Shoghi Effendi and the American Dream
Exported from Holy-Writings.com on 2026-06-20 - 1 clipping

Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Sandra Lynn Hutchison, Shoghi Effendi and the American Dream, bahai-library.com.
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Shoghi Effendi and the American Dream

Sandra Lynn Hutchison

published in World Order29:1, pp. 13-24

1997 Fall

The continent of America is, in the eyes of the one true God, the land
wherein the splendors of His light shall be revealed, where the mysteries of
His Faith shall be unveiled, where the righteous will abide and the free will
assemble. -'Abdu'l-Bahá

Shoghi Effendi and the Destiny of America

In December 1938, as the Great Depression rounded out
almost a full decade of economic devastation that seemed to lay to rest forever
the American dream of material abundance for all, Shoghi Effendi, from
war-darkened Europe, penned an epistle to his American coworkers about the
glorious destiny of their nation. Published in 1939 under the title The
Advent of Divine Justice, it was addressed to the relatively small, yet
highly diverse band of Americans who had enlisted in the ranks of the
Bahá'í community and now turned to him, as the head of the Bahá'í
Faith and its appointed Guardian, for direction on how to derive meaning from
the social and economic chaos wrought by the 1930s.

The title of Shoghi Effendi's letter was drawn from the writings of
Bahá'u'lláh, the Founder of the Bahá'í Faith, and
reflected Shoghi Effendi's intention to place the hardships faced by the
American Bahá'ís of the day in the context of the broader pattern of
Bahá'u'lláh's transcendent and universal principles, in
particular, of His vision of social renewal for the age. "Know thou of a
truth," He had proclaimed as early as the mid-nineteenth century, "these
great oppressions that have befallen the world are preparing it for
the advent of the Most Great Justice."[1]

With chronic unemployment at home and a European war looming on the
not-too-distant horizon, calamities were certainly close at hand, and the
future did not seem to augur well for peace and prosperity. But the very fabric
of the times, Shoghi Effendi explained in his letter, was woven from a
bewildering yet ultimately reassuring pattern of social decay and concomitant
spiritual regeneration; as surely as the process of "disintegration" was
evident in the society at large, so was the process of social renewal or
integration" taking place within the Bahá'í community. Social and
spiritual renewal were, he assured his readers, the very spirit of the age.

Such simultaneous processes of rise and of fall, of
integration and of disintegration, of order and chaos, with their continuous
and reciprocal reactions on each other, are but aspects of a greater Plan, one
and indivisible, whose Source is God, whose author is
Bahá'u'lláh, the theater of whose operations is the entire
planet, and whose ultimate objectives are the unity of the human race and the
peace of all mankind. (72-73).

Born in turn-of-the-century Palestine into a Persian family exiled
there two generations earlier, Shoghi Effendi grew up worlds and centuries
apart from John Winthrop, whose shipboard sermon to the Puritan settlers
arriving in America articulated one of the leitmotifs in that body of myths
termed the American dream: "the city set upon the hill."[2] Yet, despite a gap of centuries and a difference in
cultures, in many respects Shoghi Effendi's vision of the American destiny
echoes that shipboard dream with its assertions of American "newness," American
destiny, and American "exceptionalism."[3]

The idea that America offered settlers from Europe a wide, open, new space
where they could exercise their personal freedom and recreate themselves and
their society was a belief shared by many arriving from the Old World of
Europe. In the Puritans, who fled from religious persecution, such a belief
inspired the hope of building a new Eden, which would set a moral example for
the Old World society they had left behind; in many others, it generated the
hope of a different kind of freedom in the form of social mobility achieved
through a new-found economic prosperity.

The belief in the opportunities presented by the newness of the land was
integrally linked with another belief, which also became central to the
American identity — namely, that America was destined by Providence for some
higher purpose, a "manifest destiny" to "redeem the Old World by high
example."[4] In 1845 this idea took on a
slightly different meaning as the term "manifest destiny" was coined by a
democratic editor in response to European protest at America's expansionism on
the American continent, to describe America's God-given right to "overspread
the continent" in order to provide land for its "multiplying millions."[5] Moreover, in fulfilling its "manifest destiny,"
America would not fail, for, as Winthrop's sermon further underlined, America
was not like other nations: it was exceptional. The American nation had both a
sacred destiny and the capacity to carry it out.

But broader and more far-reaching than the Puritan dream of a New-World garden
for a recreated race that would set a high moral example for the Old World or
even than the recasting of that dream in a later century as expressed in the
concept of a "manifest destiny," Shoghi Effendi's vision of the American
destiny was of a nation that could, through rectifying its own moral life,
bring about universal salvation. In the final pages of his 1938 letter, Shoghi
Effendi triumphantly cited the words of his grandfather, 'Abdu'l-Bahá, the
appointed head of the Faith and interpreter of the Bahá'í
writings before him:

The American nation is equipped and empowered to
accomplish that which will adorn the pages of history, to become the envy of
the world, and be blest in both the East and the West for the triumph of its
people . . . The American continent gives signs and evidences of very great
advancement. Its future is even more promising, for its influence and
illumination are far-reaching. It will lead all nations spiritually.
(86)

Like 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi proclaimed for the American nation a
"glorious destiny ordained for it by the Almighty" (91). The American
Bahá'í community would be in the forefront of the
Bahá'í Faith worldwide, and the American nation preeminent in
world affairs. But America could fulfill its high destiny only by eschewing
contemporary values and integrating into American life the world-unifying
teachings articulated by Bahá'u'lláh. With the American Bahá'ís
at the nation's heart "consummating its divinely appointed mission" to erect
the new World Order of Bahá'u'lláh both at home and abroad,
America's leadership in world affairs, especially in the arena of peacemaking,
Shoghi Effendi assured his readers, would become firmly established (91).

"Recurrent crises" such as war, Shoghi Effendi warned, would not cease to
afflict the world as long as the "chill of irreligion" continued to creep
"relentlessly over the soul of mankind" (2, 5). Such calamities were integral
to the times and reflected the ailing spirit of the modern age. However, far
from boding ill, such agitations augured a new age of hope that would be
initiated when the high moral standard implicit in the Bahá'í
teachings began to manifest itself in the inner lives of the believers,
resulting in a network of strongly functioning Bahá'í
communities. Then, and only then, would the American dream of a new Eden in a
new world be made manifest. Moreover, through the missionary efforts of the
American Bahá'ís, that new Eden would be spread throughout the globe and a new
earth established under a new heaven.

The Advent of Divine Justice

It is difficult to ascertain exactly how much knowledge of American culture
Shoghi Effendi had absorbed when he wrote The Advent of Divine Justice.
Undoubtedly, he had learned something about American history through his
studies at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut and had gleaned something
about American culture from contact with the faculty there, which was largely
American.[6] He would have grasped still more
about the workings of the American mind from his long association with the
American Bahá'ís. In his childhood and youth he had frequently met the
Americans who came to Haifa and Acre on pilgrimage to the Bahá'í
holy places, and he had followed avidly every detail of the trip
'Abdu'l-Bahá took to America in 1912.

Later, as 'Abdu'l-Bahá's secretary, Shoghi Effendi helped maintain
'Abdu'l-Bahá's voluminous correspondence with the American believers, and, as
head of the Faith after 'Abdu'l-Bahá's passing in 1921, he initiated a fresh
correspondence with the body of American believers as a whole, which he kept up
until his death in 1957. Shoghi Effendi's letters offered guidance, gave
exhortations and expositions, and issued warnings on themes wide ranging and
diverse, from the principles and practice of Bahá'í
administration to the fundamental tenets of the Bahá'í Faith and
the role of the American Bahá'ís in bringing about the promised age of peace
prophesied in the writings of Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

The Advent of Divine Justice occupies a unique place in Shoghi
Effendi's correspondence with the American Bahá'ís during the turbulent years
leading up to World War II. Not only does it contain a detailed description of
the mission of the American Bahá'í community in establishing the
World Order of Bahá'u'lláh and of the probable role of the
American nation in future world affairs, the letter offers a critique of the
moral life of modern-day America and unveils, for the first time in Shoghi
Effendi's works, what could be described as a systematic Bahá'í
code of ethics, universal in its possible application but designed to renovate
individual and community life in America and to lend a fresh impulse to the
dream embedded in the nation's beginnings.

As Shoghi Effendi explains in The Advent of Divine Justice, the destiny
of the American Bahá'í community and of the nation as a whole
were intertwined. The fulfillment of each depended upon the successful
prosecution of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's mandate to carry the Bahá'í
teachings to all corners of the earth, a charge He gave to the American Bahá'ís
in His Tablets of the Divine Plan. The pursuit of this mission,
'Abdu'l-Bahá explained there, would bring them untold spiritual
distinction:

The moment this Divine Message is carried forward by the
American believers from the shores of America and is propagated throughout the
continents of Europe, of Asia, of Africa and of Australasia, and as far as the
islands of the Pacific, this community will find itself securely established
upon the throne of an everlasting dominion.[7]

As "the prime mover and pattern of future communities" that the
Bahá'í Faith was "destined to raise up throughout the length and
breadth of the Western Hemisphere" (6-7), Shoghi Effendi asserted, the American
Bahá'í community was certain to have an impact not only on the
moral life of America but on that of the entire planet. America was "the
cradle, as well as the stronghold of that future New World Order," which, as
Shoghi Effendi explained, was "at once the promise and the glory of the
Dispensation associated with the name of Bahá'u'lláh (6).

In The Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi weaves
'Abdu'l-Bahá's vision of the American destiny into a rich tapestry of
history and current events, linking it with the times and correlating it with
the American experience. Framed by his own unique rhetoric and characteristic
social analysis, the letter offered American readers of the day a paradigm for
social reconstruction that made sense of the maelstrom of forces that was
assaulting their fledgling community and their nation. As a student, and,
increasingly, as his ministry progressed as a master of the classical English
prose style handed down by writers such as MacCaulay, Gibbons, and Carlyle,
Shoghi Effendi undoubtedly understood the need for imagery that appealed to the
collective cultural imagination of his American readers and brought his social
analysis home to them. Drawing upon the myths and metaphors that defined the
making of their nation, Shoghi Effendi, in The Advent of Divine Justice,
not only evoked but remade for his American readers that body of myths so
integral to their culture: the American dream.

Extending the American Frontier

Of the regional myths that, according to one critic, make up the American
dream, the myth of the Far West, is, without doubt, the most compelling and
enduring in modern-day America.[8] As the same
critic, Robert Deamer, explains, "it is, in a very direct and basic way,
Americans' stance toward the frontier, toward the West, and toward their own
westering experience that has defined their character, their culture, and their
myths of place." Perhaps the myth of the Far West endures because it is, as
Deamer points out, "the least geographically definable of American myths of
place."[9] As Thoreau puts it, "frontiers are
not east or west, north or south," but "wherever a man fronts a fact."[10] "[T]he American dream of the West," Deamer
writes, "does not inhere in a literal frontier: it inheres in a spiritual
crossing of the frontier, in a fronting of primordial reality, in an
achieved change in consciousness.[11]

Precisely because of its highly metaphorical nature, the Far West has long
served as the scene for the enactment of that drama of consciousness that is
the yearning to escape from civilization and to find new horizons for being.
The westering experience, as Shoghi Effendi defines it in The Advent of
Divine Justice, carries forward this symbolic meaning into a broader
context: that of religious history. Quoting 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi
explained in a 1933 letter to his American coworkers the "strange phenomenon"
of the westward migration of religious truth: 'From the beginning of time
until the present day ... the light of Divine Revelation hath risen in the East
and shed its radiance upon the West. The illumination thus shed hath, however,
acquired in the West an extraordinary brilliancy.''

Here, the "West" represents not only a social but also a spiritual frontier, a
place where it is possible to cast off Old-World religious systems, or
"tradition," and to embrace fresh metaphors conducive to new ideals of self
hood and society. As The Advent of Divine Justice makes clear, in the
vision of Shoghi Effendi, the American nation is at the very heart of a new
"West." Perhaps it is because the migration of the new Faith to America's
shores symbolizes the kind of "spiritual crossing," to which Deamer alludes,
that Shoghi Effendi imbues 'Abdu'l-Bahá's journey there in 1912 with
such significance in his history of the first hundred years of the Faith,
God Passes By.[12]

What, then, was the "fact" the new Faith "front[ed]" when it crossed the ocean
with 'Abdu'l-Bahá to America? For Shoghi Effendi, as for many writers
and thinkers, America's great strength as a nation lay in its youthfulness,[13] a virtue that was bound up with other
qualities such as "high intelligence, unbounded initiative," and "enterprise"
(20). The very newness, the freshness of the nation made it receptive to the
new way of life prescribed by the Bahá'í Faith.

In The Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi unfolds a breathtaking
vision of the spiritual transformation of the nation that would take place as a
Bahá'í code of ethics took root in the robust, young culture of
America. For Shoghi Effendi, as for 'Abdu'l-Bahá, America was clearly
the ideal "frontier" upon which the new religious teachings could flourish, a
frontier that would, in turn, serve as the point of embarkation for carrying
the Bahá'í teachings to other countries of the globe.

In the spiritual geography mapped out in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablets of
the Divine Plan, the American frontier is extended far beyond the physical
boundaries of the nation. In that seminal teaching charter, 'Abdu'l-Bahá
entrusts to the American Bahá'ís the responsibility of taking the
Bahá'í teachings to every land. Two decades after
'Abdu'l-Bahá authored these tablets, Shoghi Effendi began the difficult
task of developing systematic plans to translate 'Abdu'l-Bahá's words
into action. The American Bahá'í community, Shoghi Effendi
reminded his American readers in his 1938 letter, already had an impressive
record of accomplishments by spiritual "pioneers" (9), Bahá'ís whose "qualities
of audacity, of consecration, of tenacity, of self-renunciation, and unstinted
devotion" had "prompted them to abandon their homes, and forsake their all, and
scatter over the surface of the globe" (9). They had established the
Bahá'í Faith in such "highly important and widely scattered
centers and territories" as Germany, the Far East, the Balkan States,
Scandinavia, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand, and the Baltic States
(9).

But the time for individual acts of consecration was over, Shoghi Effendi
explained to his American readers, and the time for a more concerted national
effort had come. Shoghi Effendi's Seven Year Plan for teaching the
Bahá'í Faith, unveiled to the American Bahá'ís the year before
he wrote The Advent of Divine Justice, had as its goal the introduction
of the Faith into an "unbroken chain" of Republics, stretching from Mexico to
the farthest reaches of South America, thus linking newly established
Bahá'í communities to their "mother Assemblies in the North
American continent" (71), with Panama in the special position of uniting East
and West (70).

Yet America's destiny was only beginning to unfold. As "the ambassadors of the
Faith of Bahá'u'lláh (74), the North American Bahá'ís had the
mandate to take the Bahá'í teachings to all parts of the globe,
and as "the chief creator and champion of the World Order of
Bahá'u'lláh (11), the American Bahá'í community was
bound not to cease until it had fostered in the local peoples the capacity to
establish "institutions, both local and national, modeled on... [its] own"
(13).

Other plans would follow, for, as Shoghi Effendi reminded his American
readers, the completion of the Seven Year Plan would result in the
establishment of only one center of activity in each of the republics of the
Western Hemisphere whereas the fulfillment of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's Tablets of
the Divine Plan implied the "scattering of a far greater and more
representative number of the members of the North American Bahá'í
community over the entire surface of the New World" (12). "With their
inter-American tasks and responsibilities virtually discharged," he elaborated,
"their intercontinental mission enters upon its most glorious and decisive
phase" (13). A crusade of even greater magnitude lay before America, one that
would entail its spreading the Faith to all five continents.

As was the case with all the global strategies he developed to meet the goals
of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's teaching charter, Shoghi Effendi couched his directives to
the American Bahá'ís in a rhetoric both powerful and appealing. In his 1938
letter, Shoghi Effendi cast familiar motifs in new molds shaped by the
Bahá'í teachings. Just as the concept of "pioneering" must have
had special resonance for his American readers, calling to mind as it would
have the spirit and adventures of those early Americans who had transformed the
country in a few short centuries from a wilderness to a leader among nations,
so would another American motif closely related to it have had special
significance for his American readers: the frontier.

The frontier archetype, so variously represented in American literature, has
always been central to the American culture and identity. Integrally linked to
America's "Western and Adamic myths of separation, freedom, and self-creation"
in the wilderness as well as to the "Adamic myth of freedom and rebirth in a
pristine natural world beyond the frontier," the archetype represents a
form of self-redefinition, a kind of transformation and redemption, as a result
of the change of consciousness that attends the radical break from familiar,
well-inhabited spaces.[14]

In Huckleberry Finn, for example, Mark Twain strongly hints that Huck
will find redemption, at last, by "setting out for the territories ahead of the
rest."[15] Similarly, for the early American
Bahá'ís, merely following the Bahá'í teachings, let alone
carrying out 'Abdu'l-Bahá's mandate to spread them worldwide, performed
the same radicalizing function that the challenge of physical geography had
served for those who opened up the wild western spaces of the American nation:
it carved out and created a psychic frontier that not only permitted but
demanded their release from American social and cultural norms.

Embracing the Bahá'í teachings placed the American adherents of
the religion on the "frontiers" of American culture, clearing for them a wide,
open space for personal transformation and offering them a broader sense of
identification with the world beyond their own national boundaries. In short,
the new Faith gave them the imperative to expand both their physical and
psychic frontiers and an opportunity to leave culture, country, and familiar
values behind, preparing them to receive the new code of ethics outlined by
Shoghi Effendi in The Advent of Divine Justice.

Redefining the Ethical Imperative

As American literature and history amply demonstrate, the frontier archetype
is associated with such extreme forms of individualism as those that reach
their nadir in those mythic communities of violence described as the "Wild
West," communities in which the self-reliance necessary for survival on the
frontier generates a law that asserts itself only through the barrel of a gun.
In the modern context, however, such an ethic is clearly antithetical to real
community-building, and the bankruptcy of the frontier archetype for
contemporary American culture manifests itself, in its most extreme forms, in
the phenomena of the urban cowboy and the terrorist.

The individualist ethos reflected in the myths of the Wild West has been
revealed to be as ill-suited to the modern American city as its counterpart of
achieving redemption in what remains of a vanishing wilderness is to its
proponents in the contemporary counter-culture. Just as the rampant spread of
industrialism and the rapid encroachment of civilization into America's wild,
open spaces has relegated the Thoreauvian dream of self-sufficiency on the land
to the romantic past, so has the growing complexity and interconnectedness of a
society that is, at once, modern, urban, and global, revealed the moral flaw at
the heart of the frontier archetype: its inability to generate an ethic capable
of fostering and sustaining community life in a pluralistic society.

Shoghi Effendi's 1938 letter outlines a system of ethics that addresses this
flaw. In The Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi invites his
readers to meditate upon "the imponderable, the spiritual, factors, which are
bound up with their own individual and inner lives, and with which are
associated their human relationships" (21). Since the fewness of their numbers
rendered them incapable for the time being of "producing any marked effect on
the great mass of their countrymen," Shoghi Effendi explained, the American
Bahá'ís were to "focus their attention, for the present, on their own selves,
their own individual needs, their own personal deficiencies and weaknesses
(20-21).

In the ethical universe delineated by Shoghi Effendi, the "wilderness" is
redefined as that place where the individual conscience, prone to temptation
and error, is in danger of being led astray by its own self-serving impulses
and egocentric concerns. In The Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi
directs his readers' attention to the moral frontier that lies within the human
heart. America's frontier culture could be purged from the excesses to which it
is prone, his letter suggests, only if the battle that once raged
without — pioneers against the environment, the North against the South, whites
against indigenous peoples — was now fought within the individual soul.

The twin obligations of the American Bahá'ís were, on the one hand, "to weed
out, by every means in their power, those faults, habits, and tendencies . . .
inherited from their own nation" and, on the other, "to cultivate, patiently
and prayerfully, those characteristics . . . so indispensable to their
effective participation in the great redemptive work of their Faith" (20).
Eschewing such "patent evils" as "materialism," "racial prejudice," "political
corruption, lawlessness and laxity in moral standards," they were to cultivate
"those essential virtues of self-renunciation, of moral rectitude, of chastity,
of indiscriminating fellowship, of holy discipline, and of spiritual insight"
(19), virtues that would, in time, fit the American Bahá'ís for "the
preponderating share" they would have in creating "that World Order and that
World Civilization of which their country, no less than the entire human race,
stands in desperate need" (19-20).

The success of America's teaching mission, Shoghi Effendi emphasized, would
depend upon the degree to which the American Bahá'ís conquered the frontier
within. He outlined "three spiritual prerequisites for success" upon which not
only the teaching plans but all other projects would depend: "a high sense of
moral rectitude in their social and administrative activities, absolute
chastity in their individual lives, and complete freedom from prejudice in
their dealings with peoples of a different race, class, creed, or color" (22).
Armed with such "weapons" as "rectitude of conduct," "holiness and chastity,"
and an "interracial fellowship completely purged from the curse of racial
prejudice," the "invincible army of Bahá'u'lláh, in one of the "potential
storm-centers" of battle, was to launch a "double crusade, first to regenerate
the inward life of their own community, and next to assail the long-standing
evils that had entrenched themselves in the life of their nation" (41, 42,
41).

Shoghi Effendi's reinterpretation of the frontier archetype in his 1938 letter
is timely and significant. His vision of the pioneer is not of the self-made
man or woman taking nature or the law in his or her hands but of the individual
contributing through sacrificial service to an orderly expansion of communities
of the faithful to extend a world-embracing, peacemaking Faith to new lands not
only "west" of a well-defined border — meaning, familiar culture — but throughout
the globe. As Shoghi Effendi enumerates them in his 1938 letter, the
prerequisites for success in pioneering to new frontiers do not depend on
individual daring and bravado but upon the refinement of the individual
character.

The ethical code outlined in The Advent of Divine Justice does not
merely seek to make peace with diverse ethnicities, condemning racial
atrocities such as chattel slavery and the Indian wars that have marred
American history; it consciously celebrates pluralism. In Shoghi Effendi's
vision, the moral refinement of the individual ultimately demands a
redefinition of individualism itself so that the act of setting out for the
frontier is no longer seen as a step toward union with, and, hence, spiritual
salvation, in a pristine wilderness but rather as the first step toward
extending a universal code of ethics salutary for a worldwide community.

America and the Most Great Peace

Of all the American motifs that Shoghi Effendi adapted in his 1938 letter,
that of the nation's mission and destiny is perhaps most critical to his
remaking of the American dream. Expanding upon both the Puritan idea of America
as a city set upon the hill" that would redeem the Old World by the example of
its high moral standard and upon the idea of a "manifest destiny" that entitled
America to "overspread the continent," Shoghi Effendi describes an America that
would extend its influence throughout the globe by setting and enforcing a high
standard of justice and by keeping world peace. In the final pages of The
Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi takes up a theme he explores in a
1933 letter to the American Bahá'ís entitled "America and the Most Great
Peace."[16]

As its "cradle and champion," the American Bahá'í community had
played and would continue to play a critical role in establishing the World
Order of Bahá'u'lláh. The "creative energies" already released by
the "first stirrings" of that order in America, he explained, had "endowed that
nation with the worthiness, and invested it with the powers and capacities, and
equipped it to, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's prophetic words, "lead all nations
spiritually" (86). Shoghi Effendi elaborated:

The potencies which this God-given mission has infused into
its people are, on the one hand, beginning to be manifested through the
conscious efforts and the nationwide accomplishments, in both teaching and
administrative spheres of Bahá'í activity, of the organized
community of the followers of Bahá'u'lláh in the North American continent.
These same potencies, apart from, yet collateral with these efforts and
accomplishments, are, on the other hand, insensibly shaping, under the impact
of the world political and economic forces, the destiny of the nation, and are
influencing the lives and actions of both its government and its people.
(86)

It was, as Shoghi Effendi emphasized in his 1938 letter, a crucial "epoch in
the world's history" and a critical "stage in the Formative Period of their
Faith," a time both of "glorious opportunities" and "tremendous
responsibilities." Indeed, "these times, so fraught with peril, so full of
corruption" were nonetheless "so pregnant with the promise of a future so
bright that no previous age in the annals of mankind," he asserted, could
"rival its glory" (43). While the American Bahá'í community was
rectifying its own inner life in preparation for its assault on the decadence
of the nation, other developments were taking place in the political sphere and
steering the American nation in the direction of its special destiny.

What role would America play in the shifting balance of world affairs? The
world was "contracting into a neighborhood," Shoghi Effendi observed, and one
wracked by social upheavals. In an ever-contracting world increasingly
afflicted by wars and political upheavals, America "must assume the obligations
imposed by this newly created neighborhood," he concluded. "Paradoxical as it
may seem," he continued, "her only hope of extricating herself from the perils
gathering around her is to become entangled in that very web of international
association which the Hand of an inscrutable Providence is weaving" (87-88).

In short, America was destined to play an important role in the future world
order as a peacebroker for the nations. Moreover, in terms of a specific
foreign policy, Shoghi Effendi predicted that America would establish a "closer
association" with the "Republics [of America]" and opt for "increased
participation, in varying degrees, . . . in the affairs of the whole world"
(90). The nation had come of age when its federal unity had been achieved and
its institutions firmly established; now its "further evolution," as "a member
of the family of nations" would continue until America would,

through the active and decisive part it will have played in
the organization and the peaceful settlement of the affairs of mankind, have
attained the plenitude of its powers and functions as an outstanding member,
and component part, of a federated world. (90)

However, it would take a "world-shaking ordeal," Shoghi Effendi warned, before
the American nation would emerge "consciously determined to seize its
opportunity, to bring the full weight of its influence to bear upon the
gigantic problems that such an ordeal must leave in its wake," and exorcise,
finally and decisively, the specter of war from the earth (90). Having
weathered such an ordeal, America would then be ready to rise to the heights of
its destiny. Shoghi Effendi concluded:

Then and only then, will the American nation, molded and purified in the
crucible of a common war, inured to its rigors, and disciplined by its lessons,
be in a position to raise its voice in the councils of the nations, itself lay
the cornerstone of a universal and enduring peace, proclaim the solidarity, the
unity, and maturity of mankind, and assist in the establishment of the promised
reign of righteousness on earth. Then, and only then, will the American nation,
while the community of the American believers within its heart is consummating
its divinely appointed mission, be able to fulfill the unspeakably glorious
destiny ordained for it by the Almighty, and immortally enshrined in the
writings of 'Abdu'l-Bahá. Then, and only then, will the American nation
accomplish "that which will adorn the pages of history," "become the envy of
the world and be blest in both the East and the West." (90-91)

Remaking the American Dream

The challenge facing Shoghi Effendi as the head of a religion only beginning
to establish itself globally during some of the most turbulent decades of this
century was to put into practice its world-unifying, integrative vision in a
world that was, as so many of his letters to his American coworkers pointed
out, on the verge of a vast and colossal disintegration. In The Advent of
Divine Justice, Shoghi Effendi not only makes sense of that disintegration
but offers a vision of social transformation that must have dazzled the eyes
and piqued the imaginations of the members of the small band of converts to the
new religion at whose head he stood.

In his 1938 letter, he paints a portrait of an America in which the social
crises of economic depression and the coming war figure as part of a
providential pattern of opportunities uniquely presented to the American
Bahá'í community to purify itself and, in turn, to regenerate the
nation in whose embrace it was evolving. But of equal importance to the power
of his message in The Advent of Divine Justice is the art giving life to
that portrait. One cannot read Shoghi Effendi's masterful ethical treatise
without being struck by his clear grasp of some of the central myths upon which
American culture is built. In The Advent of Divine Justice, Shoghi
Effendi reinterprets the westering experience, the frontier archetype, and the
American mission and destiny, making them applicable to the times and to the
goals of the Bahá'í Faith.

At the heart of Shoghi Effendi's epistle is an ethical treatise of remarkable
scope and vision in which the essential ingredients for remaking the American
dream are outlined. The frontier Shoghi Effendi enjoins his American coworkers
to open up has not only a geographical but a spiritual dimension, and success
as a pioneer on this new frontier depends, first, upon the rectification of the
individual character and, next, upon the welding together of a diverse
community of like-minded persons to exert the same refining influence on their
communities, their nation, and ultimately the world at large.

Shoghi Effendi's subtle yet radical revision of the myths that make up the
America dream is, at once, practical and visionary. Set within the context of
the far-reaching vision of Bahá'u'lláh, the new American dream that emerges in
The Advent of Divine Justice is more universal than any of which John
Winthrop could have conceived when he delivered his sermon to the Puritan
settlers about to arrive on American shores several centuries earlier. Shoghi
Effendi's new American dream is also critical of the debasing of the Puritan
ideal of "the city set upon the hill" implicit in the belief that the play of a
hearty and unrestrained individualism on America's wide, open spaces will
confer economic prosperity on all who venture there. The ethics of Shoghi
Effendi's new American frontier, rather, exploit the spiritual and cultural
geography of America by recognizing in it an opportunity for the strengthening
of rather than escaping from community life and the responsibilities it
entails. Containing perhaps one of the most radical critiques of the American
dream in contemporary theology, The Advent of Divine Justice also offers
readers a remarkably visionary recasting of the national dream in terms still
resonant with meaning today.

Notes

[1] Bahá'u'lláh quoted in Shoghi
Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, 1st Ps ed. (Wilmette, Ill.:
Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1990) All subsequent references to The Advent of
Divine Justice are included in the body of the text in parentheses.

[2] In his 1630 sermon to the Puritans who would
found the Massachusetts Bay colony, John Winthrop used the phrase "a city set
upon a hill" to describe his vision of the new settlement as a place in which
all could see the piety of the elect (W P. Kenny, "A City Set Upon a Hill:
American Identities in the Northeast, "in American Diversity, American
Identity. ed. John K. Roth [New York: Holt, 1995] 39).

[3] As Kenny puts it in "City Set Upon a Hill"
(39): "Three recurrent themes of American identity are implicit in Winthrop's
declaration. The first is the theme of American newness; what is here
represented has never before been known on earth. The second is the theme of
American identity; these European settlers manifestly have been led here for a
purpose. The third is the theme of American exceptionalism; in carrying out
its sacred destiny, America will not fall prey to the forces that have made the
fall of civilizations the great subject of history."

[4] The idea that America, the New World, had a
mission to redeem the Old World by high example" was, as Harvard historian
Frederick Merk explains in Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History:
A Reinterpretation (New York: Vintage Books) 3, "generated in pioneers of
idealistic spirit on their arrival in the New World... by the potentialities of
a new earth for building a new heaven." The notion that some "manifest destiny"
gave America the right to expand its territory was an idea deeply embedded in
the American psyche.

[5] "The Mexican War and Manifest Destiny," in
The Great Republic: A History of the American People, ed. Bernard Bailyn
et al. (New York: Little, 1997) 611.

[6] The Syrian Protestant College is now known
as the American University of Beirut.

[7] `Abdu'l-Bahá , Tablets of the
Divine Plan: Revealed by Abdu'l-Bahá to the North American Bahá'ís, first
ed. (Wilmette, Ill: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1993) 7.5.

[8] In his The Importance of Place in the
American Literature of Hawthorne, Crane, Adams, and Faulkner: American Writers,
American Culture, and the American Dream, Studies in American Literature,
vol. 7 (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990) 7:1,
Robert Deamer writes: "the American dream is, as I hold, a cluster of myths
which happen, mainly, to be myths of place."

[9] Deamer, Importance of Place 8, 13.

[10] Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other
Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern
Library, 1937) 410.

[11] Deamer Importance of Place 13.

[12] Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By,
intro. George Townshend, new ed. (Wilmette, Ill: Bahá'í
Publishing Trust, 1974) 279-95.

[13] As Deamer points out: "The Adamic vision
of life, of Thoreau's 'waking dream' (defined in A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers and achieved in Walden), of the rebirth into 'new
youth' is what D. H. Lawrence defined as the 'true myth of America (Deamer,
Importance of Place 16). For the D. H. Lawrence reference quoted by
Deamer, see Studies in Classic American Literature (Garden City. New
York: Doubleday, 1951) 64.

[14] Deamer Importance of Place 2,
4.

[15] Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Sculley Bradley, Richmond Groom Beatty, and E.
Hudson Long (New York: Norton, 1962) 226.

[16] See Shoghi Effendi, World Order of
Bahá'u'lláh 71-94.

METADATA

Views15288 views since posted 2001-05; last edit 2021-03-25 12:06 UTC;

previous at archive.org.../hutchison_shoghi-effendi_american_dream;
URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
Language
English
Permission
author
History
Formatted 2001-05 by Jonah Winters.
Share

Shortlink: bahai-library.com/4398
Citation: ris/4398

select Collection:
Archives
Articles
Articles-unpublished
Audio
Bibliographies
BIC
Biographies
Books
Chronologies
Compilations
Compilations-NSA
Compilations-personal
Documents
East-asia
Encyclopedia
Essays
Etc
Excerpts
Fiction
Glossaries
Guardian
Histories
Introductory
Letters
Maps
Music
Newspapers
NSA-documents
NSA-letters
Personal
Pilgrims
Poetry
Presentations
Resources
Reviews
Scripts
Software
Statistics
Study
Talks
Theses
Transcripts
Translations
UHJ-documents
UHJ-letters
Video
Visual
Writings

home

sitemap

series

chronology

search:
author

title

date

tags

adv. search
languages

inventory

bibliography

abbreviations

links

about

contact

RSS

new
-- Shoghi Effendi and the American Dream (Used by permission of the curator)