The Bahá'ís of the United States

The Bahá'í Faith was founded in 1863 when Baha'u'llah (1817-92), an Iranian of Muslim background, declared that he was a messenger of God with a revelation suited to the needs of humanity in a modern world. His message included the common divine origin of all the world's major religions, the need for world peace and an international order to maintain it, equality of the races and sexes, and principles for economic reorganization. 

The religion he founded is organized by locally elected councils rather than clergy, holds spiritual, administrative, and social gatherings once every Bahá'í month (19 days) instead of weekly worship services, and stresses empowering every member to teach the religion to others. In a century and a half the religion has spread to almost every country in the world and embraces about five million members from a wide range or religious and cultural backgrounds . The United States has 142,000 Bahá'ís and 1177 communities with locally elected councils.

The Bahá'ís participation in the FACT project included a survey of all 1177 of their congregations in the United States. A total of 327 questionnaires were returned for a 27.78% percent response rate.  View the version of the questionnaire used by the Bahá'í faith.

The FACT2000 Report for the Bahai Faith is available for download on this web site. The FACT2005 report for the Bahai Faith is available as a MS Word document on this site. If you are interested in obtaining specific information about the results of the Bahá'ís survey, please get in touch with their official contact person Rob Stockman at rstockman@usbnc.org. 

Several additional persons were involved in collecting the Bahá'ís in the United States information.  Michael McMullen was a key researcher, Theresa Zingery Mullen is the person charged with encouraging denominational congregations to use this information, and Lorelei McClure is the media contact person for this information. 

If you would like to know more about the Bahá'í Faith, visit the denomination's official web site at www.us.bahai.org.