The Faith Communities Today (FACT) religious research consortium has been conducting key informant surveys since 2000 to explore congregational-level data about the American religious landscape. However, last year, FACT conducted the first attender-level survey of members of churches/synagogues/mosques/temples in over two decades.
This paper will explore how American Bahá’ís in diverse communities throughout the US have adapted to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will present data on hundreds of Bahá’ís from dozens of communities concerning attendance at religious worship and religious education classes, outreach to the community, the shift to online forms of worship and celebration of sacred holidays, and their personal religious practices (prayer, reading holy writings, fasting, etc.) during the pandemic. This data will be compared with Christian churches to see how other Americans in varied Christian denominations coped and thrived spiritually during the restrictions of COVID. Results indicate that Bahá’ís were able to maintain attendance levels at their online worship services and children and adult education classes at rates much higher than churches did on average. Both Bahá’í communities and Christian churches maintained a similar level of community service throughout the pandemic. I will provide some institutional explanations for these data comparisons.
Faith Communities Today (FACT) is the longest-running, most comprehensive interfaith research project of American religious congregations, which since 2000 has been developing and fielding questionnaires to most major denominations and faith traditions in the United States. This comparative research project surveys members of groups as wide-ranging as the Bahá’ís, Baptists, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims and Methodists and others (see http://faithcommunitiestoday.org/).
This paper will be a unique look at how members of one non-Christian faith tradition (the Bahá’í Faith) endured and adapted to lockdowns and restrictions that affected all social institutions in the US: schools, corporations, universities, and religious organizations.
This paper will explore how American Bahá’ís in diverse communities throughout the US have adapted to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will present data on hundreds of Bahá’ís from dozens of communities concerning attendance at religious worship and religious education classes, outreach to the community, the shift to online forms of worship and celebration of sacred holidays, and their personal religious practices (prayer, reading holy writings, fasting, etc.) during the pandemic. This data will be compared with Christian churches to see how other Americans in varied Christian denominations coped and thrived spiritually during the restrictions of COVID. Results indicate that Bahá’ís were able to maintain attendance levels at their online worship services and children and adult education classes at rates much higher than churches did on average. Both Bahá’í communities and Christian churches maintained a similar level of community service throughout the pandemic.