Theos-Talk Archives (January 2002 Message tt00503)

Dear Larry,

Here are two links with somewhat different POVs:

http://bahai-library.org/essays/membership.stats.html
http://members.fortunecity.com/bahaicensorship/FalseStats.htm

In 1968 there were 17,765 American Baha'is; I joined at 15 in 1969 
(after a few months stint with the Mormons) and when I left in 1974 
membership had grown to 63,470-- more than tripling in 5-6 years. 
Baha'i had successfully marketed itself to the youth culture and to 
African Americans, and this is where all the growth was. But the 
original pre-1969 Baha'i community was ill-prepared for this influx 
of [mainly] liberals in a heretofore conservative community, and 
there was a crackdown on the "teaching" efforts that were bringing in 
all these new members. The great majority of teenage and black 
converts left within a few years.

Although numbers have supposedly more than doubled since 1974, there 
is ample room to doubt this. An organization like the ARE or the 
Adyar TS has annual membership dues and thus only those motivated 
enough to pay up are listed as members. But Baha'i keeps people on 
the rolls forever, until they know for sure that the person is dead 
or has resigned. (They make it a big deal to resign, so most people 
just disappear, leaving no forwarding address.) If ARE worked this 
way it could claim way over 100,000, and the American Section of the 
Adyar TS probably could come close. The actual growth that occurred 
after the late 70s was due to a huge influx of Iranian emigres. But 
the number of active Baha'is is probably smaller than it was when I 
left, according to the analyses of Juan Cole, leading academic expert 
on the Baha'i Faith.

As for why the collapse: the Faith overreached itself with an 
aggressive teaching campaign that pulled a lot of new members in 
without telling them all the difficult details of Baha'i faith and 
practice. A strict, repressive leadership drove out most of the new 
converts fairly quickly and has never been able to replace those 
driven out. This was kinda a case of Moonies pretending to be 
Unitarians and grabbing lots of sympathetic publicity and converts-- 
but ultimately losing all the new members when they found out what 
kind of religion they had really joined.

Cheers,

PJ