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Submitted by and posted with permission of author.This material has been published in
 Religion
 (May 2000) 30, 2:109-125, the only definitiverepository of the content that has been certifiedand accepted after peer review. Copyright and allrights therein are retained by Academic Press. Thismaterial may not be copied or reposted withoutexplicit permission. For a full table of contents to thisissue, see the International Digital ElectronicAccess Library. Available online at http://www.idealibrary.com
Race, Immorality and Money in the American Baha’i Community:Impeaching the Los Angeles Spiritual AssemblyJuan R. I. ColeAbstractThis article analyzes the dissolution of the Baha’i local assembly of Los Angelesin 1986-1988 by the National Assembly. Official explanations for this movefocused on lapses in morality and administrative discipline. But localinterviewees, as well as some official pronouncements, suggest that the conflicthad two roots: The globalization of the community and resultant ethnic conflictamong whites, African-Americans and newly immigrant Iranians; andnational/local conflicts over power and money. The article concludes that low-information elections, the unaccountability of elected officials, censorship, anddifficulties in acknowledging social conflict, make for such episodes in the Baha’ireligion.Where could Iranian-Americans, African-Americans and whites meetregularly for worship, negotiating each other’s very different value system in theglobalized world of diasporas and New Religious Movements? The answer is, inthe Baha’i community of Los Angeles. An analysis of a crisis in that communitywill tell us a great deal not only about the Baha’i faith but about how animmigrant faith that has attracted many converts deals with the resultantcommunal tensions. On July 19, 1986, the National Spiritual Assembly of the
 
Baha’is of the United States formally dissolved the Local Spiritual Assembly(LSA) of the Baha’is of Los Angeles, then a community of some 1200 adult believers and among the larger urban Baha’i communities. The nationalauthorities replaced the disbanded local assembly with a six-person administrativecommittee that was to report directly to the national Baha’i headquarters inWilmette, Illinois, so that in effect the national body took direct control of theaffairs of the Baha’is of Los Angeles. This action was thought by local Baha’is atthe time “unprecedented.” Although local assemblies are routinely dissolved, itis usually because their members have flagrantly broken Baha’i law, which, with perhaps one exception, was not the case here. Why, then, did the NSA act in sucha direct and forceful fashion? What goals did the national body wish toaccomplish through this intervention? What problems had the local spiritualassembly faced that the national body felt it simply could not deal with? Threeadmitted major areas of concern later emerged, having to do with finances, racerelations, and immorality. Other sources suggest that concern for the power and primacy of the national assembly played a part. Which, if any, of these causes wasdeterminative?The Baha’i faith came to the U.S. in the 1890s from the Middle East,where it had been founded in 1863 by an Iranian notable and prophet, Baha’u’llah(1817-1892). He taught the eventual advent of world peace, the need for collective security, the unity of humankind, the unity of the religions, and the needto replace absolute monarchy with parliamentary, constitutional government. Hisson, `Abdu’l-Baha (1844-1921), came to the U.S. in 1912-1913 to help spread the
 
religion, and he was succeeded by his grandson, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani, 1921-1957. From the 1920s, the relatively liberal, freewheeling early American Baha’icommunity, which had no clergy, began to be transformed by the religion’sleaders into a much more disciplined, organic sort of body. It was demanded thatall publications of Baha’is about their religion must be vetted by the Baha’iassemblies at the appropriate level. Baha’is were gradually forbidden to utter any public criticism of their religious bodies’ policies or decisions. The collective,nine-man international head of the religion from 1963, the Universal House of Justice came to be considered infallible in all its doings by most AmericanBaha’is. The American community probably now consists of about 60,000 adult believers, though the authorities claim twice that number of adherents. The LosAngeles community dates from the early twentieth century, and is the burial siteof Thornton Chase, widely regarded as the first American Baha’i.As Mike Davis has contended, Los Angeles is a city of contradictions andcontrasts, above all between the poor and the rich, but also ethnically andoccupationally. Nowhere is this axiom more true than in the sphere of religion.Most of the world religions are active in the city, and ethnic religions abound. Its population now over nine million, swollen by a century of astonishingimmigration rates, Los Angeles county is a place where 106 languages are spokenand persons of Western European descent are a minority. The reality of immigration presents enormous difficulties for religious communities. In thewords of John Gregory Dunne, “Everyone was an alien, the newcomer never anexile. In such an environment, the idea of community did not naturally flourish,
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