# Shoghi Effendi and the American Dream

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> 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.
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> 
> 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.
> 
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> — *Shoghi Effendi and the American Dream (Used by permission of the curator)*