Archival information, historical records, and the national Bahá’í membership database allow an approximate reconstruction of the numbers of Bahá’ís in the United States from 1894 to the present (which increased from 4 to 178,000). These data show three distinct periods of rapid growth: the opening years, 1894-1900; the Great Depression, 1929-35; and the “Second Sixties,” 1968-72. Important, continuing growth is also seen in the “First Sixties,” 1960-67. Slow growth (less than 1% per year) may have characterized the early 1920s when there was a transition in leadership and organizational style, and again from 2005 to the present, when another organizational transition was underway.
Less information is available about principal sources of conversion. It can be said with confidence that the single largest group that has entered the American Bahá’í community has always been white middle-class Protestants. This may seem unexceptional, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, persons interested in Theosophy, Hinduism, and Buddhism were primarily upper class and upper middle-class whites of liberal Protestant or “post-Protestant” backgrounds (that is, Transcendentalists, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, members of the Free Religious Association, or simply unchurched seekers). The consistent emphasis on Bahá’u’lláh’s coming as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy guaranteed that the American Bahá’ís would, on average, come from mainstream Protestant churches and that a reasonable number of them would be from smaller towns and cities and be of blue-collar backgrounds (like Kenosha, WI).
It needs to be emphasized, however, that the American Baha’is understood from nearly the very beginning that Bahá’u’lláh’s message was meant for everyone. The first two African Americans became Baha’is in 1898 and 1899. Muslim immigrants from the Middle East joined in small numbers. In its first few decades, Catholics joined in small numbers, and even some Jews. As a result of emphasis on race unity in the 1920s and 1930s, the African American population reached 5.5% of the Baha’is of known ethnic heritage. After the door-to-door teaching in the rural South from 1968 to 1972, it may have reached as high as one third of the total number of American Bahá’ís. The current membership database lacks ethnic information for more than half of the Bahá’ís; African Americans are 6.7% of the ones of known ethnic background. Notably about a quarter of the individuals elected delegates are Black and a third of the members of the National Spiritual Assembly are African American.
Robert Stockman has a Th.D. in religion from Harvard University, focusing on the history of religion in the United States. He has taught religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago and currently teaches at Indiana University in South Bend, Indiana. He also serves as an “Affiliated Faculty” to the Ansari Institute for the Global Engagement with Religion at Notre Dame University. He has published seven books on aspects of the Bahá’í Faith including an edited volume, The World of the Baha’i Faith (Routledge, 2022). He is the Director of the Corinne True Center for Bahá’í History.
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