Some Sociological Themes in Bahá'í Studies

1. Peter Berger’s work and the concept of religious motifs.^[1]

The sociological study of the Babi and Baha’i movements essentially begins with Peter Berger’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘From Sect to Church: A Sociological Interpretation of the Baha’i Movement’, completed in 1954 at the New School for Social Research in New York, and some subsequent articles based on the thesis.^[2] Although at one point thinking of pursuing his research by examining the Iranian Baha’i community, Berger subsequently moved on to other areas of sociological inquiry – eventually becoming one of the leading figures in American Sociology. Berger did not refer to his early work in his later writings, and his study of the Baha’is was forgotten until ‘rediscovered’ by the present author in the 1970s.^[3]

Born in Vienna in 1929, Berger first encountered the Baha’is around 1945 when he was in Palestine at the end of World War II. He would then have been about 16 years old. Unable to gain an audience with Shoghi Effendi, the then head (‘Guardian’) of the Baha’i Faith, he met both Ruhiyyih Khanum and Riaz Effendi, the Guardian’s wife and younger brother. Subsequently moving to the United States with his parents, he initially planned on becoming a Lutheran minister but instead ‘accidentally’ drifted into Sociology, completing his post-graduate work at the prestigious New School.

Berger rejected what he saw as the then prevailing concerns of American Sociology of Religion – the relationship between religious groups and wider society, and the reductions of social phenomena to psychological character types and processes and of religious phenomena to a set of socio-economic determinants. Instead, he opted for a phenomenological approach in the tradition of Max Weber, Rudolf Otto, Geradus van der Leeuw, and Joachim Wach. What was of interest to him were the internal dynamics and the social and cognitive structures of religious groups themselves. Thus, he wanted to focus on the ‘inner meaning’ of conversion for those who joined religious groups rather than any supposed psychological aspects of conversion, and saw religious action as an interaction between religious groups and the wider social institutions of their environing society rather than as merely determined by that society.

In relation to the Baha’is, Berger developed what had been an originally theological conception of ‘motifs’ to describe ‘specific patterns’ or gestalts of religious experience. This enabled him to trace the development of what he saw as the dominant motifs in Baha’i history: fundamental patterns which identified the distinctive nature of a particular religious movement. Whilst disagreeing with Berger’s particular framing of Baha’i motifs, I have used my own version of the concept in several of my publications, identifying millenarian, legalistic, social reconstructionist, esotericist, liberal, and universalist themes, as well as praise for sacrificial martyrdom, and what I have termed a ‘polar’ motif – the continued desire for authoritative and charismatic leadership.^[4] For me, the framework has allowed for a dynamic account of the often complex development of a religious movement over time, avoiding the common sociological practice of pigeon-holing such movements into static categories.

Relying mostly on the Western academic literature available at the time for his account of Baha’i history, Berger also conducted what was probably the first sociological study of the American Baha’i community, apparently meeting a cross-section of the Baha’is in a number of cities as well as having a simple questionnaire administered on his behalf at a regular meeting of the Baha’is in New York City, and meeting with two leading Iranian Baha’is (‘Ali-Akbar Furutan and Valiyu’llah Varqa) who gave him detailed information about the contemporary state of the Iranian Bahai community.^[5]

In relation to the Sociology of Religion, Berger’s thesis was an important statement of the idea that ‘sects’ were distinguished from ‘churches’ in their belief that the spirit (pneuma) was immediately present and did not have to be mediated by any churchly institutions, and were effectively ‘island formations’ set apart from the world. By contrast, ‘churches’ had made their peace with the world and had been invaded by its social realities. The Weberian concept of the ‘routinization’ of charisma occurred through a process of institutionalization as legal authority replaced the sect’s original shared intensity of experience. Berger noted that in the case of the Babi and Baha’i movements, routinization had twice been postponed though the emergence of new charismatic centres: Baha’u’llah essentially coming to replace the Bab as the centre of devotion for most of the remaining Babis a decade or so after the collapse of the original movement in the 1850s, and Baha’u’llah’s eldest son ‘Abdu’l-Baha replacing his father as the centre of devotion after his father’s passing in 1892. Only following ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s own death in 1921, did the Baha’i religion become routinized as a rational-legal authority replaced the earlier charismatic one. My own introduction of a ‘polar motif’ – present from the time of the religion’s Babi origins in the 1840s up to the present day, provided a commentary on this process.

Berger also began his investigation of what he later came to term religious ‘pluralism’, that is, the coexistence of a number of separate and often contradictory meaning systems within a society. In marked contrast to his later views, in his early work, Berger took an extremely negative view of the phenomenon, seeing it as a collapse of a common unifying frame of reference in contemporary Western society, and as major cause of the emergence of a plethora of sects in all areas of human activity (i.e. not just religion). The American Baha’i movement was one such sect. These sects were self-contained meaning systems which individuals joined through conversion, and were often extremely hostile to other rival systems and to those members who challenged their authority structures.     

2. Babi-Baha’i expansion and ‘geo-cultural breakthroughs’.

Berger’s work on the Baha’is was completed prior to the rapid emergence of Baha’i communities in various parts of the ‘Global South’ (Latin America, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia) from the late 1950s onwards. I addressed this development in my book

The Babi and Baha’i Religions: From Messianic Shi`ism to a World Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1987. Reissued, 2008) and in several later publications.^[6] In tracing the overall development of the Babi and Baha’i religions from 1844 onward, I argued that the combined movement had experienced a series of cultural breakthroughs linked to its expansion.

All religious movements initially emerge within a particular social milieu, each with its own particular culture. Those movements which come to transcend their origins necessarily have to appeal to a wider constituency. To do this they have to broaden the constituency from which they draw their members, whether in terms of such social factors as social class, ethnicity and language, or in their major religious concerns. This the Babis did. Initially, drawn from the followers of the Shaykhi sect of Twelver Shiism established amongst the Arabs of Iraq and the mostly Persian-speaking Iranians (a ‘heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot’ of a Shi’i sect as Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, described them), within a matter of only a few years, they had succeeded in attracting a wide range of Shi’i Muslims across much of Iran, including both eminent clerics, merchants, and townsfolk. Millenarian and messianic concerns had come to augment the complex esotericism of the Shaykhis.

The effective destruction of the Babi movement by the Iranian authorities in 1850-1853 blocked any further expansion that may have been possible, but expansion was resumed under the guidance of Baha’u’llah from the late 1850s onwards. Baha’u’llah not only revived the Babi movement, but he massively expanded its religious concerns, emphasizing ethics, practical spirituality, and later a wide-ranging social reformism. He also expanded the missionary outreach already started by the Babis, so that by the year of his passing in 1892, there were Baha’is drawn from Sunni Muslim and even Christian backgrounds in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, as well as Iranian Jews and Zoroastrians, expatriate Iranians in Russian Turkestan and the Caucasus, and Muslim converts in British India and Burma. The movement had moved far from its Shaykhi origins.

An even greater geo-cultural breakthrough occurred during the ministry of ‘Abdu’l-Baha (1892-1921), with small groups of Baha’is developing both in North America, Europe, and later the Pacific, and expanding in British India and Burma. This marked a genuine ‘internationalization’ of the religion, with ‘Abdu’l-Baha himself making two substantial visits to the new Western (largely Christian) Baha’is (1911-13) as well as addressing their religious and social concerns in his writings. Despite the fewness of their numbers, the Western Baha’is enjoyed a freedom not shared by most of their eastern coreligionists and made a major contribution to the development of Baha’i literature and later to the further expansion of the movement across Europe and Latin America.

Whilst international expansion continued under Shoghi Effendi (1922-1957), the only large Baha’i community remained that of Iran. This changed dramatically from the later 1950s onwards as large-scale conversions were made in several parts of the Global South. For the first time, the Baha’i Faith began to assume the characteristics of genuinely global religion, with the total number of Baha’is worldwide increasing from perhaps 200,000 of so in the early 1950s to 5 million or more at the present time.^[7] Unlike the existing Baha’is of the West and Latin America, these new Baha’is included many people from rural areas. Existing Baha’i concerns with education, women’s rights, and social development expanded. During the 1960s and 1970s, many Western Baha’i communities also attracted significant numbers of youth – often with a resultant shift in aspects of their music and cultural styles. With the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia from 1989 onwards new opportunities opened up for the Baha’is in the former Communist world.

3. Resource mobilization.

3.1. In 1986, I coauthored a paper with Moojan Momen utilizing the concept of resource mobilization from the Sociology of Social Movements, with the sociological framework being provided by me.^[8] Briefly, the resource mobilization perspective focusses on the practical means by which social and religious movements expand rather than the motivations of those involved. Relevant factors considered include the effectiveness of the movement’s system of organization, the nature of the environing society, the role of social control and opposition, the movement’s political role, the pattern of recruitment, and the form and content of the movement’s ideology. These various factors are likely to be dynamic in nature, changing in response to the developing relationship between the movement and the wider society. Any movement’s development will be shaped by the strategic choices its members make, notably whether the primary target for change is the individual or the wider society; their attitude to the use of force to accomplish their objectives; and whether the movement or society itself is expected to implement the movement’s desired changes. Whether or not the movement gains social legitimacy is an important variable, as also is its ability to secure and maintain the commitment and unity of its members.

This framework was applied to the Babi movement (1844-1853). In addition, we made a provisional estimate of the number of Babis, and described their social location and religious background.^[9]

3.2. I returned to the resource mobilization perspective in a webinar I made for the Wilmette Institute on ‘Recruitment and Organization in the Bábí and early Baha’i Movements’ broadcast in March 2019.^[10] This discussed the issues of recruitment, cohesion and leadership, and the interactive relationship with the environing society, noting the differences between the original Babi movement and the early Baha’i movement which grew out of it.

A number of points were made. These included: (i) The importance of intellectual salience for those joining a religious movement; (ii) The greater role played by women in the Baha’i movement compared to the Babis, and the assumed linked process of ‘familialization’; (iii) The use of the latest technologies by the Baha’is to achieve their goals (printing, the telegraph, steamer services and railways); (iv) The Baha’is’ successful development of a conceptual language in teaching non-Muslim minorities; (v) The Baha’is’ successful maintenance of the cohesion and unity in their movement, including their development of an effective logistical system, organizational mechanisms, and provisions for succession; (vi) The contrast between the Babis and Baha’is in terms of their relationships with the environing society; (vii) The development of strong Baha’i communities in Asiatic Russia up to the early 1920s showing the possibilities open to them in a benign environment; and (viii) ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s sociological observation about Lutheranism in his Secret of Divine Civilization.

3.3. In a presentation to the Oxford Bahai Studies Seminar delivered remotely in June 2020, I combined some of the ideas of the resource mobilization perspective with those of the religious motifs approach in a paper entitled ‘Cohesion and Leadership in the Babi and Bahai Religions: Some Sociological Considerations’.

The key question posed was how did religious and social movements maintain their cohesion over time. It was common for them to divide into rival branches as a result of differences of belief, strategic choices, or leadership; ethnic or national divisions; or clashes of personality or competing claims to charisma. Historically, state support for a particular movement had frequently led to coercive enforcement of a particular orthodoxy, but this was inherently fragile: if coercion was removed, cohesion could quickly vanish.

I suggested that two sociological mechanisms involved in the continuing cohesion of the Baha’i movement were the ‘polar motif’ (above), and effective resource mobilization. With the first, there was a deep-seated belief that there must always by an authoritative supreme leader – as in the Baha’i concept of the Covenant, the Roman Catholic Papacy, the Isma’ili Imams, and the Dalai Lamas in Tibetan Buddhism. With the second, the early Baha’is quickly established efficient mechanisms of communication to overcome the logistical challenge of the distance between Baha’u’llah and the mass of his followers. This was later supplemented by the development of administrative structures which successfully linked the increasingly diverse and widespread Baha’i groups and communities. They were also able to maintain a ‘unity of message’. The early Babis by contrast were not able to overcome the challenges to their cohesion and eventually split into different cliques.

4. Membership, joining, and leaving religious movements and organizations. 

Although not directly related to Babi and Baha’i Studies, a long essay I wrote in 2019 relating to the Sociology of Religion is also of note. I presented this in series of YouTube videos and summarized the main arguments in a long entry on my blogsite.^[11] 

5. Extramural religious movements.

In 2012, I published a short entry on ‘Islam-related movements’ in Sage’s Encyclopedia of Global Studies. I also presented a short-summary of the article on my YouTube channel along with a video explaining the concept of ‘Extramural religious movements’ in slightly more detail.^[12] 

Notes and links

[1] See Peter Smith. ‘Peter Berger’s Early Work on Baha’i Studies’. Journal of Religious History. Volume 43, Issue 1, pp. 45-69 (March 2019). Online at https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12559

[2] Peter L. Berger. ‘Motif messianique et processes social dans le Bahaisme’. Archives de Sociologie des Religions 4 (1957), 93-107; see also idem. ‘The Sociological study of sectarianism’. Social Research 21 (1954), 467-85; idem. ‘Sectarianism and religious sociation’. American Journal of Sociology 64 (1958), 41-44.

[3] Berger’s later work includes The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, coauthored with Thomas Luckmann (1966), and The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979) – the first a major contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, and the second a fundamental study of the religious world in an age of pluralism.

[4] See in particular ‘Motif research: Peter Berger and the Baha’i Faith’. Religion 8 (1978): 210-34; ‘Millenarianism in the Babi and Baha’i religions’. In Millennialism and Charisma, ed. Roy Wallis, pp. 231-83.  Belfast: The Queen’s University, 1982; The Babi and Baha’i Religions: From Messianic Shi`ism to a World Religion. Cambridge University Press, 1987 (Reissued, 2008); (with Moojan Momen) ‘The Baha’i Faith, 1957‑1988: A survey of contemporary developments’.  Religion 19 (1989): 63‑91; and (with William Collins) ‘Babi and Baha’i millennialism’. In Catherine Wessinger (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Millennialism. Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 474-91.

[5] Both the survey and extended interview with the two Iranian Baha’is were conducted in 1953. The questionnaire delivered to the New York Baha’is was conducted at a Nineteen Day Feast and was answered by 90 individuals who answered questions about their sex, occupation, previous religious affiliation, and what aspects of the Baha’i Faith had first attracted them to the religion.

[6] An Introduction to the Baha’i Faith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2008); ‘Babi–Baha’i Expansion and “Geo-Cultural Breakthroughs”’. Journal of Religious History. Volume 40, Issue 2, pp. 225–236 (June 2016). Version of record online: 8 July 2015. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9809.12280;  and ‘The history of the Babi and Baha’i Faiths’. In The World of the Baha’i Faith, ed. Robert H. Stockman. London: Routledge (2022), pp. 501-512. See also: ‘The global distribution of Baha’is in the 1920s’. Baha’i Studies Review, vol. 14 (2007), pp. 107-20; ‘The global distribution of Baha’is in the 1930s’. Baha’i Studies Review, vol. 15 (2009), pp. 115-32; ‘The global distribution of Baha’is in the 1940s’. Baha’i Studies Review 16 (2010), pp. 135-53; ‘The Baha’i Faith: Distribution Statistics, 1925–1949’. Journal of Religious History. Volume 39, Issue 3, pp. 352-369 (September 2015). Version of Record online:  26 Nov 2014. DOI: 10.1111/1467-9809.12207.

[7] As with religious statistics in general, Baha’i statistics are rather uncertain.

[8] Peter Smith and Moojan Momen. ‘The Babi Movement: A resource mobilization perspective’. In In Iran: Studies in Babi and Baha’i History, Vol. 3, ed. P. Smith, pp. 33-92. Los Angeles: Kalimat Press.

[9] For an earlier set of estimates see Peter Smith. ‘A note on Babi and Baha’i numbers in Iran’. Iranian Studies (1984) 17: 295-301.

[10] Recruitment and Organization in the Bábí and early Baha’i Movements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUg-qpyPYS0.

[11] Peter Smith. https://icpetermahidol.wordpress.com/2025/11/04/peter-smith-membership-joining-and-leaving-religious-movements-and-organizations-2019/.

The videos:

• Membership of religious movement and organizations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfQJydWab9c&list=PLVrMvFa4xrbSC2biTJ3xrIGWWFhBP38mc&index=4.
• Conversion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiKt4iWfTmc&list=PLVrMvFa4xrbSC2biTJ3xrIGWWFhBP38mc.
• Deconversion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En3y9IzNkv8&list=PLVrMvFa4xrbSC2biTJ3xrIGWWFhBP38mc&index=5.
Sociological factors impacting conversion and deconversion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w96UDgKyJ7A&list=PLVrMvFa4xrbSC2biTJ3xrIGWWFhBP38mc&index=7.

[12] Peter Smith. ‘Islam-related movements’. Helmut K. Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.) Encyclopedia of Global Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. See: https://icpetermahidol.wordpress.com/2026/08/05/extramural-religious-movements/; and https://icpetermahidol.wordpress.com/2026/08/06/islam-related-movements/.

I also published an entry on ‘The Baha’i Faith’. Helmut K. Anheier and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.) Encyclopedia of Global Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.