I was the secretary of a Baha'i "state committee" for Iowa in the 1980s called the "District Teaching Committee." In Soviet style, the Baha'i Administration in Wilmette was trying to turn the United States into renamed regions. Each unique American state became nothing more than a Baha'i  "District." 

At the time I was living in a small southern town of Lamoni, a R.L.D.S. (Mormon) stronghold, as a "homefront pioneer." I was recommended for the D.T.C., then formally asked onto it in a portentious letter. (The Baha'i Faith is a religion that specializes in generating portentious-sounding letters written by faceless powertripping world-controllers in anonymous offices with good English.) My appointment was obviously due to my close friendship with a fellow already serving on the committee who I'll call "Chad" who was truly my best friend. It was called an appointed position. I think the appointment happened because I knew him well and he knew me (connections), and because of by basic avidness as a Baha'i and maybe my verbal ability. The cranking engines of the Baha'i Faith are faceless men, and perhaps women, who can talk in a certain educated, elegant voice -- the "Baha'i administrative voice" you might say. I could pull that off, and I soon was the Secretary of the committee, a position with a lot of de facto influence because one basically composes letters while harried fellow members nod approval or not.

Once a month I would travel to a set location somewhere in Iowa with Chad in his beat up old Datsun B210 for a meeting with the other 2-3 members. Ostensibly we were supposed to concentrate on "teaching" (think evangelism) projects, but we ended up being mostly bogged down by so-called "administrative" minutia and "enrollment" issues, and the meetings were long  and draining. I ended up with a a file cabinet full of files and the membership roll. I remember dragging around the floppy, side punched dot-matrix printout with me many places. By the time it got bent and frayed and flappy the "administration" in Wilmette would send another fresh printout each year. It never seemed to get much fatter. 

 In a sense this committee functioned as a "Local Assembly" for all of the Baha'is statewide who were not under the auspices of a "Local Spiritual Assembly" of nine members, the Baha'is' ideal administrative unit. That is, all Baha'is in groups made of less than nine, which was probably two-thirds of the Baha'i population. We were only 4-5 members, so we had an important role in the state, trying to nurse along little groups of Baha'is -- from singles to groups of 2-8 -- until they became the magical number nine at which time they could create a "Local Spiritual Assembly." I had already been on the Local Spiritual Assembly of the capital city, Des Moines, before moving to Lamoni. DTC membership was a heavier load than an average member of a Local Assembly, especially for the traditionally overworked Secretary, and that position soon fell to me.

I had traveled already to many Iowa towns as a Baha'i teacher and knew quite a few of the Iowa Baha'is. I noticed there were many names on the list I'd never met. I found that Baha'is had their jargon on the cursed "administrative" side: There were the "active" believers and the "inactives." Part of our duties as D.T.C. members was to stay in touch with members and keep them interested in being active or revive them from inactivity. Activity meant attending meetings, basically. Or we might go "check them out" to see if they were in "violation" of Baha'i laws and required administrative rights removal. (Oh, what little Puritans we were. It was a novel undertaking.) Or to see whether they had improved and mended their ways. In any case,  I remember it was commonplace -- whether for myself or another committee member -- to check in on some long inactive member and find them very distant in attitude to the religion, and sometimes hostile. The hard hostiles might be reported as a lost case at the next DTC meeting. I vaguely recall that the secretary who served before me might write a letter to "National" recommending that the person's name be removed, perhaps with National taking over from there and pestering the poor backslider with a "recanting" form. But I myself, when Secretary, never wrote any such reports. My tendency was to think I, or Chad, or somebody we dreamed up -- might be able to warm a problem inactive up somehow,  and occasionally we tried, with phone calls, letters, or personal visits. Only a few of these did we ever draw back, through our affectionate encouragement, into attending Baha'i meetings again. But we had a lot of heart. (Certainly the Administration never knows what avid foot soldiers labor selflessly in their trenches, especially when new and bright-eyed, and they specialize in finally killing out all impulses for leadership and action among Baha'is. One reason they're perpetually dying. But that's another story.)

Based on my being in the loop of the Iowa State committee, and my much personal travel to the small Baha'i "communities" in the state (really just little clusters of families) I would say that of the 350 names on the list maybe 100-120 were active at all, with at most 30-40 true stalwarts state-wide. 

In the hallowed days of Christian small town life 120 people was like one small church congregation out of perhaps several local churches. (Oh, how I long for those days of the White Europeans now.) I recall that our annual state convention would stay at around 100 attendees year after year. 120 or more was a healthy year. I had been disappointed at the number "350" in the first place when coming onto the committee. But  I remember it was all the more discouraging, as an avid Baha'i full of dreams for the religion, to realize how many of those 350 were like deadwood.

I saw this principle then expand rather grotesquely in the aftermath of "mass teaching" events, a couple of which I helped put on. Baha'is would get thrilled by, say, even 3 sudden enrollments. This was around 1980.  Five, and it was Big Statewide News in the state DTC Newsletter. Ten or 15 -- and Baha'is would hyperventilate! It was as if angels had filled the sky. Glorious, majestic, and ringing phrases of impending victorious world conquest would fill our newsletter, just like the patter of Glenford Mitchell in a "Feast" letter. (Because I got the "Administrative Voice" down, you see. It was now I who got to be the faceless Baha'i Wizard-of-Oz, writing the heart-pumping prose Baha'is live on, another hidden little 'Glenford Mitchell' for the state of Iowa.) Yet these enrollments were often problematic. These people "came in" through a hard-sell taking place over a weekend, and their commitment was tenuous. It turned out that Baha'is usually failed to work with these people and stay in contact with them. It turned out that these "mass teaching" enrollees, pressured into a life-change by bliss-faced and affectionate Baha'i teachers one weekend then forgotten, when finally contacted later, turned out to be a particularly bitter type of disaffected "Baha'i." (Oh, how I wish I could go back in time and NOT spend an hour with another Baha'i trying to pressure an old farm wife to leave her Christian Faith and join our absurd race-fetishizing religion -- pressuring her until she began to cry. I never did a "teaching project" again.)

I was also on the "Local Spiritual Assembly" of Des Moines, Iowa. Though the capital of the state, our membership roll was never more than thirty until somebody got the brilliant idea to hook up to a bunch of Cambodian would-be immigrants as sponsors. Then "voila!" our community "doubled in size." None of the needy and supplicant refugees -- some with tuberculosis -- were going to refuse the nice man Bill Brown who became their Father Christmas plus "taught them to the Faith" when Bill invited them all to sign some fun little cards. This was no doubt like the future India in miniature. Back in more normal times, before committing the crime of helping change the European ethnic makeup of Des Moines into Hideous Diversity -- even that number "30" was misleading. We only saw about half that number on a regular basis. Just as with the State membership, certain members were like spiders who holed up. One became afraid to ask about those names you never saw, wondering what the trouble was. I still remember some of them to this very day -- inactive names we'd print up on lists for years -- yet never met them once.

Certainly the admin enjoys membership inflation from the fact of cold, disaffected members retaining place on their lists. Some commentors on the blog (see link below) talked about the matter of Baha'i withdrawals. I think it's much worse than these posts suppose, because I believe that MOST disaffected members never do formally withdraw or take their names off of the membership roll. I'm just one example. I'm still part of the numbers they claim.

The organization has this sort of trick in which you must do a formal "recanting" in order to have your name removed. You have to sign a statement repudiating the founder. Something to the affect of "I declare that I no longer believe Baha'u'llah is the manifestation of God for this day" -- is what I heard it was. Anyway, I think the vast majority of Baha'is who become disaffected or alienated do not want to bother with this process.

One reason: It's unpleasant or painful. They don't want to be talked out of it, get any pressure, or argue. Maybe they don't relish facing some cold-blooded Baha'i inquisitor in Wilmette even for a moment. (The women who congregated around the Wilmette Temple for very long were, I found, to be a particularly cold-blooded type. It's as if they've imbibed too much of the distant, grandiose tone of too many Feast letters. Utterly power-striving, Baha'is who cluster around the Wilmette "National Center" are Buddha's perfect picture of an "asura" or "jealous god." After a few experiences, one becomes frightened to even converse with them.) I know that with me, as I became disaffected, I simply didn't want to bring them down. I knew how bad it made Baha'is feel when they heard of anybody becoming negative or "withdrawing." That was especially true for a formerly positive and stalwart member. I cared about the Baha'is. I did not want to hurt them and I knew how much it would hurt to see me turn away. 

Now, my animus toward the official religion ("The Baha'i Faith") became great. (That was after I discovered the "marketing package" sold as "The Baha'i Faith" was so different than the original religion.) I felt I'd been deceived and misled by shallow men. So you'd have thought I would have taken pleasure in doing the formal "recanting" paperwork. But to do so didn't even fit my beliefs or have any metaphysical validity to me. I simply didn't see that such a statement was necessary. All the vocabulary itself, such as "Manifestation of God" or "for this Day" -- had become silly to me since broadening my mind with books like "Autobiography of a Yogi," "The Yoga Sutra," and the Upanishads. My understanding of religion had become different. Those terms were meaningless or altered in my new, broader view. There was no need to "renounce" Baha'u'llah. First, I had never developed a felt, personal, or genuine "relationship" with him anyway (as is so possible with a guru figure). And there had been some good in the Baha'i Faith. A lot, in fact, for me in the end. The devotional aspect of the Baha'i Faith, seen in the prayers and writings, had a huge impact on my spiritual life forever to come. And I didn't want anybody to feel bad. Even the Baha'is I disliked, I didn't want them to have to feel that blow. And to some extent I still feel bad about having to abandon them still today. Having a heart for them I left quietly with no display, statements, or checking out. I just happily and  hummingly faded away, fascinated with the new knowledge and new paths I was finding as I continued to be a God-seeker.

I think that, indeed, the majority of disaffected Baha'is never do formally take their names off the rolls. Baha'i membership is a churning affair. The Baha'i Faith is for most like a way-station they pass through in their process of religious search and exploration. I can't even find a trace of most of my favorite Baha'i associates from the 1970s and 80s. (With one notable exception, the Baha'is who "matchmade" me into a horribly mismatched marriage.) The religion lives by new members and their enthusiasm, and I think the pass-through or attrition rate is far higher than anybody conceives. 

That had to be true. When you hide and suppress your own central scripture for 120 years -- you make of your religion a joke. Few people can process the chutzpah and absurdity of that. The beginning of my exit was when I found a copy of the full text of the Kitab-i-Aqdas (Elder/Miller) just after being told by an "Assistant" once more that "it hasn't been translated yet." A glance at a few pages of that book and I saw immediately that the religion I had been sold was not what the religion originally was. Eighty percent of what is promoted as "the Baha'i Faith" is really the thoughts of clever men overly influenced by White guilt and Marxist deracination and nation-killing ideals. Simply reading the Kitab-i-Aqdas straight and unadulterated makes it very clear that the Baha'i Faith is now, in many dimensions, an invented, man-made religion.

J. Curtis Lee Mickunas

http://www.bahaiface.com/