The Bahá’ís of America

Mike McMullen’s The Bahá’ís of America: The Growth of a Religious Movement tells the story of a significant alternative American religious community, a Muslim sectarian movement known as Bahá’í. As part of an increasingly diverse American religious world, the specific story and place of the Bahá’í may tell us much about religious diversity, the growth of new religions in the United States, and sources of tension that American alternative religions face. McMullen’s methodology, however, uses primarily official documents to narrate the American Bahá’í path over the past fifty years, resulting in what is essentially an institutional history with only a passing concern for diversity, the growth of new religions, and the sources of tension for new religions. American religious communities have become increasingly diverse over the past five decades. Driven largely by a 1965 reform of immigration laws that opened U.S. borders to large-scale entry from non-European countries for the first time, people from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East who never had the opportunity to permanently settle in the United States before began to move there. They brought their religions with them, and 1965 is now considered a watershed moment in American religious history. Yet religious communities that originated in those parts of the world did exist in the United States prior to 1965, albeit in much different forms. The 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago allowed representatives from non-Christian religions all over the world to speak to an American audience for the first time and sparked a new interest among primarily white, well-off Americans in non-Christian religions. Several small communities, shaped specifically to appeal to that white, middle-class audience, emerged in the early twentieth century as a result, including the first Bahá’í communities. This mixture of European American convert movements with immigrant communities is a critical factor in understanding many non-Christian religious traditions in the United States.

Diversity (politics) · History of religions · Immigration · Parliament · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History · History of Science and Medicine · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Law · Religious studies