I have no doubt that he lost his faith. What happened after that illustrates that.
This sounds honest to me. I don't think that Universal House of Justice would publicly criticize a member of the Continental Bord of Counselors, because that is not in their nature to publicly criticize any one. They only comment on good qualities of people or a group of people in public in my experience. Why this shattered his faith is a mystery to me. That a person misunderstood him and thought he was saying things "contrary to the Covenant" would do that to him perhaps indicates might come from weak faith before that. It was the straw that broke his back. I don't know, though. A scholar can sometimes develop a weak faith because they scrutinize with a searching eye, and people like that can find things that make it hard to believe. I know this from experience though I'm not a scholar. I scrutinize things with a searching eye also. At times in the past my faith was weak, though it isn't now. I've found too many answers to my doubts.
Here's
one account of what the problem was...
Another attempt at getting unofficial views published in the community was the magazine
Dialogue, which was published briefly in the mid-1980s. Although the editors and staff cooperated with the often cumbersome review process, the magazine was viewed with great suspicion by the National Spiritual Assembly. At the 1988 National Convention, when delegates from around the country gathered to elect the next year's Assembly, External Affairs Secretary Firuz Kazemzadeh denounced a particular article slated for publication called
A Modest Proposal and described those involved with the magazine as "dissidents". Faced with such hostility, and with their reputation thus ruined in the eyes of the community, the editors stopped publication. Several of those involved in the L.A. study group and Dialogue magazine were later active participants on the Talisman forum.
The nucleus of the email forum called "Talisman" began when two old friends, Professor Juan R.I. Cole of the University of Michigan and Professor John Walbridge of the University of Indiana began an intense email correspondence concerning some aspects of early Baha'i history. (The results of this research can be seen in Cole's book Modernity and the Millennium, available through Amazon.) Both men had been Baha'is for more than twenty years, and had been "pioneers" (Baha'i missionaries) in the Middle East during thier youth. In the early 1990s, these email discussions continued on a small forum called, somewhat whimsically, "Majnun"(this Arabic word means "crazy"). The members of Majnun were all scholars and specialists, and the forum was quite academic.
In 1994, Walbridge started up Talisman, a more open forum on a big listserv at the University of Indiana. While the stated purpose of the list was the academic study of the Baha'i Faith, a great majority of the participants were not specialists or college professors. Old-time members of Talisman describe those early days as a time of excitement and wonder. Because of the pattern of Baha'i missionary work, most Baha'is live in small, scattered communities of less than 30 people. While the Baha'i community prides itself on its ethnic diversity, many Talisman participants had never been exposed to such diverse views on Baha'i teachings. Outspoken feminists found themselves corresponding with old-fashioned Middle Eastern men; legalistic administrators talked to mystics; scriptural literalists went head-to-head with scholars using academic methods.
While Talisman was exciting, it also tended to be contentious, and Baha'is traditionally value "unity" and the harmony of the group. More conservative Baha'is, including those serving on Baha'i institutions, were deeply disturbed by Talisman's rather freewheeling and argumentative atmosphere.
Matters came to a head in late 1995, when David Langness was contacted by the National Spiritual Assembly(NSA)concerning an email he had written to Talisman about the Dialogue episode. He had been the main author of A Modest Proposal and gave vent to the secretive way Baha'i jurisprudence is handled. This post also made the statement that the Universal House of Justice had not approved of the NSAs action in the Dialogue case. The NSA called the statement a lie and insisted that he publicly apologize and retract the statement. (There seems to have been considerable difference between public and private statements on this issue, and I personally believe it to be a matter of confusion rather than dishonesty.)Langness posted a reluctant retraction but it was deemed unsatisfactory by the NSA. He was penalized by the loss of his "administrative rights". This meant that he could not vote, or be elected to a Baha'i institution, or participate in any even that was limited to Baha'is in good standing.
In February 1996, a young member of Majnun (the smaller list continued with its more specialized discussions) was furious at the way the NSA handled the case and suggested that an organized protest be formed along with a written statement of reform proposals for Baha'i administration. Another member of this small circle of friends responded with a humorous message, gentle vetoing the idea as potentially causing more harm than good, and saying that the administration couldn't do anything about the existence of Talisman or the spread of liberal ideas, even though they disliked it. Fatefully, this email was sent to the broader forum, Talisman, instead of to the Majnun list. This message, later dubbed the
"Majnun post"was misinterpreted as evidence of a conspiracy and used as an excuse to investigate the prominent posters on the list.
These included John Walbridge and his wife, Linda, Juan Cole, Steven Scholl of White Cloud Press and founding editor of Dialogue magazine, and Anthony Lee of Kalimat Press, an independent Baha'i publisher. Accounts differ concerning the nature and purpose of this investigation. Cole, who had made the most extensive public statements on the crackdown insists that he was threatened with being called a "covenant-breaker" if he did not stop posting his liberal views on email forums. (A covenant-breaker is a heretic who advocates a form of authority other than the Baha'i institutions. The penalty for this is shunning.) Baha'i officials deny that Cole was ever threatened.
The only written evidence of the nature of the threats made against the Talisman posters are two letters by Counselor Stephen Birkland, the Baha'i official asssigned to the investigation, to
Scholl and another
Talisman participant.Both of these letters end with the warning that "your promulgation of views contrary to the Teachings was damaging to the Cause. If you were to resume in any fashion this course of action, the effect would be to bring you into direct conflict with the Covenant"; that is, they would be regarded as "covenant-breakers". The letters also make it clear that Birkland's instructions came from the supreme governing body of the Baha'i Faith, with its seat in Haifa.
