temples may look glorious, but that is merely the mark of an influx of money. Morally and socially, the Bahá’í religion is not so vivacious as it once was. There is little spirit left in its adherents, and even less imagination. They are nearly invisible. The only recent victory they seem to have achieved is in seeking martyrdom at your hands. In your need to punish the Bahá’ís for their heresies, their vain ambitions, and the sins of a few among them, I fear that you are unwittingly playing into their impotent hands, and alas, you achieve nothing of sustained value in making martyrs of them.

It may sometimes be useful to mark a scapegoat, but one must use caution in doing so. It can be a risky task to scapegoat a people whom citizens meet on a daily basis, a scapegoat whom the people can readily see are too powerless to be an effective enemy. Attempting to scapegoat the wrong people, a purely Iranian people of Shi’ah heritage such as the Bahá’ís, can erode public confidence in your leadership.

It may be reasonably contended that some Iranian Bahá’ís have acted greedily. I have seen the ostentatious homes, clothes and cars of some Iranian Bahá’ís that fill many American Bahá’ís with envy and covetousness; I have seen the glorious Bahá’í construction projects in Israel that have undoubtedly been funded largely by wealthy Iranian Bahá’ís, and I wonder how so many Iranians can be so poor while so few are so rich. I can understand your suspicions. But if these men obtained their wealth by criminal means, they could be investigated and prosecuted. Instead, they have been driven overseas, and they have taken their fortunes with them, leaving many less fortunate Bahá’ís behind. Though you may regret having chased so much money away, the Bahá’ís that remain in Iran are certainly no threat to you.

Globally, the Bahá’í religion is no more threatening than those unfortunate native Bahá’ís stranded in your shadow. Their religion has long lost any mark of distinction by which it might be empowered. The only distinction that the Bahá’ís lately advertise is the blood on your hands, which they claim to be their own though it is also the blood of intellectuals, artists, dissidents, and homosexuals.

Listen to the Bahá’ís: they have little on their lips other than the courage of their martyrs. They hope that their imprisoned and executed heroes will bring their religion notoriety. If you wish to silence them, then ignore them; treat them as the ordinary Iranians that they are, and deny them the glory of martyrdom.

Peace.

It’s been over thirteen months since I last posted to this blog. There’s a good reason for my absence: I haven’t had much to say about Bahá’í matters. Perhaps this is because not much is going on—I’m in no position to say. I will say that I only created this blog because I wanted to remove the entries on Bahá’í matters off of my principal blog (now named Kindling, but with the original motto).

I never had any intention of blogging on the Bahá’í Faith indefinitely. I just didn’t expect to have that much to say on the topic.

Recently, I did contribute an article on my conversion to Zoroastrianism to the Project Conversion site—back at Naw Ruz time (Naw Ruz was a Zoroastrian festival long before it became a Bahá’í holy day). This article wasn’t about the Bahá’í Faith, but it might be of interest to anyone who’s wondered what a “native-born Bahá’í” like me might do in terms of religion after having moved away from the Bahá’í Faith.

Remember the old Y2K scare? We generally look back at that anxious time as an anticlimax, understanding that nothing much happened at the turn of the millennium. I remember how the Bahá’ís expected world peace to flower by the end of the 20th Century. Since then, many Bahá’ís have sought out alternative interpretations of their failed peace prophecy.

Mustaghath, shortly before his occultation

I say “failed,” but I know something that most Bahá’ís don’t. Truth be told, at the close of the year 2001, on the very last day that fell within the Y2K window, a young prophet discovered his calling. Evidence of this portentous moment can be found with the help of the tool known to nostalgic Web surfers as the WayBack Machine:

Dec 02, 2001

This page doesn’t provide any actual information on the youthful prophet, but information would soon be forthcoming:

The hour is approaching when the most great convulsion will have appeared. I swear by Him Who is the Truth! It shall cause separation to afflict everyone, even those who circle around Me….

—Baha’ullah (Mar 29, 2002)

The great unveiling was finally accomplished, as far as I can determine, in early April 2002, when the Prophet proclaimed to the Bahá’ís:

We observe that your Faith is shiny on the outside but rotten at the core: that when a person doth look, he beholdeth a beautiful thing; but when he doth taste of it, he spitteth out the foul flesh of a fruit gone bad …

Mustaghath’ul-Baha, The Book of Restoration

If there had previously been any doubts of God’s disapproval of the course of the Bahá’í Faith at the turn of the millennium, those doubts were vanquished. The LORD GOD was obviously unhappy. In that same sacred declaration, He continued:

O people of Baha! Institutions are not to be worshipped! Bow not the knee before the false god of bureaucracy!…

What Bahá’í of sound mind could possibly disagree? The world was on the threshold of rebirth. Reform was in the air.

This “new messenger of God” did not satisfy himself with a mere web site, but also founded an organization which he christened the Alliance for the Reform of the Baha’i Faith. Because he soon realized that this title was ungainly, he went on to rename the alliance “Baha’i Alliance for the Reform of the Faith,” commonly known as BARF.

The young messenger was met with strident opposition. Conservative Bahá’ís stood against him, arguing that their founder Bahá’u'lláh had forbidden any claims to prophecy ere the passing of a thousand years. But alas, the young messenger had all the answers:

Did ye think there would come unto you no messenger for a thousand years? Alas! ye have misinterpreted the scriptures and have forgotten many teachings.

The meaning of this passage was veiled in many hidden meanings, such as this: it was the dawn of a new millennium, and a millennium is the passing of a thousand years!

This was a profound insight, but because none could apprehend the meaning of His words, he was laughed to scorn.

Given more time, the young Prophet might have had a profound influence on the new millennium, but His ministry came to a premature and tragic end. No one knows for certain what happened to Him, and rumors still swirl around the memory of that blessed Youth. Some say that AO (Authoritative Odor) operatives spirited him away, and that he remains in occultation, deep beneath the great marble Arc in Haifa Israel. Other point their fingers at Eric Stetson (not to be confused with noted evangelical Christian Eric Stetson, or the noted Christian Universalist Eric Stetson) as a suspect in the abduction or murder of the Youth. Stetson appeared to be the Prophet’s web master, and had unsurpassed access to the prophet. Stetson, a strident Unitarian, has since made strong statements that some see as clues to his guilt:

Although various people may have spiritually inspired ideas, there is no human being, institution or organization that can claim to speak for God, because Baha’u'llah explicitly prohibited anyone from claiming a station of “command” for at least 1000 years after his own prophethood.

Eric Stetson (the Unitarian Bahá’í)

Though such statements may seem damning, the reader should note that any Unitarian Bahá’í could have made such a statement, and Stetson is but one of many Unitarian Bahá’ís.

In any case, the loss of Mustaghath was a lethal blow to the spirit of the Bahá’í community, which has remained mired in paralysis since the Prophet’s disappearance. From the four compass points, Bahá’í voices can be heard calling, “Mustaghath, Mustaghath! Where are you?”

Who are these “Unitarian Bahá’í” we’ve been hearing about?

If a theological unitarianism is meant, why use the term “Unitarian Bahá’í” at all? Have you ever met an avowed trinitarian Bahá’í?

The mystical 18-pointed star ("bp" is for "Blessed Perfection")

If we are to take the term seriously, we ought to seek to understand its meaning in context. The term has come to be associated with the Behaists, an early 20th Century Bahá’í splinter group whose distinguishing doctrine was a rejection of the divinity, i.e. infallibility, of `Abdu’l-Bahá’, the leader of the Bahá’í religion at the time. The point, then, of using the term “unitarian” in this context, is to indicate a rejection of the divinity (infallibility) of any man. This makes sense, for the deification of any man is tantamount to polytheism.

The problem I’ve always had with the Behaists calling themselves Unitarians is that they never had a problem deifying Bahá’u'lláh himself.

Frankly, I happen to believe that most Bahá’ís are trinitarians, because their theology of Manifestation owes much to Christian theology. This is also true of those who call themselves “Unitarian Bahá’ís.”

The home page for the Unitarian Baha’i discussion group states:

The Unitarian Bahai faith is a movement of Bahaism that teaches that none of the successors of the prophet Baha’u'llah are infallible …

A true unitarian would not deify any man. A unitarian Bahá’í would be a Bahá’í who lives as a Bahá’í without any belief in the infallibility of Bahá’u'lláh.

I personally believe that a Bahá’í can be a unitarian. It’s not as if I don’t know of any true unitarians among the Bahá’ís, but I hesitate to single them out for fear of what might be done to them.

The latest target of BIGS Legal

I recently decided that I didn’t really want to say any more about the Rocky Mountain Bahá’ís, that is, the O’Bahá’ís (Orthodox Bahá’ís) of New Mexico and the BUPCees (Bahá’ís Under the Provisions of the Covenant) of Montana. It’s obvious that they’re irrelevant and seeing as I have taken the position that the Guardianship was a bad idea to begin with, I don’t really see the point of promoting their desperate causes.

Guardianship? For those not in the know, a Guardian is a sort of Bahá’í Imam or Ayatollah.

Anyhow, The BUPCees are just too kooky and fragmented, and the O’Bahá’ís—they’re just boring. What have they done for me lately?

But then I was reminded that these two pathetic minorities have recently been getting bullied in court by the dominant Bahá’í organization, henceforth referred to as the BIGS™ Corporation, or BIGS™ Inc.

Word on the street has it that the BIGS™ (Bahá’ís In Good Standing) have been diverting construction funds into litigation against those minuscule mountain communities, so I couldn’t help but take notice. And what are they suing the O’Bahá’ís and BUPCees for? Exclusive rights to Bahá’í terms such as “Bahá’í,” “UHJ,” and “The Greatest Name.”

“The Greatest Name”—now who wouldn’t want to corner that?

“The mainstream Baha’is have responded with a lawsuit that tries to bar the orthodox from calling themselves Baha’i and sharing the “The Greatest Name,” a sacred and trademarked symbol. Baha’is believe they are not only safeguarding their identity. They are defending the truth with a capital T.

“The Orthodox say that is not a matter for the courts to decide.”

—Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2009

At present, BIGS™ Inc is losing. They lost to the BUPCees in 2005 and then lost to the O’Bahá’ís in 2008. The latter case is being appealed. Stay tuned. The Chicago Tribune is on the case.

“… the Court finds that the alleged contemnors are not in contempt …”

How minority Bahá'í attorneys of the future will get to court.

I wonder how well paid the BIGS™ Inc legal team is. I wonder whether the BIGS™ Inc lawyers are themselves BIGS™ members. Then again, who cares?—I just hope they’re well paid. But I digress.

As for the mountaineers, can they even afford attorneys? I’m surprised that they can even afford airline tickets to Chicago. Then again, maybe they left the driving to Greyhound. Speaking of Greyhound, check this ride—but I digress further.

One thing that I still like about the Bahá’í Faith is its severe prohibition against backbiting:

“The worst human quality and the most great sin is backbiting, more especially when it emanates from the tongues of the believers of God. If some means were devised so that the doors of backbiting could be shut eternally, and each one of the believers of God unsealed his lips in praise of others, then the teachings of His Holiness Bahá’u’lláh would be spread, the hearts illumined, the spirits glorified, and the human world would attain to everlasting felicity. ”

—`Abdu’l-Bahá’, Bahá’u'lláh and the New Era

“backbiting quencheth the light of the heart, and extinguisheth the life of the soul.”

—Bahá’u'lláh, the Book of Certitude

“Ye have been forbidden to commit murder or adultery, or to engage in backbiting or calumny; …”

—Bahá’u'lláh, the Most Holy Book

Funny thing, then, that—to my knowledge—a Bahá’í can lose his administrative rights for being openly gay, or worse—for drinking beer, but I have never heard of a Bahá’í losing his administrative rights for backbiting.

Oh, and I could not help but notice that these same men who preached so clearly and firmly against backbiting happened to have made so many hateful and defamatory statements against their foes.

In the following passage, Shoghi Effendi—or rather his secretary—explains the harsh treatment awaits the Bahá’í who attacks Bahá’u'lláh:

“When a person declares his acceptance of Bahá’u'lláh as a Manifestation of God he becomes a party to the Covenant and accepts the totality of His Revelation. If he then turns around and attacks Bahá’u'lláh … he violates the Covenant. If this happens every effort is made to help that person to see the illogicality and error of his actions, but if he persists he must, in accordance with the instructions of Bahá’u'lláh Himself, be shunned as a Covenant-breaker.”

—from a letter dated March 30, 1957 on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, “Messages to Canada,” pg. 64

This passage indicates that a Bahá’í, having declared his or her belief in Bahá’u'lláh as a consenting adult at—say—age 15, has no right to turn around and criticize Bahá’u'lláh. Such a Bahá’í—or Ex-Bahá’í—is to be regarded as “Covenant-breaker,” and—as if that weren’t heinous enough—an illogical.

Apparently it’s illogical to criticize someone that you once worshiped as a child.

Though apostasy is not a capital offense in the Bahá’í Faith, it was no small crime in the eyes of Shoghi Effendi.

“People who have withdrawn from the Cause because they no longer feel that they can support its Teachings and Institutions sincerely, are not Covenant-breakers—they are non-Bahá’ís and should just be treated as such. Only those who ally themselves actively with known enemies of the Faith who are Covenant-breakers, and who attack the Faith in the same spirit as these people, can be considered, themselves, to be Covenant-breakers.”

—from a letter dated March 30, 1957 on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, “Messages to Canada,” p. 64

Hence belief in Bahá’u'lláh is not a prerequisite for Covenant-breaker status. The only prerequisite is that one is or once was a believer. The key point is keep your mouth shut. You can’t be blamed for ceasing to believe, but to openly criticize the Bahá’í Faith—having once believed—is the most reprobate of offenses.

The following is a specific reference to a Bahá’í who turned against the Bahá’í Faith in its entirety. Abdu’l-Husayn Ayati had been an eminent Bahá’í historian. `Abdu’l-Bahá’ had named him “Avarih,” and Shoghi Effendi declared him a Covenant-breaker for his criticisms of the Bahá’í Faith:

“Avarih … will be condemned by posterity as being the most shameless, vicious, relentless apostate in the annals of the Faith, who, through ceaseless vitriolic attacks in recorded voluminous writings and close alliance with its traditional enemies, assiduously schemed to blacken its name and subvert the foundations of its institutions.”

—Shoghi Effendi, Messages To The Bahá’í World: 1950-1957, pages 53-54

Shoghi Effendi often spoke of apostasy of as though it is an evil in and of
itself. Let’s close with several examples:

“Some have apostatized from its principles, and betrayed ignominiously its cause.”

—World Order of Bahá’u'lláh, page 195

“The volumes which a shameless apostate composed and disseminated, during that same period in Persia, in his brazen efforts not only to disrupt that Order but to undermine the very Faith which had conceived it,…”

—God Passes By, page 327.

“Apostates, rebels, betrayers, heretics, had exerted their utmost endeavors, privily or openly, to sap the loyalty of the followers of that Faith, to split their ranks or assault their institutions.”

—God Passes By, page 408.

Back around the close of the 1970s, my friend next door showed me a newspaper article that seemed to be about my father. It was about a Bahá’í chiropractor—a Dr. Jensen—who was making prophecies about a coming calamity. My father, Dr. John Jensen, is a Bahá’í chiropractor with a Bahá’í fondness for doomsday visions. Fortunately—or unfortunately, as the case may be—the Dr. Jensen featured in the article was out in Montana, a long way from my home in central California. It was some other Bahá’í chiropractor named Jensen.

The old Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, Montana

This was quite a coincidence, of course. It’s not like there are many Scandinavian Bahá’ís like there are hoards of Scandinavian Mormons.

Actually, my father’s dad was one of those Scandinavian Mormons, but that’s another story.

One thing the Bahá’ís and Mormons do share, though, is a peppering of heretics across the Rocky Mountain states. Must be something about mountains that brings out the heretic in people.

This Dr. Leland Jensen of Missoula, Montana was well known among researchers for his string of failed prophecies. He was also known for being convicted for sexually molesting of a minor. It was while doing time in the big house that Jensen received his calling, as so oft it happens. Upon release, Jensen founded his own Bahá’í sect, and commenced to doing what prophets do.

My father was and is quite different. He is a principled man who would never entertain prophetic delusions or manipulate people as the Montana Jensen did.

But my father did—and does—share Leland Jensen’s apocalyptic view of the immediate future. He is a Bahá’í, after all. It’s in the scripture. A lot of bad things are going to have to happen for the world to be cleansed before the last century ends.

As a child in a Bahá’í household, I learned about a horrible calamity that would soon cleanse the world of its blind materialism and render it receptive to the light of faith in Bahá’u'lláh. We weren’t sure what exactly would happen but we knew it would necessarily be bad—something along the lines of Zechariah 13:

In the whole land, declares the LORD,
two-thirds will be struck down and perish;
yet one-third will be left in it.
This third I will bring into the fire;
I will refine them like silver
and test them like gold.

Two-thirds of the people of the world would perish, and many of the survivors might wish they had perished as well. It was a retributive promise laid over the real danger of the Cold War. It was easy for a child to internalize.

Noted skeptic Michael Shermer has also heard of Leland Jensen. Shermer discussed Jensen at length in his book How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science:

On a brisk April 29 morning in 1980, Dr. Leland Jensen, a chiropractor and leader of a small religious sect called the Baha’is Under the Provisions of the Covenant, led his devoted followers into fallout shelters in Missoula, Montana, to await the end of the world. Within the first hour, Jensen believed, a full third of the Earth’s population would be annihilated in a nuclear holocaust of fire and fallout. Over the course of the next twenty years most of the remaining population would be ravaged by conquest, war, famine, and pestilence. (page 192)

What I find interesting about this Leland Jensen episode, beside the curious parallels in my family, is the way that Jensen and his followers handled the failure of Jensen’s prophecies. It reminds me of the rationalizations offered by Bahá’ís in response to the failure of mainstream Bahá’í prophecies of peace and calamity in the 20th Century:

Psychologists who studied Leland Jensen and his Baha’i sect … discovered that when the end of the world came and went, they did not quietly disband and go home. Psychologist Leon Festinger applied his theory of cognitive dissonance to failed prophecy, and argued that the stronger one’s commitment to a failing cause, the greater the rationalizations to reduce the dissonance produced by the disappointment. Thus, paradoxically, after the 1980 debacle in the bomb shelters, not only did Jensen and his followers not abandon the cause, they ratcheted up the intensity of future predictions, making no less than 20 between 1979 and 1995! Jensen and his flock applied one or all of the following rationalizations:

1. the prophecy was fulfilled—spiritually
2. the prophecy was fulfilled physically, but not as expected
3. miscalculation of the date
4. the date was a loose prediction, not a specific prophecy
5. God changed his mind in order to be merciful
6. predictions were just a test of members’ faith.

How We Believe, page 202